Noah D. Arney

Author: Noah Arney

  • #MySAPath – My Path to Student Affairs via Indigenous Education

    The full post of this is over at The Student Affairs Collective blog.

    I am a student advisor (both academic and career advising) at a small aboriginal college in Vancouver B.C., Native Education College. The issue I have with describing a non-traditional student affairs path is that I have very little reference for what a traditional path is; there are so many routes to the field, at least among my colleagues here in Canada. Mine may have been a little unusual, though.

    My plan when I went to University was to be a high school English teacher. There were many reasons my plan changed but most of them come down to being unaware of my options. I went to university thinking I had one option, came to realize that I had three, and wound up taking the first option anyway only to change my direction two years later.

    Please go here for the rest of the article.

  • Fantasy, Humanism, and Improving Authors

    Everyone likes different books. I tend to like books that speak to being human. I think that’s why I read so much fantasy literature. To blatantly steal a concept, they use the impossible to examine the probable. When you strip away the requirement to make the setting accurate you allow yourself the ability to more easily examine Truth.

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  • Secret witnesses in Canadian courts?

    If you haven’t seen it yet bill C-44 (the Protection of Canada from Terrorists Act) is an interesting read (see more here: http://openparliament.ca/bills/41-2/C-44/). It does a number of things, mostly putting in law things that are already happening. One portion of it is highly problematic, though others might take issue with different provisions, and that would be subsection 18 – the secret witness section. Here’s the complete text of that section before we get into the problematic part:

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  • For the New Board of Education

    Although I was not elected (not even close) I’d like to give my thoughts to the new Board of Education in Abbotsford School District, SD34. Please take ideas from all of the candidates platforms. I mentioned during the forum that it’s important to cast a wide net to bring in a lot of ideas so that the best can be examined. Please use the ideas of all of the candidates, or at least examine them.

    To that end, I’d like to propose four points for you to look into.

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  • Time for Inside Higher Ed to End Anonymous Comments

    There have been many cases against anonymous comments.

    Popular science removed their comments entirely for a good reason, as referenced in a New Yorker article:

    “The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse.”

    Huffington post brought up To Kill a Mockingbird:

    “Lee’s basic claim is this: We are capable of doing far worse things to one another when we do not have to own up to the things we do.”

    The cases for anonymous comments tend to focus on the lack of effect restricting it will have as people are still willing to say terrible things in public under their own names.

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  • Thoughts on the 2014 Election

    My thoughts on the 2014 Abbotsford municipal election. Actually just about the SD34 Board of Education Trustee election.

    I’d like to start by thanking the 3500 people who voted for me. It was a great experience and my first time putting myself out there in a city context. I hope to run for School Trustee again in four years.

    It’s interesting to look at the election results and compare them to the campaigns run. As expected the incumbents were re-elected (generally the majority of incumbents get re-elected for school trustee, though it is by no means easy), but the interesting thing is the numbers for the non incumbents.

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  • Thoughts on the Mindset List

    Beloit College in Wisconsin puts out an annual “Mindset List” to give you an idea of where the newest college students are coming from in regards to what they see as being “the world as it has been”.

    Take a look at the info behind it here: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/ and this years here: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2018/

     

    The list is very geared towards the US, as it’s from a US college, but I wanted to show a few that I felt were particularly important:

     

    Students heading into their first year of college this year were generally born in 1996.

    1. During their initial weeks of kindergarten, they were upset by endlessly repeated images of planes blasting into the World Trade Center.

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  • 2014 School Trustee Platform

    The campaign season has wrapped up and I did not make it in.  But I wanted to keep my platform here for people to see.

    Brief Bio:

    Noah Arney grew up and attended school in Abbotsford and returned to establish a family after receiving his Bachelor of Education from UBC. He has worked in education for six years at both the secondary and post-secondary levels; working primarily with Aboriginal learners.

    During his post-secondary education Noah was active in student government and institutional committees at UFV and is now interested in pursuing a more active role in the community through service to the Board of Education.

    Noah hopes to bring to the school board his expertise as an educator and his commitment to current best practices in education.

     

    Platform:

    The current Abbotsford School Board has done some very good things over the last three years, the strategic plan is a sound document and I would love to be part of the implementation of it, and the increase in the Aboriginal student graduation rate to being within 5% of the general graduation rate is an accomplishment that should be lauded and continued to be worked on. But there are some areas that I feel need to be revisited.

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