Receiving  the Botein Fellowship for research in the history of the book in American culture will grant McLaren access to the AAS library that houses approximately two-thirds of all American publications produced between 1640 and 1876.

Scott McLaren

Access to America’s earliest publications may seem counterintuitive to a study of Upper Canadian Sunday schools, but McLaren knows this literature will have a profound influence on his research. “Sunday school libraries in Upper Canada started to take shape in the 1820s and in many ways they functioned as the colony’s first ‘public’ libraries, especially for those living outside of urban regions,” McLaren explains. “However, many of these schools followed American models and imported all their books from New 91��ɫ.” For these reasons, Sunday school libraries functioned as transnational centres for literacy across the Upper Canadian backwoods.

Following the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 it became especially problematic for Upper Canadian Sunday Schools to form libraries around American texts. These books presented a version of history that Canadian political elites were not comfortable with. In the 1840s the colony’s chief superintendent of education, Egerton Ryerson, banned the use of American textbooks and teachers in Canadian schools entirely.

What McLaren is most excited about is the opportunity to pore over literature that was deemed insidious enough to be prohibited by Canadian politicians. “I want to use my time at AAS to read through these ‘subversive’ books and see what people were reading in 1822-1840 – particularly because these texts helped to shape the landscape of early Canadian print culture,” McLaren explains.

These publications will inform a number of scholarly articles as well as McLaren’s book tentatively titled A Reading People: Print Culture and the Methodist Struggle for Social Respectability in Upper Canada, 1800-1850.

“Scott is a great scholar who captures our imagination and certainly demonstrates book history is not boring,” says Cynthia Archer, University Librarian. “How many of us knew Sunday Schools and public libraries in Canada are related and that Ryerson banned American textbooks for use in the classroom?”

The AAS was established in 1812 when the United States was at war with Britain. The founder, Isaac Thomas, wanted to preserve all records that served to inform the American identity outside of Britain’s governance. The AAS also boasts one of the world’s largest collections of early Canadian publications.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin to research stories on the research website.

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It was during this week, in the lead-up to today’s supernaturally inclined date of Friday the 13th, that I learned the similarity between believing in Bigfoot and believing in The One, wrote columnist Micah Toub in :

This somewhat unsettling information was delivered to me not by the Weekly World News, but by Ian McGregor, a 91��ɫ psychology researcher [Faculty of Health]. With assistance from his grad student , McGregor has been studying what those in his field call “compensatory conviction”. I had been curious to find out about the usefulness of pinning one’s romantic hopes and dreams on things like astrology, synchronicity and fate. As it turns out, there is some.

In his lab, McGregor has his guests perform activities and answer questions that are meant to put them in an anxious mood. He then asks them to rate their level of confidence that they’ve found, as he puts it, “their soul mate or the person they are meant to be with.”

When they were rattled, subjects consistently rated their current relationship higher on the magic scale, using their partner as a balm to ease anxiety about other matters.

“If you’re feeling uncertain about a particular domain in your life – economics or academics or family, for instance – you’ll find another domain to find certainty,” McGregor explained. “Relationships can become an attractive domain for irrational conviction.”

Similarly uncertain subjects, McGregor told me, also calm themselves by exaggerating beliefs in supernatural phenomena, like heaven and hell. And yeah, Bigfoot.

. . .

In hindsight, it seems somewhat silly, but according to McGregor, a certain amount of silliness can be a good thing. He actually called it an “optimal margin of illusion,” which will also be the title of my first album. “People have a lot of illusions to protect them from anxiety,” McGregor told me. “But sometimes, positive illusions can actually come true. Sometimes people eventually develop better relationships because of them.” In other words, if your belief in astrology makes you optimistic about your current love interest, that superstitious optimism might be the thing that turns the two of you into a scientific fact.

For those who place themselves firmly on the skeptical side when it comes to the universal energy flow’s influence on love, McGregor pointed out that this doesn’t mean you're immune to illusion. “People can delude themselves about how great their partner is and how great they are,” he said, adding that these people who put too much faith in the awesomeness of their own will can become equally out of touch with reality.

