“Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon… everything’s different.”

Calvin & Hobbes

The University of Toronto welcomed be back with open arms in the fall of 2020 in spite of my terrible first attempts at an undergraduate degree twenty-five years earlier. They offered me a fellowship which meant that my tuition was completely covered for both years. I was extremely grateful for the relief in financial burden for my third return to school in less than a decade.

I have many things to share from my time at UofT, but two stand outs come to mind: developing my own reading course about Social Justice, and demonstrating to a paper-heavy program that video output submissions have value.

I felt that there was a real lack of attention to social justice issues in the courses that I had been taking, so I decided to build my own. I secured an academic advisor in Dr. Colin Furness and he encouraged me to build a course. So I did. Social Justice and Information Literacy Instruction was a reading course that I completed during the summer of 2021. I include here the syllabus that I created.

A big hurdle to transitioning to UofT was the emphasis on writing papers. It felt like that was all that we did. And since I had come from an undergraduate degree where nearly all our work was digitally produced, I wanted to show my professor how valuable this medium could be for certain assignments. I submitted the following video and my professor agreed that there was value in envisioning a submission in a different format. Ultimately, I created a perpetual asset for him to use in future courses (not included here).