Category: Events

We are thrilled to kick off the East & West Dialogue in 2021 with two prominent Black leaders in Canada!  The monthly event invites people of different heritages to come over to our organization as guest speakers, and share their life stories, thoughts and suggestions with our audience, many of whom are immigrants.  We are deeply grateful to the guest speakers for volunteering their time and expertise to help immigrants learn more about Canadian society, people and customs, as well as to promote communications among people from different cultural backgrounds.

(Poster created by Christina Wang. Photos courtesy of Rosemary Sadlier and George Elliott Clarke.)

In This Dialogue:

George Elliott Clarke is a poet and professor.  Rosemary Sadlier is a social activist, Author, and Speaker.  They share many things in common: having had great achievements and received highly recognitions in their own fields across Canada, family trees dated centuries back in the country, and prominent advocates for social justice, among other traits.  They grew up in quite different environments.  Rosemary lived in a very white neighbourhood in Toronto when she was a kid, while George was familiar with both city and rural life of Black Nova Scotians from childhood.  How have their life experiences shaped their growth paths and perspectives of the world?  What are the driving forces behind their remarkable success?  What barriers have they experienced and how have they coped with them?  What opportunities and challenges do they see that the Black community in Canada is facing?  How do they feel about the Asian community with regards to stereotyping, marginalization  and racism?  What suggestions do they have for immigrants to live in Canada with a bit more ease and grace?

 

Continue reading “EAWLC East & West Dialogue with George Elliott Clarke and Rosemary Sadlier”

With the courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), our old friend, artist and art educator Doris Purchase will come to the East and West Learning Club as a guest speaker again, and facilitate AGO Artworks Show & Talk events!

 

We’ll start with an art engagement workshop in March.  Doris will use a video she created for the AGO, introducing two important Canadian artists, and facilitate a very engaging art talk based on their artworks.  One way that you can prepare and engage in this workshop will be to think about two words and how they relate to your personal experience: “tough” and “love”.  You are also invited to have something citrus and have a smell or taste of cinnamon, ginger or vanilla when you join the zoom.

 

Guest Speaker: Doris Purchase

Artist and art educator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Public programming and Learning

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Doris has lived in Toronto since attending OCA in 1987.  She is a conceptual artist focusing on the painting.  Doris works part time for the AGO as a tour guide, and enjoys connecting people with art and engaging them in a creative process.

In 2018, Doris came to the East and West Learning Connections (then ‘the East and West Learning Club’) for the first time, and was one of the guest speakers for our East&West Dialogue event.  We were all inspired by the originality of her artworks, as well as the life experience she genuinely shared with us.  We are so happy that she will come again and try something innovative, to introduce the highlights of the AGO’s collections, and facilitate talks to connect our life experiences with the art!

Continue reading “AGO Artworks Show & Talk @East and West Learning Connections”

Thanks to the League of Canadian Poets for funding, our old friend, Mississauga’s inaugural poet laureate Anna Yin, will facilitate two poetry workshops again at the East and West Learning Connections, co-hosted by SureWay Press.

Continue reading “Poetry Workshops by Poet Laureate Anna Yin @EAWLC”

* We are constantly recruiting native English-speaking facilitator volunteers for the English Conversation program!  Please see the invitation message at the end of this announcement.

Have you ever wondered what to talk about in a social conversation?  Or as an immigrant do you sometimes feel it is difficult to join your local co-workers’ conversation because you don’t know the people or things they are talking about,  or you have some everyday questions that you would like to know how local people would think or deal with?  Or do you just want to find a safe, relaxing and friendly environment to talk to some native English speakers, and enjoy a pleasant conversation?

Judith Lawrence and her native English-speaking volunteer team are kindly offering this free English Conversation program to address those questions for you at the East and West Learning Connections!

Continue reading “The English Conversation @EAWLC”

Culture is the beliefs and practices of a people, and literature is one of the richest repositories of these beliefs. In this reading group we will read canonical texts that greatly influenced English literature, and as we read, we will encounter dominant cultural values that still hold sway today.  The importance of free will, the individual in society, the role of gods and fate, the nature of virtue, and the conventions of love and gender are just some of the ideas we will explore. We will read works ranging from Ovid in the 1st century BCE to Chaucer in the 14th century CE–literature that greatly influenced English writers, and literature that was considered the earliest kind of English literature. Before 1500, works that influenced English literature were written in Latin, Italian, or French; moreover, early “English” literature is written in a version of English that native speakers now no longer understand! Therefore, the readings are all in modern English translations. Web links, PDFs, and library links will be provided to enable members to gain affordable and easy access to these texts.

