Emily Wilson is bowing her upper body to the sea goddess Thetis, mother of the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles. Facing her is a packed lecture hall at the University of King’s College, where Wilson is giving this year’s Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture Wednesday Mar. 6. She sports a golden brooch of a hippocampus—a Greek mythological sea-horse—to […]
Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Lauren Phillips is The Coast’s Education Reporter, a position created in September 2023 with support from the Local Journalism Initiative. Lauren studied journalism at the University of King’s College, and has written on education and sports at Dal News and Saint Mary's Athletics for over two years. She won gold in the Canadian online publishing awards in the academic Best Multicultural Story category for her work on "Kwe’ Eskasoni," in May 2022, and assisted the journalism academic partners of Looking Out For Each Other (LOFEO), a project that started with the media guidelines on how to report responsibly on missing Indigenous people. Lauren assisted in researching recommendations for family and friends of missing Indigenous people to help them understand how media works and how to communicate effectively with reporters.
Posted inNews + Opinion
Back to school at MSVU
Students returned to class at Mount Saint Vincent University on Thursday, Mar. 7 after faculty settled their three-plus week strike on Tuesday. The largest union at MSVU—representing 160 full-time faculty, lab technicians and librarians—returned to work on Wednesday, a day before students. But everyone had to wait until Friday evening, after the school’s senate met […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Good news for MSVU students as union votes ‘Yes’ on tentative agreement with employer
Update March 5: After this story was published, the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association released a statement that answers one of the story’s key unknowns: Classes at The Mount are starting up again on Thursday, Mar. 7. At this point, it remains unknown if the semester is going to be extended to make up […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Latest budget just the beginning for education spending
Nova Scotia’s budget for 2024-25 was released Wednesday Feb. 29. Think of it as a collection of estimates the government makes now, for what it expects to spend on all provincial departments from April 2024 through March 2025. It is planning for a total of $16.5 billion, including an estimated $2.72 billion on education. The […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Province and city need to work together to solve child care crisis in HRM, says daycare director
Families are struggling to access child care in Nova Scotia. In 2021, one in two young children in Nova Scotia were living without adequate access to care, in what’s known as child care deserts. So, another 9,500 child care spots by March 2026 may sound like a lot—that’s what Nova Scotia and Ottawa promised to […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
MSVU prof links Black studies with animal studies, as researcher at Cambridge
El Jones is: a spoken word poet, radio host, writer, journalist, community activist, assistant professor at Mount Saint Vincent University and a current research fellow at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Along with 160-plus full-time faculty, librarians and lab technicians at MSVU—Jones is also on strike. “No one wants to go on strike,” […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
MSVU faculty on strike after weekend-long bargaining fails to reach agreement
As the noon gun sounded on Monday, members of the largest union at Mount Saint Vincent University went on strike after failing to reach an agreement with the school’s bargaining team over the weekend. The union, with approximately 160 members of full-time faculty, librarians and technicians, has been working without a collective agreement since June […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Universities have to fix their housing issues or lose millions, says province
Nova Scotia’s universities are scrambling to grasp the implications of a new provincial funding agreement, announced last week. On Friday Feb. 2, the Department of Advanced Education presented their replacement plan for the current memorandum of understanding—or MoU—signed by Nova Scotia and all 10 provincial universities in 2019. That five-year MoU will expire on Mar. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
An Atlantic Canada first: new Masters of nursing in mental health and addictions coming to Dal
Registered nurses who are working in mental health and addictions services will soon be able to advance their skills in the classroom through a new Masters of nursing program. The first of its kind in Atlantic Canada, Dalhousie’s Master of Nursing, Advanced Practice, Mental Health and Addictions, is accepting applications up until April 1 for […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Canada’s cap on international student visas just scapegoats students, says CBU student
Navy Nguyen is a fifth-year student at Cape Breton University outside of Sydney, NS. When they moved here from Viet Nam at the end of 2018, Sydney was a lot smaller than they’d been led to believe: “I was disappointed by how bad the transit system was already back then, and it’s just gotten worse […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia and PEI likely to suffer from cap on international students
It’s application season for universities–animated by stress and excitement for the future. Deciding on where to spend the next four years can be a challenge. Budgeting for tuition, food and rent in a city experiencing a housing crisis–another. Figuring out if your chance of getting into school just got slashed by 35%? That’s a challenge […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The missing Grade 9 problem
In 2020, voters elected Jeff Arsenault to the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial–CSAP, the province’s French school board–as one of three representatives for Halifax. The CSAP has 18 elected members province-wide, who are responsible for a school system of 23 Acadian and French-language schools that served 6,170 students in Nova Scotia last year. Halifax has over […]