He went even further: “The personal confidence illusions can spin into narcissism, where the person is living in their own mind, leaving a wake of rubble behind them as they flex their grandiose muscles.”

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Slowly, over the past 12 years, the landmark book – critical of Islamic fundamentalism and its treatment of women – has become increasingly available in Muslim countries. A year after it first came out, Oxford University Press released it as part of its millennium series in Pakistan. Last year, it was translated for Korean audiences (see YFile, Oct. 6, 2010).

, which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award in sociology in 2000, was translated and released in Indonesia by the Jakarta-based International Centre for Islam and Pluralism and publisher LKiS Yogyakarta.

Moghissi, who teaches  women’s and equity studies, couldn't be more pleased about her book's release in Indonesia, which has blossomed into democracy since the overthrow of President Suharto in 1998. “Indonesia is the largest Muslim country on Earth," she points out. “Obviously, the ideas remain current and of concern if publishers are making available a book that is critical of fundamentalism and of its treatment of women."

Neighbouring Malaysia long ago banned Moghissi’s book. “The fact that it is being published next door in Indonesia makes me even happier,” she says. No doubt copies will filter across the Strait of Malacca.

In her ongoing effort to illuminate the experience of Muslims in the West, Moghissi on the subject, .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“For a choral composer, a premiere sung by a Cambridge Choir is like a dream,” says Martin, who has just returned from three weeks at the University of Cambridge immersed in the daily life as a Visiting Bye-Fellow. The 24-voice strong Selwyn College Chapel choir is comprised of male and female choral scholars and students, who performed the world premiere under the direction of Sarah MacDonald, the choir’s director of music.

Right: Stephanie Martin conducting

Martin had the Selwyn College Chapel Choir members in mind when she composed the new settings, as they perform a traditional version of evensong several times a week. “They are students, but functioning at a professional level. They rehearse and perform at least four days every week,” she says.

Monastic communities throughout the world still sing these prayer services called “offices” several times a day, but it is the service of evensong that has survived in common practice at Cambridge, and is now a big draw for tourists. Choirs like the famous King's College, Cambridge have been making recordings for decades. She calls the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis canticles “beautiful and inspired poetry” with the Magnificat being quite dramatic in places, and the Nunc Dimittis gentle and comforting.

Already, Martin has been contacted by choirs in Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto, who would like to perform her settings when they go on tour in England, and that, says Martin, “is pretty exciting.”They will be able to sing a Canadian composition. “It’s one thing to create a piece that is performed once, but quite another thing to compose a piece that has legs and will be sung for years.” She hopes this premiere in England will interest other choirs in her music.

Left: Selwyn College Chapel at the University of Cambridge

“The difficulty for modern composers with thousands of years of Western music behind them is to strike a balance between honouring tradition and saying things in a new way, while keeping the performers in mind,” she says. The desire always for composers is to express their own voice.

A recipient of the Lilian Forsythe Award for excellence in church music and the Leslie Bell Prize for choral conducting, Martin has had plenty of opportunities to express herself while on sabbatical this past year. She’s launched a new CD – , won the Association of Anglican Musicians competition for new choral music and has been accepted as an associate composer into the Canadian Music Centre, which keeps a library of some 600 composers of which Martin will now be one.

What has been really close to her heart, however, is the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of young people with cancer. She was recently asked about having her Alleluia CD available as an online resource for young people coping with cancer in Northern Ontario, and, of course, she said yes. “I do this pretty self-indulgent thing. I just write music and perform. Sometimes I step back and wonder how I’m helping anyone,” she says. “So I think that this is just such an amazing thing. This is kind of special because it will actually help someone.”

As the director of music at the , she is also involved in fundraising for Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand, which lost its tower in the recent earthquake. A doctor from the Christchurch area, sang with the Gallery Choir at the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene during the recording of Martin’s Alleluia CD. The choir won in their category of the CBC amateur choir competition in 2008.

