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Finemaster: Brad Arsenault fined most on their knowledge of Edmonton History.
Happy Bucks: Doug Sollows happily paid a happy buck fine to comment on President Ingrid's wonderful 'fascinator' worn to promote the night at the races at the upcoming weekend's District Conference.
50/50: Anne and Brad did not match cards; so the pot of cash was carried over.
Presentation/Speaker: Jerome Martin introduced Paul Martin who is the faculty development coordinator at Grant McEwen University. paul has had 20 years of experience in teaching courses in post colonial literature and literary theory with a strong emphasis on the literatures of Canada.He is the author of "Sanctioned Ignorance - The Politics of Knowledge Production and the Teaching of the Literatures of Canada" which won the 2013 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism of English literature. He is the former director of the University of Vermont's Canadian Studies program and Assistant professor in the department of English.
Paul returned to Edmonton in 2011 after teaching at the University of Vermont for 8 years. He explained that he was always a Canadian at heart especially while teaching others about Canada. He explained how once that he became the director, he became the de facto expert on all things Canadian and that he was asked over and over again by the media to comment on many Canadian issues, including Canadian foreign policy, Stephen Harper, Tim Horton's expansion to the US, and Quebec hydroelectric costs. Which had absolutely nothing to do with his expertise is literature.
Paul showed examples of several of his field trips where he brought dozens of American students to Ottawa to learn about Canadian culture and government. What was really interesting was the access to MP's that was given to Paul and his students while in Ottawa. This was unheard of in the states where the students would never get any kind of access to congressmen or other lawmakers.
With all this time teaching about literature in Canada he started studying about how Canadian literature is being taught throughout the country. This began while he was un undergrad and started taking classes in different languages and noticing that even though the subject and the era of the classes may be the same, there was no cross referencing of each of the other languages literature. So even though we talk of Canadian literature, we really have several distinct literatures, and not only in English and French, but many other languages including oral first nations literature.
It was the recognition of these differences that set the base for his PhD thesis and ultimately his book.To kick this off, in 1997 Paul travelled across Canada visiting 27 different universities and interviewing over a hundred different professors who were teaching Canadian literature to understand their methods and why they chose certain books to teach. Then, in 2007-08 he collected that same data which allowed him to see some very interesting trends such as a movement away from early Canadian literature towards contemporary literature and other things.It also showed that universities were very "silo-ed" in that different languages, universities, faculties and even departments did not know each other very well and were not aware of what was being taught by each other.
This sort of developed the title of his book in that although all the different universities, languages and department were building their own "stand-alone" curricula, this was seen as ok or sanctioned. This lack of communication can definitely be seen as a barrier of being able to build upon each others classes and finding new ways of doing things in these classes.
He went on further to discuss what he sees as a real threat to current universities across Canada and the US in the decline in the hiring of "tenure track" teachers and professors where they have a stable job for a longer period of time in which they can develop better teaching practices and course materials. In his interviews, he talked to some of the early professors from the 50's and 60's who literally had decades to develop their programs and have a strong influence in their field. Today in Canada, over 50% of undergraduate classes are being taught by teachers who are working on short term contracts. This means that we are having fewer and fewer people who have long term influence on the field or can properly mentor students fully. In the United States it is even more dramatic with over 75% of classes being taught by term or adjunct professors. Some of these professors are only making $2,000 to teach a course, so sometimes will have to teach 4 or 5 classes just to keep bread on the table and therefore have no time available to further develop new and innovative courses. Universities have been able to "coast" on this for the last 20 years or so, but Paul sees many long term ramifications to curricula if this is allowed to continue much longer.
Another issue that Paul brought forward was the 2012 discontinuation of the funding of Canadian Studies Programs around the world by the Department of Foreign Affairs, and International Trade (DFAIT) after doing so for 41 years. This was a $5 million dollar program that assisted in bringing students, academics and researchers to Canada to assist in Canadian studies.Thsi program was cut somewhat arbitrarily in that in 2010, DFAIT received a report that showed that the original $5M dollar investment brought in over $200 million in additional Canadian studies dollars by the participating partners with $70M actually being spent directly in Canada by visiting students, teachers and researchers. This is a real threat to teaching the rest of the world about Canada in developing not only academic understanding of our Country but economic and business understanding as well. Paul's book brings forward some of these issues and studies them as well.
Paul answered several question from the floor and was then thanked by Mike Henry.
The meeting was adjourned by President Ingrid.
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