Right now I am taking a course at York called Popular Education for Social Change. As a part of our course we have started a blog. It is great having a site where we can continue our class discussions, and as well share our personal histories which brought us to this work. A number of the people in my class are doing popular education already, working with a myriad of communities to democratize education and educate about critical issues such as racism, sexism and environmental destruction. I have loved this class so far, as we are diving into more of the theoretical nature of the practice.

I also love getting to know my classmates more. Talia is an ethnomusicology student who is focusing on Latin American women who are using hip hop music to battle sexism. Then there's Blakka, who has been working in popular theatre for years in Jamaica and is also a stand up comic. Last but not least there is Helena, the amazing E.D. of Young Diplomats, a local Toronto group that works to empower Ethiopian youth. These class, and all of the amazing people in it, serves to inspire my work and I hope to collaborate with everyone well into the future.

Christie Blatchford's article on blogging is ridiculous at best. Her main point seems to be don't try this at home kids, especially if you don't have a paid editor on staff! She also seems pissed that people take the liberty to post their personal thoughts online. I mean, that's for diaries!

After being blogged Blatchford shares her sense of violation of life's private moments. While I agree that not everything in life deserves to be blogged about (or Facebooked for that matter), the opinions of public society deserve to be shared and distributed. We are sick of hearing whiny white ladies dramatize murder trials, and put colonization in brackets. Pardon us if the rest of the world wants to take a step up to the plate to get our voices heard. We may not have journalism degrees, but I think we have a thing or two to contribute.

That being said, I think I'm going to stop reading the Globe and Mail!

p.s. Is this why you hate blogs Christie? I agree that his grammar is atrocious, but your article just gave him a few thousand hits. Way to set yourself up for failure and embarrassment.

This piece is by Mona Musa, submitted for Forum Magazine's Creative Resistance issue.

Erin Vahidi will be performing tonight as a part of new school reverberations, our launch party for Youth Action Network's new website, Resource Action Centre, and FORUM Magazine. Check out this preview MP3 clip of Wedding Band, as well as Erin's article on Spoken Word which is included in the latest issue of Forum!