The Association of Atlantic Universities announced the recipients of the AAU’s annual regional awards for excellence in teaching and educational leadership today during a presentation ceremony at the University of Prince Edward Island. And, for the second year in a row, a UPEI professor is a recipient.

Dr. Gordon MacDonald received the 2015 AAU Distinguished Teaching Award recognizing outstanding teaching over a number of years. Only three award winners are chosen each year from the 16 universities represented by the AAU.

“I congratulate Dr. MacDonald on receiving this prestigious award,” said President and Vice-Chancellor Alaa Abd-El-Aziz. “Gordon is dedicated to UPEI, having served on the Senate and Board of Governors, but most importantly, he is dedicated to his students. It is wonderful that his passion and talent for teaching has been recognized in this way.”

Dr. MacDonald, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, has research interests in operator theory and linear algebra, working to better understand collections of matrices or operators, specifically their properties and structure. He was instrumental in developing the proposal for a new school of applied mathematics at UPEI. The program is currently being considered by the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Council.

The AAU (www.atlanticuniversities.ca) represents the 16 universities in Atlantic Canada and serves as an advocate for the important role Atlantic universities play in preparing future leaders of our communities, in path-breaking research and innovation and in contributing to the economic prosperity and quality of life of the Atlantic region. Read the AAU news release.

Nobel-prize nominee and internationally recognized environmental and human rights activist, Sheila Watt-Cloutier will be participating in the upcoming J.S. Palmer Conference being held at UPEI on Thursday and Friday.

“I am thrilled to have one of Canada’s most celebrated environmental activists providing her unique and important perspective at the J.S. Palmer Conference,” said President Abd-El-Aziz, UPEI. “Her life’s work of improving the lives of Inuit people brought her to the international environmental movement.”

In 2007, Sheila was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy work in showing the impact of global climate change on human rights—especially in the Arctic, where it is felt most immediately and dramatically than anywhere else in the world.

Ms. Watt-Cloutier was instrumental as a spokesperson for a coalition of northern Indigenous Peoples in the global negotiations that led to the 2001 Stockholm Convention banning the generation and use of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that contaminate the arctic food web.

She has recently authored her memoir, The Right to Be Cold. It is a human story of resilience, commitment, and survival told from the unique vantage point of an Inuk woman who, in spite of many obstacles, rose from humble beginnings in the Arctic community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec—where she was raised by a single parent and grandmother and travelled by dog team in a traditional, ice-based Inuit hunting culture—to become one of the most influential and decorated environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world.

Ms. Watt-Cloutier will join Dr. Andrew Light, former Senior Climate Change Adviser to the U.S. State Department and musician, creator, and editor of A Global Chorus, Todd MacLean, as they identify what actions Canadians need to take now to ensure the environment is protected for future generations.

“Conference delegates can expect thoughtful and innovative discussions from all the panellists and speakers as we explore what actions we need to take now that will support the Canada we wish our descendants to experience in 150 years,” said President Abd-El-Aziz.

The J.S. Palmer Conference was created in 2010 to bring together some of the finest minds across the country to discuss public policy issues of high priority to the public sector and to Canada.

For a full conference agenda and more information see the website, at www.palmerconference.com.

A group of graduate students at UPEI want to hear views and perspectives from the public of the educational culture on PEI. They are conducting an online survey to gather opinion in six specific areas: social promotion, large-scale assessment, the role of parents in education, mathematics, aboriginal culture, and leadership.

The online survey can be completed in 15 minutes and can be found here.

'This project gives our graduate students a very hands-on experience,' said Dr. Tess Miller, associate professor of Education, and the teacher of the Quantitative Statistics course gathering this information. 'They work with real data, and do real analysis.'

Information gathered in the survey will be analyzed by the students and will be presented at a public event on Thursday March 26 in room 242 of UPEI's Don and Marion McDougall Hall. The presentations begin at 4:30 pm.

University of Prince Edward Island women’s soccer coach Graeme McDonald announced today that two of PEI soccer’s top young provincial players have committed to play at UPEI.

Defender Danielle Younker graduated from Colonel Gray and belongs to the Charlottetown Royals FC. Midfielder Jennifer Balderston received her diploma from Bluefield and plays club soccer with the Ramblers Clippers United.

