By J. Sparks – Redefining Traditional Project Team Member Welcome (and welcome back) to Redefining Traditional – a community and information hub for post-secondary students who are also parents, and to those who are supporters of student parent communities. My name is J. I am a university student and a…
Sharing Knowledge and Thanks to our Community!
By Heather Watts, Shamim Ahmed, and Kaitlyn Corlett Here at Redefining Traditional, we’ve shared a lot of important resources, stories and beginnings of conversations to not only bring into our lives as student parents – but also throughout our wider…
Supporting Student Parent Success: Tips from Research and Practice
Authored by Victoria Fritz, PhD Candidate (Family Relations and Human Development) & Learning Specialist, University of Guelph
The university landscape in Ontario is changing, and our student body is becoming more diverse. As we see more students coming from non-traditional backgrounds (traditional being direct entry from high-school), we need to become more aware of the unique needs of our students in order to better support them as practitioners. One group, in particular, that I have had the privilege of interacting with both in my research and in my professional work, is student parents.
The Conversation That We Need to Have
By Shamim Ahmed
I was sitting on the couch, reading a popular “Bengali”[1] fiction, and all of a sudden heard my daughter mumbling “brutal”. I looked at her once, and again went back to my reading when I heard her infuriatingly saying “that’s totally unacceptable”. I took a pause from my reading, sat back properly, looked at the television and saw that horrid image of a policeman sitting on the road with his knee placed firmly on a person’s neck with a stone face. I was a little startled whether my 12-years old daughter should be watching this, but then she left on her own without saying much. I inquisitively continued to watch the news and came to know about the horrific act of killing George Floyd, a 46-year-old black American, during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. To be frank, I came to know about the allegation at least two weeks after the killing, as I was not curious about the reason why a person could be killed so brutally. I had no idea why a person should be treated so inhumanely as if he was not a living object. I was shocked.