In addition, she is getting ready to launch another CD, this one with in Toronto, a 90-voice oratorio choir, which Martin has conducted since 1996. After putting out a call for submissions to their Great Canadian Hymn Contest, the Pax Christi Chorale picked one winner out of 75 submissions. The judges felt there were at least 10 more hymns deserving of wider dissemination and decided to have the choir perform the hymns for a CD that will be part of a book containing all 11 new hymns.

As if that weren’t enough, Martin will conduct the opera La Serva Padrona in Calgary in May, head to England for the Three Choirs Festival and be back in time to starting teaching once again in September.

To listen to a preview of Martin's Alleluia CD, visit the website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“Caribbean Religion and Female Esthetic” will take place Thursday, March 10, from 12:30 to 2:30pm in the Conference Centre on the fifth Floor of the 91��ɫ Research Tower, Keele campus.

In particular, Duncan will look at the religious dress in the Spiritual Baptist faith as a site of meaning-making and identity construction. Drawing on ethnographic research, multiple associations of religious dress, including modesty, leadership and African diasporan religious identities are discussed.

“My research suggests that religious clothing is simultaneously material culture, artistic production and narrative in cloth, linking contemporary life experiences in large urban centres, to which Caribbean people have emigrated, and Caribbean past,” says Duncan.

Left: Carol Duncan

She is the author of This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008) and co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007).

The event is co-sponsored by Founders College, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, the Department of Humanities, Vanier College, African Studies, Culture & Expression and Religious Studies.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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For more than 1,400 years, Muslims have held multiple and diverging views about their religious tradition. Yet especially since Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims are commonly portrayed as homogeneous and dogmatic.

In his new book, , 91��ɫ anthropologist challenges that view. The 253-page volume published by I.B. Tauris and launched at Harvard University this fall features essays by world-class scholars that explore Islam and Muslim societies and cultures from a range of perspectives.

The book arose from a seminar series on Muslim pluralism hosted at the London-based Institute of Ismaili Studies in 2002 and 2003 in response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, explains Hirji in his editor’s note. “Since that moment, words and images concerning Islam and the histories, beliefs and practices of Muslims have proliferated globally.”

This complex portrait of Islam “challenges the notions that Muslims everywhere are the same or should be the same,” wrote Hirji. Like the seminar series, the book aims not to present the social fact that Muslims are diverse, he added, but to examine how Muslims frame their own diversity over time and in different contexts.

As a social historian as well as an anthropologist in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Hirji is interested in how Muslim societies express their sense of community. He has contributed the first of eight essays in Diversity and Pluralism in Islam, “Debating Islam from Within: Muslim Constructions of the Internal Other”.

Hirji co-authored and co-edited , a comprehensive account of Ismaili history and intellectual achievements, set in the wider contexts of Islamic and world history. He has co-edited Places of Worship and Devotion in Muslim Societies, expected out soon. He has also recently completed a 25-minute film on Tehreema Mitha (see YFile May 7, 2009), a classical and contemporary dancer from Pakistan, and is working with the Textile Museum of Canada on an exhibition of Muslim material culture and heritage in Africa to open in May.

Right: Zulfikar Hirji

At 91��ɫ, he teaches senior undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam and Muslim societies, visual anthropology and the anthropology of the senses.

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The conference, “Education in Tough Times: Tough Times in Education,” from Oct. 21 to 24 at the Novotel Hotel (North 91��ɫ), features critical historical explorations, innovative research, vivid photographic exhibitions and stimulating discussions of some of the most pressing issues for students, parents and policy-makers in education today.

“Current debates in education locally, nationally and internationally are best understood by examining the rich history of education,” says Professor , former dean of 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education, who organized the conference. “This gathering is a unique opportunity to engage experts and various sectors of the education community. From the vantage point of an informed analysis of the past, we can look toward a wider array of options in policy and practice for the present and a more vibrant and enlightened future.”

