Victoria Surtees is the internationalization specialist at the Teaching and Learning Centre, which seeks to incorporate Indigenization, equity, diversity, and inclusion into new teaching techniques for the classroom.
“I was brought on two years ago, when there was this huge surge in international student recruitment in particular, and there was this need to think about how are we working with these students in the classroom and creating inclusive spaces for them?” said Surtees, who through several years of living in France and Montreal understands what housing instability can feel like.
“I know what it’s like to live without the certainty that you’re allowed to continue living in that place, and how stressful that can be. So I bring a lot of empathy to the role, I think, and I am always looking for voices to amplify and highlight as I continue this work.”
And what sprung from student courage and the collaboration of many talented, innovative creators became EKTA.
“It was very clear to me that when I was speaking to faculty and to staff, I don’t necessarily have the lived experience that our students are having,” Surtees described. “And what they really wanted to hear was the student voices, they wanted to know, ‘Does what I do matter? Do they care? What do they think?’ And I thought, well, I need to find a way to connect student voices to our faculty and staff.
“I asked for recommendations from faculty for inspiring students, but I also just met students in my travels around campus and got to talk to them. And just ask them, you know, is there a story you would like to share with the UFV community here, and I was so surprised that most of them said, ‘You think people would be interested at all?’ And then they would say, ‘Well, yes, please hear my story.’ And I was really touched by that.”
While students exchanged their personal experiences for a willing ear, the platform gave them free rein to talk about their lives leading up to that point. As Surtees recalled the process, “The way it would work is that students would come, we meet first and just have a general chat about their life about where they came from, their home communities, about what made them feel powerful and powerless on campus and that’s really become the central question of this podcast. I credit Sundeep Hans for that question.
“This podcast couldn’t have happened without a massive amount of consultation, so I consulted many faculty of colour, experts in social justice, including our wonderful Equity Diversity Inclusion director, Sundeep Hans, and I asked them, you know, what should be included? Where do I need to be careful, what things do I need to think about to do this in an ethical way?
“Students are asked to do things for free all the time, students are asked to put in work and then don’t necessarily get the credit that they deserve. So it takes a long time. It’s taken a year to get this podcast on the road and an entire year to make everything happen. But it was a good year. And that’s because if you want to do something, you have to do it right.
“And you need to take the time to build the relationships and make sure that you’re hearing the people that need to be heard.” The project itself was a learning process, as Surtees explained. It was a journey worth all its rewarding moments, and eventually the name would spring from that, too.
“I also learned about the concept of Ekta. So that’s the title of the podcast, Ekta, learning differently together. When I first started this podcast, I didn’t want it to have an English name. And I know that sounds maybe crazy, but for me, English is the language of colonization. It pushes out other cultures, it pushes out other languages. They call it a killer language. And so for me to create space for other cultures and perspectives, part of that, embodying that, was to choose a word that wasn’t English.
“If people are interested and they want to talk to me, they want to share their own story with me, I can find a way to make that story heard in other forms. So I do encourage them to reach out to me. I’m always happy to listen and to find a way to perhaps organize or communicate something to faculty and staff about their stories.”
Students and staff interested in listening to the first episode of EKTA can find it on Apple Music, Spotify, and Student Perspectives, where Surtees interviews UFV students Bradley and Billie, who share their own in-depth stories while navigating the intertwining complexities of life in Canada.
