Today@Dal

Posted Dec. 2 by the National Post:

With drums, posters and a cause, 70 Dalhousie University students threaded through Halifax’s core late last month protesting rights abuses in North Korea. It was not a controversial cause — not the way abortion or any of the other hot topics of the day might be, organizer Robert Huish acknowledges.

Their biggest challenge, he said, was figuring out how to keep candles lit in sub-zero temperatures. The turnout was great — perfect, even — quite likely because the participants’ academic success depended on it.

Mr. Huish, a Dalhousie professor, is perhaps the first university instructor in Canada to award 20% of his students’ grade on “active protest” — showing up and playing part in an organized protest; the kind generations of students have done in their own time and for the good of the cause, not their academic transcript.

“The beauty of bringing credit into it is this is something where we can actually say it’s worthwhile discussing, it’s worthwhile learning about it in a way that allows the students to figure out what goes right, what goes wrong,” he said Tuesday. “A lot of protest movements don’t offer that educational experience — they’re kind of doing it on their own time, they may not be able to fully appreciate the complexity of the organization.”

The goal is to “use the university space” to study the role of protest in society — is it a way to “advance citizenship?” he asked, or more “peripheral” in Canadian society?

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