Papers and presentations cover a broad spectrum of issues such as religion in schools, lifelong learning, student health, disability, learning difficulties, diversity, gender, assimilation, resistance and accommodation. These topics are reflected in such titles as:

• The Sixties Revolution and the Meaning of Higher Education
• Commies at the Chalkboard: National Security, Teachers and the Long Red Scare
• Montreal’s Little Strikers: Antisemitism, Poverty and Resistance at the Aberdeen School, 1913
• Kids Learn to Smoke: The case of Tobacco Manufacturers’ Pseudo-Anti Smoking Messages and the Pathetic Real Deal − School Curricula
• No Light Without Shadow: Education and Experience at Rochdale College
• Schoolyard Archaeology: Digging for Toronto’s African Canadian Heritage;Canada’s History Crisis of the 1990s: The Public Debate and Its Legacy
• Sex and Social Segregation in English Canadian High Schools: The Interwar Years

The conference features a special exhibition of photographs and short essays titled “A Picture in a Thousand Words“, showcasing education historians using visual sources. It also includes a tour of rare artifacts of the history of Ontario education, which have been preserved at the , on the Keele Campus of 91��ɫ.

“91��ɫ is proud to be the home of the Archives of Ontario and to serve, in this way, as the gateway to the history of education in Ontario,” says Axelrod, whose most recent work analyzes the abolition of corporal punishment in Ontario’s schools. “This repository is an indispensable resource for all serious students of the history of education in this province.”

The Faculty of Education at 91��ɫ, one of Ontario’s largest institutions for higher learning in education, has earned an international reputation for its interdisciplinary approach to research and teacher training in both undergraduate and graduate studies. Its focus on community engagement combined with a rich diversity of conceptual and applied research distinguishes the faculty as a leader in knowledge mobilization in the field of education.

For event details visit the or the Faculty of Education.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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In a series of studies, more than 600 participants were placed in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and then asked to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals. This included asking participants whether they would give their lives for their faith or support a war in its defence.

Across all studies, anxious conditions caused participants to become more eagerly engaged in their ideals and extreme in their religious convictions. In one study, mulling over a personal dilemma caused a general surge toward more idealistic personal goals. In another, struggling with a confusing mathematical passage caused a spike in radical religious extremes. In yet another, reflecting on relationship uncertainties caused the same religious zeal reaction.

Researchers found that religious zeal reactions were most pronounced among participants with bold personalities (defined as having high self-esteem and being action-oriented, eager and tenacious) who were already vulnerable to anxiety and felt most hopeless about their daily goals in life.

A basic motivational process called reactive approach motivation (RAM) is responsible, according to lead researcher Ian McGregor, a professor in the Department of Psychology in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health. "Approach motivation is a tenacious state in which people become ‘locked and loaded’ on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede," he says.

"RAM is usually an adaptive goal regulation process that can reorient people toward alternative avenues for effective goal pursuit when they hit a snag. Our research shows that humans can sometimes co-opt RAM for short-term relief from anxiety. However, by simply promoting ideals and convictions in their own minds, people can activate approach motivation, narrow their motivational focus away from anxious problems and feel serene as a result," says McGregor.

Researchers also measured participants’ superstitious beliefs and deference toward a controlling God to distinguish religious zeal from meeker forms of devotion. "Anxiety-provoking threats sometimes also cause people to become paranoid and more submissive to externally controlling forces, so we wanted to rule out that interpretation for our results," he says. Anxious uncertainty had no effect on either superstition or religious submission.

Findings published last year in the journal by the same authors and collaborators at the University of Toronto found that strong religious beliefs are associated with low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that becomes active in anxious predicaments.

"Taken together, the results of this research program suggest that bold but vulnerable people gravitate to idealistic and religious extremes for relief from anxiety," McGregor says.

The findings, reported in two separate articles, "Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM)" and "Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) for Religion", were co-authored by McGregor and 91��ɫ graduate students Kyle Nash, Mike Prentice, Nikki Mann and Curtis Phills. Both articles appear in the July issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The release was covered in the , The Peterborough Examiner and July 7:

Anxiety can lead people to become more radical in their religious beliefs, a 91��ɫ study says.

