Know Your Profs is an ongoing series of profiles on the instructors at Camosun College. Every issue we ask a different instructor at Camosun the same 10 questions in an attempt to get to know them a little better.
If you have an instructor you’d like to see interviewed in the paper, but perhaps you’re too busy (or too shy!) to ask them yourself, email editor@nexusnewspaper.com and we’ll add them to our list of teachers to talk to.
This issue we caught up with Camosun College History and Religious Studies prof Kamran Bashir and discussed how he feels about dropping formalities, why he is constantly changing how he teaches, and when he chooses to immerse himself in imagination.
1. What do you teach and how long have you been teaching at Camosun?
I teach History and Religious Studies here as a term instructor.
2. What do you personally get out of teaching?
For me, teaching is a testing ground to measure the strength of the ideas that we read in books.
3. What’s one thing you wish your students knew about you?
Maybe that I love to know what they think about what they study.
4. What’s one thing you wish they didn’t know about you?
My ideas and how crazy some of them can be.
5. What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you as a teacher here?
The interesting questions that students ask me. It helps me to think about how and what I teach.
6. What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you as a teacher here?
Despite trying new experiments, I never feel satisfied with the way I teach. I always go home thinking that these ideas could be taught better.
7. What do you personally see in the future of post-secondary education?
I think the future depends on how much we are actually open to continuously rethinking about what and how we want to teach in humanities and social sciences.
8. What do you do to relax on the weekends?
I enjoy watching cricket and comedy shows on TV and immersing in the joys of imagination.
9. What is your favourite meal?
I enjoy many South Asian Punjabi dishes.
10. What’s your biggest pet peeve?
Official formalities. Procedures… the iron cage of modern times.