Coach McDonald commented, “I am delighted that both players are coming to UPEI. Jennifer is an intelligent player, has great technique, and strikes the ball very well which will add to our creativity and goal scoring.”

“Danielle has an excellent range of passing, is strong on and off the ball, and is very good in those one versus one situations.” He added, “It’s important that we continue to recruit the best players on PEI to keep our identity and also give our young players inspiration to wear the green and white Panther jersey".

Younker said, “As a young soccer player, I always looked up to the Panthers and now I'm excited that I get a chance to play with them."

Balderston agreed, “I've grown up watching the Panthers play and I'm really excited to finally get the chance to play with such a great group of girls."

Both Younker and Balderston have been accepted into the Bachelor of Science program.

Eight senior players are returning for this coming season including AUS first team all-star goal keeper Ashley McKenna and UPEI MVP Emilie Pelletier.

Training camp opens on Friday, August 29 from 9:30 - 11:00 am at the UPEI Turf Field. Anyone interested in trying out must complete all Student-Athlete Registration requirements.  For more information contact Ron Annear at 902-566-0991 or annear@upei.ca.

The first exhibition action at home will be the Mulligan Cup next weekend, September 4–6, when both the UPEI Men’s and Women’s Soccer teams take to the pitch.

Season Tickets are now on sale and can be purchased at Panther Central at the Chi-Wan Young Sports Centre, by calling (902) 566-0368, or filling out the online form at gopanthersgo.ca.

About UPEI Athletics and Recreation
• Nine varsity sports and six club team programs
• Proud member of the AUS and CIS
• Athletic facilities include: Chi-Wan Young Sports Centre, UPEI Alumni Canada Games Place
• Home of Panther Sports Medicine
• Other facilities available to students and the community at large include: fitness centre, squash and racquetball courts, competition and leisure pool with hot tub, and two ice arenas

How do horses learn? How can we use that understanding to the mutual benefit of horses and those who work with them? Applied equine behaviour is the focus of the Atlantic Veterinary College’s 2015 Animal Welfare in Practice conference, which will take place from September 18 to 19.

Dr. Gemma Pearson, Equine Behaviour Service, Dick Vet Equine Hospital, University of Edinburgh, will give a public lecture, “Demystifying the horse whisperer—how horses really learn,” on Friday, September 18, at 7 p.m. She has been working with behaviour cases for over 15 years; she is currently conducting research into horse-veterinarian interactions. Her lecture will take place in the Alex H. MacKinnon Auditorium, Don and Marion McDougall Hall, UPEI.
On Saturday, September 19, Pearson will give two lectures, one covering equine learning theory, and the other about applying learning theory to everyday veterinary practice. Dr. Laurie McDuffee, professor of large animal surgery at AVC, will give a talk about higher level equine cognition. McDuffee is studying equine learning theory and its incorporation to promote humane handling of equine patients. Following the talks will be a session of video scenarios about equine behaviour with audience participation, and a demonstration about overcoming problematic behaviours and practice with clicker training.

The public lecture on Friday, September 18, is free. Registration is required to attend the workshops on Saturday, September 19; the Saturday events will be held in AVC’s Lecture Theatre A. Please visit upei.ca/awc or call (902) 628-4360 for program details and registration information.

The conference is co-hosted by the SJDAWC and the AVC Animal Welfare Club, with generous additional support from the Animal Welfare Foundation of Canada.

The UPEI community, led by the Institute of Island Studies, celebrated today the launch of a new publication about the creative side of enterprise in small island states and territories. Entrepreneurship in Small Island States and Territories documents the considerable resourcefulness these islands and territories display in facing the challenges of size, scale and peripherality. The book is edited by Dr. Godfrey Baldacchino: an Island Studies Teaching Fellow at UPEI.

“In spite of much received wisdom, being on a small island is also a business opportunity, a condition that permits specific island based businesses to emerge, thrive and survive,” said Dr. Baldacchino. “There is ample evidence of this, with Biovectra leading the way on Prince Edward Island.”

The creative endeavours of their residents, facilitated by adroit public policy, has created economic and investment opportunities that translate into some private sector employment and decent livelihoods for many. The contributors to this book explore the local ingenuity, coupled with strategic investments and the support of the diaspora, that has led to a suite of (sometimes unlikely) products and services: from citizenship and higher-level internet domain names, to place-branded foods and beverages; from electronic gaming to niche manufacturing.