Continue reading “Reading for Culture with Emma: Monthly Reading Group @East and West Learning Connections”

Our final public event in 2020 will be a dialogue about future!

 

The dialogue between a professional human resource development strategist and an engineer  father of three, that will bring along their vision for tomorrow’s job market, how jobs would be created, who would be the most valued workers, the trends in education, and how we can prepare ourselves and/or our kids today for success tomorrow!

Continue reading “EAWLC Zoom Dialogue on Future Jobs and Education: the Trends and How to Get Prepared”

The East and West Learning Club is offering this personal communication skills training to its members as promised.  Please check Membership page to see how to become a member, and you are welcome to participate if your membership application is accepted before  the workshop begins

 

All members will receive an email invitation to register for the online workshop via Zoom.

 

Time: Saturday November 21, 2020 at 8:00 – 9:30 P.M. Eastern Time

 

Cost: Free, and for members only

Continue reading “EAWLC Personal Communications Training for Members – Practical, Helpful, and Useable”

Shaoxuan Zhou (Joe), a professional architect and urban designer, came to our club in July of this year, giving a wonderful lecture on the appreciation of architectural designs.  Other than an architect, ‘Coach Joe’ is also a known nickname among his friends: they often go to Joe for fitness advice, some finding it life-changing.  It all started from a casual enrollment in a community gym in Beijing in 2005.  At the time Joe had been bothered by stomach ulcer and insomnia for years.  He even stopped his indie architecture design practice, spending most of the time on all kinds of sports in a hope to get his health back on the track, but had progressed very little.  To his great surprise, Joe saw remarkable improvement in all of his symptoms within one month after he started the workout, and felt like overhauled after three months.  Ever since then, Joe’s  fascination with fitness training has driven him to educate himself on kinesiology, and become an personal trainer for himself, families and friends, in addition to a happy, healthy and successful architect again.  Exercises, if done in a right way, is bound to bring life-changing benefits to your health, according to Joe, as he has witnessed himself!

Continue reading “EAWLC Zoom Learning for Curious People: The Fitness Remedy”

Ivy Tan is a successful financial advisor.  Her excellent number sense came
to light when she worked at OTIS China as its CFO’s secretary, then an
English Literature major just graduated from university.  She decided to
sharpen that talent so she went to the United Kingdom, and obtained her
Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and a Master’s in Finance from Oxford
Brookes University.  She became a capital manager, in charge of a cash flow
of 36 billion volume in RMB (around 4.5 billion in USD) for a Chinese
company. In 2012, Ivy immigrated to Canada with her family, and started a
new career.  She founded Phoenix Finance, a Toronto-based life insurance and
investment agency.  She is a MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) member, and
her company has been  one of the top  agents of Canada Life since 2017
nationwide.  Ivy loves reading in her spare time, and has  a passion for
doing research in the fields of finance and economics.
Continue reading “EAWLC Zoom Learning for curious People: Let’s Talk about Money”

Near the River Cam in Cambridge, King’s College set up a memorial garden for
Xu Zhimo, a pioneer of modern Chinese poetry who studied at King’s College in 1921-22.  At the entrance to the garden, stands a white granite stone carved with the beginning and last lines of Xu’s most famous poem ‘Second Farewell to Cambridge’.  Xu wrote the poem in 1928 after re-visiting the university.  Three years later he died in an airplane crash at the age of 35.  Xu was one of the prominent intellectuals who pushed forward the New Culture Movement in China around 1920’s.  He wrote and promoted free verse poems and essays in vernacular Chinese, and was the first to introduce poetry works of western romantics to China.  His marriages and love affairs with three renowned women controversially illustrates his life time goal of pursuing love, freedom and beauty.  Under all this glamour, Xu is a learned scholar deeply influenced by both eastern and western cultures.  Before he went to study at the University of Cambridge, he learned Laws at Peking University, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from Clark University, Massachusetts, majoring in Political and Social Sciences with a minor in History, and did graduate studies in Economics and Politics at Columbia University.  In 1925, Xu travelled to Moscow to observe the newly
established Soviet Union.  He left with vivid accounts of his observations
and insightful reflections, many of his forecasts only to be Proven later by
the history. [1]-[3] Continue reading “EAWLC Poetry Series: Decoding ‘Second Farewell to Cambridge’”