Дві Університети, Один Якір
Notes from the first week of Educating for Social Change · Kamloops and Lviv, May 2026
This week I begin teaching Educating for Social Change in two classrooms at once. One classroom is at Thompson Rivers University, where I have the honour of meeting students I have taught before, students whom I already know are future change-makers, because I have watched them practice the work in the rooms I built with them over last few years. The other classroom is 8,000 kilometres east, at Lviv Polytechnic National University, where I am offering a parallel course in English to faculty colleagues as part of the LPNU Faculty Development Program · Освіта заради суспільних змін.
The Lviv course meets at 22:30 Kamloops time, which is 8:30 in the morning in Lviv. My evening, their morning. My porch light, their sunrise. The Pacific and the Carpathians joined for ninety minutes, four times across the term, with one practice that travels in both directions.
The students in Lviv are not students in the usual sense. They are professors, engineers, architects, educators, pharmacists, IT specialists, who came to the first session this week and described their students to me as I described mine to them. They spoke of remarkable young people learning under air-raid sirens. I spoke of remarkable young people learning across the Indigenous–settler relations of Canada. We compared notes on the same question from opposite ends of the world: what do you do when the conditions try to take the teaching away from you?
The lecture tonight: Anchor · Якір
Tonight’s lecture, the second in the series, is called Anchor, the A in the CARE+ Practice Framework. C-A-R-E: Consciousness, Anchor, Roots, Enact. Anchor names what holds practice steady when the external supports waver. Anchor is the architecture of ethics, the discipline of identifying the principles that organize our decision-making before a crisis arrives, so that when the crisis comes, the principles answer, not the panic.
The framework that operationalizes Anchor as teachable practice is Love · Care · Share · Любов · Турбота · Поділ. Three root causes of social problems (trauma, indifference, greed) and three ethical responses matched to each: love heals trauma, care heals indifference, share heals greed. The framework is grounded in the Anishinaabe Seven Sacred Teachings, in the Canadian Association of Social Workers ethical tradition, and in Ukrainian-Canadian lived experience: three rivers running into one practice.
Tonight, the TRU students will hear the same lecture the Lviv faculty heard on Thursday morning. They will meet the Seven Sacred Teachings as medicine, not as decoration. They will meet the NEWS diagnostic compass (North, East, West, South), asking at the end of every class what was wounded, what was strong. And they will meet the keystone of the whole architecture, the word I have been carrying with me for decades and have only recently learned to name out loud as a framework.
Nadiya · Надія · the keystone
Nadiya is the Ukrainian word for hope, but it is not optimism. Optimism is a forecast. Nadiya is a discipline. It is the practiced refusal of despair under conditions that would reasonably produce despair. It is the hope of the Holodomor survivor, of the refugee, of the caregiver who keeps showing up, of the worker betrayed by the institution they served, and still chooses connection over closure.
The opposite of nadiya is ozloblennya: embitterment, the slow embrace of injury as identity. Every day, every classroom, every encounter offers us the fork. The Anchor lecture names the fork so that students and faculty can recognize it the moment they arrive at it.
Today’s shadow
Today is also the day Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote what I have been thinking all morning:
“Yesterday, Russia launched one of its largest drone and missile attacks on Ukraine in four years. Canada unequivocally condemns these indiscriminate attacks. I express my deepest condolences to those injured and everyone mourning their loved ones. Canada stands with Ukraine as it defends itself against this unconscionable aggression and we will work with allies to sustain pressure on Russia to bring this conflict to an end.”
It has now been more than 1,500 days since the full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022. More than 200 Saturdays of standing in Kamloops near City Hall at 3:00 PM with the Stand with Ukraine community. More than 1,500 mornings when Ukrainian professors have woken up to news that would freeze any one of us in place, and gone to teach anyway.
That is what I want my TRU students to understand tonight. The educators I met in Lviv this week are not surviving. They are teaching. They are building the future of a country while the present is being bombed. They are practicing nadiya as a daily craft. They are the living proof of what the Anchor lecture argues: that Love-Care-Share is what holds when everything else is taken.
What carries forward
The people of Ukraine hope without hope, but with Nadiya. That phrase is not a paradox; it is a definition. Hope-without-hope is what remains when every reasonable ground for optimism has been bombed, displaced, betrayed, or rationed away, and the discipline of disciplined hope continues anyway, because it is rooted in something deeper than circumstance. Nadiya is rooted in the Seven Teachings, in the kalyna and the vyshyvanka, in the songs that survived the camps, in the prayers said by candlelight, in the mother who keeps cooking, in the teacher who keeps teaching.
To my TRU students, to my Lviv colleagues, to every student I have had the honour of teaching: thank you for showing up this week. Thank you for being the change-makers I already see in you. Thank you, дорогі, for letting me carry this work between two continents and bring you both into the same room.
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