The book includes a chapter by Dr. Jim Randall at UPEI on the growth of the biosciences on Prince Edward Island, and specifically, on the company BioVectra Limited. BioVectra, founded by Dr. Regis Duffy, has been a formative actor in the emerging bioscience cluster on PEI. The chapter explores the emergence of this innovative company and sector on an island otherwise dominated by seasonal economic activities.

“The impact of entrepreneurship on PEI in particular has been felt through the development of a number of small and medium size enterprises, including the over 40 companies that comprise the PEI BioAlliance,” said Dr. Robert Gilmour, UPEI’s Vice-President Research and Graduate Studies. “In addition, UPEI has the capacity to transform the entrepreneurship of its faculty into real-world outcomes through Synapse, its recently restructured technology transfer unit.”

There is much more to small island survival than subsistence farming, aid, remittances and public sector workfare. Entrepreneurship in Small Island States and Territories helps to dispel this myth, showcasing an aspect of life in small island states and territories that is rarely documented or critically reviewed.

In his introductory editorial to the book, Dr. Baldacchino uses the phrase 'doggedly perseverant and cleverly opportunistic' to describe the entrepreneurship that has arisen on many small islands of the world, from aquaculture in the Faroes, to the use of coconuts as biofuel in the Solomon Islands, casino tourism in Macao, medical tourism in Barbados, and off-shore banking in Jersey.

Entrepreneurship in Small Island States and Territories is published in New York by Routledge, one of the world’s leading academic international publishers, as part of its Studies in Entrepreneurship series.

A wise Islander, Dr. Ralph Hazleton, once said, “The economy is too important to be left to economists.” As a small island with a small population and limited land and freshwater resources, Prince Edward Island faces significant challenges with respect to economic and social development. The degrowth community presentations and workshops—to be held in Souris, Charlottetown, Breadalbane and Summerside between September 13 and 18—will introduce community leaders and interested citizens to the AHAH! process, which has been used worldwide to stimulate human-scaled, community-based economic activities.

A combination of workshops and presentations, hosted in collaboration with the Building Community Resilience Conference (10^th North Atlantic Forum and 27^th Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation Conference, September 16-19, Summerside) will be held at the following locations and times:

• Sunday, September 13, 2-4 pm at Souris Strikers Ski Lodge, Souris Line Road
• Tuesday, September 15, 12 noon in the Main Building Faculty Lounge, UPEI
• Tuesday, September 15, 6-9 pm at Murphy Community Centre, Charlottetown
• Friday, September 18, 11 am-12.30 pm at Loyalist Country Inn, Summerside (Building Community Resilience conference presentation, http://pei2015.crrf.ca)

The AHAH! process asks participants to share their understandings of what is truly important to people, how their own work connects to the wider economic system, and what resources and opportunities are available for transforming the local economy to meet actual needs while improving environmental health, community well-being and quality of life. We hope that by engaging community leaders, we can start the ball rolling by introducing some ideas, tools, and information that can help you and your community council or organization to develop ongoing processes and projects.

These interactive sessions will be led by FairTrade Canada founder Bob Thomson, who serves on the Executive of the People’s Social Forum and received the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Integrity Award in 2013. Mr. Thomson, who attended the first degrowth conference (Paris, France, 2008) and introduced the concept of “convivial degrowth” to Canada (Montreal, 2012), has seen the international movement gather momentum from a few hundred participants to a few thousand (Leipzig, Germany, 2008) in recent years. 

A global leader in community-based, co-operative development and social justice, Mr. Thomson will assist Islanders in answering the question: “How do we reduce our societal and industrial metabolism to a point where it is sustainable?”

“A planned way down in terms of physical consumption can be a way up in terms of people, community and culture,” explains Mr. Thomson, who holds a Master of Arts in International Affairs from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, and has worked with degrowth groups in various parts of the world.

Our task as workshop participants will be to take a clear-eyed look at our situation, to discover how we might build alternative economies in a way that benefits individuals and communities as well as our environment. We hope that area residents, community leaders, and local organizations will join us in welcoming Mr. Thomson and work together to imagine and plan a bright future for our Island.