Researchers put more than 600 participants in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and asked them to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals.

Lead researcher Ian McGregor, a psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, said a basic motivational process called reactive approach motivation (RAM) is responsible. “Approach motivation is a tenacious state in which people become ‘locked and loaded’ on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede,” he said in a release.

It also received coverage in the St. Catherines Standard July 10:

Anxiety can lead people to become more radical in their religious beliefs, a 91��ɫ study says.

Lead researcher Ian McGregor said a basic motivational process called reactive approach motivation (RAM) is responsible. “Approach motivation is a tenacious state in which people become ‘locked and loaded’ on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede,” he said in a release.

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Vanessa Lamb (right), a second-year doctoral candidate in geography, is the 2010 Vivienne Poy Asian Research Award recipient. Her research interests include the politics of the environment and development, feminist political ecology and critical science studies.

Lamb received her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, where she researched and studied the interdisciplinary understandings of conservation. Prior to attending 91��ɫ, she worked for the Bangkok-based organization TERRA, a regional non-governmental organization (NGO) that works on environmental issues within the Mekong Region. As a doctoral student she has worked as part of the Challenges of Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia project team.

The award funds will assist Lamb in her dissertation fieldwork during the 2010-2011 academic year. Her research looks at knowledge-making and claim-making practices around resources of the Nu-Salween River, which supports an estimated six million people in China, Burma and Thailand as a source of livelihood and food. She will conduct interviews with local residents, activists, engineers and others connected to a large hydroelectric development project along the river at the Thai-Burma border. Specifically, her research will consider how different knowledges produced about the river interact and influence decision-making processes around development.

The award is named for Canadian Senator Vivienne Poy. It assists a graduate student in fulfilling the fieldwork requirement for the Graduate Diploma in Asian Studies.

Ei Phyu Han (left) and Rae Mitchell are the 2010 YCAR Language Award recipients. Han, a doctoral candidate in geography, will study Thai, while Mitchell, a master's candidate in social & political thought, will use the funding to study Hindi in anticipation of her 2010 fieldwork in India.

Han is examining gender identity formation of Karen refugees from Burma along the Thai-Burma border to learn how it is influenced by different actors and power groups at multiple sites of displacement. Her research aims to demonstrate how identity is influenced by place and therefore shifts during the process of being displaced because it is continually being renegotiated. This research has the potential to help improve resettlement programs, and she hopes it can play a role in future Canadian refugee policy changes.

"Although I am now a Canadian citizen, I migrated to Canada at the age of six from Burma with my family in the aftermath of the brutal repression of peaceful demonstrations in 1988," says Han. "I believe that this project is important not only for the ways that it can influence policy and resettlement program changes, and its engagement and contribution to academic knowledge, but also because it is integral to learning more about the growing humanitarian crisis in Burma."

She completed her coursework and set the foundations for her fieldwork in the summer of 2009 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, by making contacts with NGOs and by taking Thai language courses. The YCAR Language Award will assist in the continuation of these studies. She will begin her fieldwork this month working with the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, Women's Education for Advancement & Employment and the Karen Youth Organization.

Right: Rae Mitchell

Mitchell's research interests include resistance, social movement theory, engaged Buddhism and social anarchism. Her current research focuses on Gandhian perspectives of the body, including the methods utilized by Gandhi to transform his body (and self) from British subject into revolutionary satyagrahi. She's also interested in the ways that Gandhian approaches to social and political transformation are being adapted and utilized by female members of the Mahila Shanti Sena (Women's Peace Force) in Northern India.

She will complete a four-week intensive Hindi language-training course at the Jaipur School of Hindi in Jaipur, Rajasthan. The school is run in affiliation with Shashvat Sansthan, a local NGO working for the welfare of Rajasthan’s tribal-indigenous communities. Mitchell will also be travelling with University of Toronto Professor Reva Joshee and Jill Carr-Harris, a development worker in India, throughout central India for three weeks in October to explore possible research collaboration on Ekta Parishad's struggle for land and forest rights for marginalized and indigenous peoples in India.