The degrowth sessions are sponsored by the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation, Council of Canadians PEI Chapter, CUPE PEI, CUPE Global Justice Committee, SSHRC, and the UPEI Faculty of Arts. For more information regarding the movement on Prince Edward Island, please contact Marian White (Council of Canadians) at (902) 368-7337.

For further information about Mr. Thomson’s presentations or about the Building Community Resilience Conference, please contact Emily Thomas, Conference Co-ordinator at naf@upei.ca or (902) 566-0909. 

Seventeen years after the first North Atlantic Forum (NAF) was hosted in Charlottetown, UPEI’s Institute of Island Studies and Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF) are pleased to invite Islanders to the 10^th NAF and 27^th CRRF conference—Building Community Resilience: Innovation, Culture, and Governance in Place—in partnership with the City of Summerside. Both NAF and CRRF are committed to supporting healthy communities, as demonstrated in our collaborations with Island-grown businesses, including the Summerside-based Samuel's Coffee House; Island Taylored Meats, Montague; and Charlottetown’s Prince Edward Island Farm Centre and Legacy Garden, during this four-day event.

Building Community Resilience opens at Summerside’s Harbourfront Centre (7:30 pm, Wednesday, September 16) with a public “fireside chat" focused on the effects of globalization. Dr. Kelly Vodden and Dr. Sally Shortall, leading academics in rural community development from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Queen’s University, Belfast, respectively, will speak to "Globalization: Who's Winning? Who's Losing?" The Premier and UPEI President will bring greetings on behalf of the Province and University. The opening is free to attend and includes the launch of Place Peripheral: Place-based Development in Rural, Island, and Remote Regions (ISER Books, Memorial University) and a special journal issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism. The evening closes with a reception.

Share your thoughts on “voluntary simplicity” and how you might envision “a planned way down in terms of physical consumption” as part of the Island’s future at one of the pre-conference AHAH! Workshops. FairTrade Canada founder Bob Thomson, who introduced the international “convivial degrowth” movement to Montreal in 2012, will lead sessions in Souris (September 13, Souris Striders Ski Lodge, 2-4 pm) and Charlottetown (September 15, 12 pm, UPEI Faculty Lounge and 6-9 pm, Murphy Community Centre).

On September 17, the Mayor of Summerside, Bill Martin, will be on hand to welcome us to Summerside and to kick-start the conference at the Loyalist Country Inn, followed by a keynote address on indigenous resilience by Daniel G. Pottle, Nunatsiavut Minister of Finance, Human Resources and Information. Stories of international resilience will be highlighted by guest speakers Maura Walsh (Chief Executive Officer, IRD Duhallow, Ireland) and Shey Conover (Vice President, Programs, Island Institute, Maine). The keynote sessions offer opportunities for conversations about youth mobilization, gendered resilience, tourism development, environmental management, Aboriginal issues, and much more.

In order to showcase the Island’s own path to resilience, Friday’s agenda includes tours of Summerside’s wastewater treatment improvements and Slemon Park, as well as field trips engaging with Lennox Island’s heritage, the Kensington North Watershed area’s environmental challenges, and the Evangeline Region’s cultural economy. The conference closes in Charlottetown at the Farm Centre and Legacy Garden on 2:30 pm Saturday, September 19. 

Building Community Resilience will bring approximately 70 unique perspectives from across and beyond the North Atlantic to the Island, through a series of papers, panels, and presentations. The conference draws from CRRF’s countrywide presence and the international network of researchers built as the NAF travelled from Prince Edward Island to Newfoundland and Labrador, Cape Breton Island, the Shetland Islands in the UK, the island of Bornholm in Denmark, and Iceland. The aim is to build momentum and extend support for communities to achieve societal and economic health and stability. French and English simultaneous translation will be available.

Join us to learn about how to get involved in the 11^th North Atlantic Forum, to be hosted in Norway in 2017. Check pei2015.crrf.ca for upcoming details about the post-conference Summerside Youth Forum, planned in collaboration with the City of Summerside. A detailed conference program and schedule are accessible on the website as are online registration options for community tours, daily attendance, and full conference activities.

Contact NAF 2015 Conference Coordinator Emily Thomas at naf@upei.ca or (902) 566-0909.