Mitchell holds a combined bachelor of arts (BA) in peace studies and anthropology with a minor in religious studies from McMaster University.

The YCAR Language Award was created to support graduate students in fulfilling the language requirement for the Graduate Diploma in Asian Studies and to facilitate awardees master's or doctoral-level research.

Ferdinand Dionisio Caballero (left), a master's candidate in social anthropology, is this year's recipient of the David Wurfel Award. The award will aid him in his fall archival fieldwork in the Philippines where he will focus on the entangled relations between the Catholic Church and the Filipino people.

The David Wurfel Award provides financial support to an honours undergraduate or master's graduate student who intends to conduct thesis research on the topic of Filipino history, culture or society.

Caballero's major research paper will be an anthropological inquiry on religion, colonial subjects, post-colonialism and history. More specifically, he is interested in exploring and understanding the dynamics of power relations between religious institutions and the people.

He holds a BA in anthropology with a specialization in ethnographic studies from Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.

The award was established in 2006 by Senior YCAR Research Associate David Wurfel. He wanted to contribute to the emergence of a new generation of Filipino leadership that is grounded in the country’s history, culture and public affairs. Wurfel is a Philippine specialist who received his PhD from Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program.

Heather Barnick (right) is the 2010 recipient of the Albert C.W. Chan Foundation Fellowship. A doctoral candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at 91��ɫ, her current research interests are related to the anthropology of media, digital anthropology, and techno-science with a specific focus on the visual and material cultures of video games and massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

Last month, Barnick began ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, China, following the ways in which online role-playing games have become significant sites for the formations of new national and cultural imaginaries in mainland China. Her fieldwork is supported by the Albert C.W. Chan Fellowship and a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral scholarship.

This research follows on the heels of a project initiated by China’s General Administration of Press & Publication (GAPP) to encourage the production of 100 domestically produced MMORPGs. The narratives and imagery integrated into games developed under GAPP’s initiative frequently make use of famous fictional stories, such as the Journey to the West, and historical battles, such as Genghis Khan’s exploits and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Focusing on the perspectives of youth from Shanghai, Barnick’s research will examine how these adapted histories come to have new meanings for life in the present. The primary goal is to understand how notions of national and cultural belongings and identities are continuously formed, expressed and re-imagined by Shanghai youth through their participation in MMORPGs produced in China.

Barnick earned a BA in sociology and anthropology from the University of Prince Edward Island and a MA in social and cultural anthropology from Concordia University.

The Albert C.W. Chan Foundation Fellowship was established by the Albert C.W. Chan Foundation to encourage and assist 91��ɫ graduate students to conduct field research in East and/or Southeast Asia and was made possible through the support of the Albert C. W. Chan family.

Adnan Amin (left) was selected from a strong group of graduate and undergraduate applicants to represent 91��ɫ at the Global Initiatives Symposium in Taipei next month. This opportunity is provided by the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

Amin's winning essay, “When East Meets West: A Personal Essay on Intersections of North American and East Asian Education”, reflected on his experiences as an English as a second language (ESL) teacher in Taiwan.

Last year, Amin graduated from 91��ɫ with an honours double major degree in English and history, completed his concurrent bachelor of education degree, and held a position as student senator for the Faculty of Education Students' Association. Amin has also held an international internship in the English Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education and taught ESL in Taiwan. He is currently pursing his master of education degree at 91��ɫ.

Amin's research interests are in teaching and learning strategies, immigrant experiences, English language learning and digital media technology. He currently works as a school settlement worker in Toronto high schools where he helps newcomer students and families with settlement needs.

The Global Initiatives Symposium will be held at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, from July 12 to 16. It will bring together emergent leaders from around the world to discuss critical global issues. The topic for 2010 is The Emergence of New Giants: Evolution or Revolution. Participants will also take part in several days of cultural tours in Taiwan following the symposium.

Amin’s opportunity to represent 91��ɫ at the symposium was made possible by the Taipei Economic & Cultural Office and the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

For more information on any of the awards, visit the YCAR Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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