Meet Dr. Duanduan Li: Teaching the Chinese language
When Professor Duanduan Li joined UBC from New York City’s Columbia University in 2003, she did so for a specific reason. She had worked as director of Columbia’s Chinese language program and was attracted to UBC because of its large community of heritage language (HL) learners — students with a background, though not necessarily a fluency, in the language being taught.
Meet Dr. Margery Fee: Fostering student engagement
Professor Margery Fee completed her PhD on Canadian literary history at a time when the topic was not as popular as it is today. “People just laughed and said, ‘You want to do a thesis on Canadian literature? Is there any?” Fee says of her years as a graduate student. Since then, Canadian literature has become a legitimate area of study, and Fee has remained committed to giving students “subject matter that they are interested in.”
Meet Professor Allen Sens: Tackling the world’s problems
“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” Professor Allen Sens of Political Science analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now.”
Professor Allen Sens has spent his professional life chewing over the kind of big-world problems his students want to fix.
“Anyone can criticize,” says Sens, adopting the same dramatic, bass tone that makes him a favourite in the classroom. “You just get a soapbox, go down to Stanley Park, stand up, and start screaming. It’s a lot harder to say what you’d actually do to effect positive change.”
Sens believes a pinhole lens is inadequate for big-picture issues like global warming, sustainability, genetically modified foods, and AIDS. That’s why he is troubled that most first-year students are directed like fish into one of two streams, Arts or Science, and spend the next four, or five years narrowing in on one specific focus, never to turn back. “We can’t have a society that’s going to be capable of solving these problems without having this understanding of both the scientific basis for the problems and the social and humanities perspectives of the problems as well.”
Fusing the physical life sciences dimensions of something like climate change together with political and social aspects is the inspiration behind the Terry Project, which Sens co-coordinates with David Ng, director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory in the Michael Smith Labs. Terry brings renowned public speakers like Stephen Lewis to UBC and also publishes creative writing, mainly from undergraduates, on terry.ubc.ca, the project’s website.
This year, Sens and Ng unveiled a cross-disciplinary course they’ve been shaping, called “Global Issues in the Arts and Sciences.” “Our intent is to get students thinking in an interdisciplinary way, across Arts and Science, very early in their careers,” Sens explains. The professor has earned wide appreciation for his efforts, winning the 2003 Killam Teaching prize from fellow-faculty, plus two Just Dessert Awards, given on behalf of students by the Alma Mater Society.
Besides teaching in the Department of Political Science and being chair of the International Relations Program, Sens is probably best known for teaching “Introduction to Global Politics,” a must-take course that fills up quickly every time it is offered. “Let’s face it, content changes all the time, especially in international relations,” says Sens, referring to his own experience as a student. His PhD thesis on the possibility of a global nuclear war triggered in Europe changed “over the course of virtually an evening,” when the Cold War ended.
With this in mind, he tries to provide students with tools for lifelong learning so they can tackle those issues that frequently change in shape and size. “One of the things that troubles me about what I’ve seen particularly in recent undergraduates is they’re all in a great big rush. It’s as if our society has already imprinted onto them this image of where they need to be at a certain point in their lives, and what you need to have in order to advance, or be successful,” Sens says. “It may be more of a path to ulcers and premature graying.”
He advocates the five-year degree, and encourages students to submit their ideas to undergraduate journals, and get involved in policy debates and student governance — in other words, to allow time for thought, reflection, and analysis before graduating.
According to Sens, unless we slow down and think beyond our own personal areas of interest, we will not be equipped to address the global issues we face.
“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” he analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now. I’m a promoter of slow food and slow education. Savor it, develop the flavours, try new things, experiment.”
By Josephine Anderson, an English major at UBC.
Meet Professor Jerry Wasserman: Living a ‘parallel career’
It’s not every day you get home from a long day at school, flop on the couch, flip on the TV, and see your prof.
But that happens all the time for Theatre and English Professor Jerry Wasserman’s students. They’re just as likely to catch him in an episode of The X-Files, or Battlestar Galactica — or on the silver screen — as they are to see him in class.
Ever since he moved to Vancouver from his hometown New York City in 1972, Wasserman has been living out what he calls his “parallel career.”
By day, he’s a prize-winning professor and a respected academic. The rest of the time, he’s hard at play in “Hollywood North,” Vancouver’s booming film industry, where he’s got more than 200 acting credits to his name. “It’s been great having this dual life,” Wasserman says, beaming his megawatt smile. “I’m the luckiest person I know.”
Sure, his work as an actor has seen him consort with celebrities like Will Smith and Ethan Hawke, but he’s adamant that teaching is no bit part in his career.“I love teaching,” he says. “At best, it’s this kind of ridiculously ideal job where you get to talk about interesting things to interested and interesting people. And someone pays you for it? I mean, what could be better than that?”
The classroom, to his mind, is a kind of stage in its own right — especially when it comes to Monday morning survey courses, where students fight to keep their eyelids open. “I figure it’s my job that a) the students stay awake, and b) they stay engaged,” Wasserman says. “And that’s an actor’s skill.”
Acting skills he has in spades, but he says the class-as-theatre analogy has its limits. “There’s a fine line between upstaging your material and utilizing those skills to maximize students’ engagement with the subject at hand.”
It seems to be working — UBC honoured Wasserman with a Killam Teaching Prize in 1998 and the Dorothy Somerset Award in Performance and Development in Visual and Performing Arts in 2005.
Trained as a 20th Century English and dramatic literature specialist at Cornell University, Wasserman became deeply involved in that university’s theatre scene. When he came to Vancouver to teach canonical British writers like Beckett, Woolf, and Conrad in the Department of English, he soon started acting and lecturing on Canadian theatre. “The field of Canadian drama studies was wide open, it was literally brand-new,” says Wasserman, who recalls that at the time he was literally able to read every play ever published in Canada. “I came in right on the ground-floor of a new discipline.”
He became a leading expert in the field, publishing among other things the book Modern Canadian Plays (Talonbooks: 1985), an anthology that has since become the major textbook in the field.
Extremely thankful to work at a university that has supported his double life, Wasserman equally credits lady luck for allowing him to be in the right place at the right time.
“I wake up in the morning sometimes and I have to pinch myself, you know, because I’m living the dream.”
Meet Professor Tina Loo: Following suit to make a difference
In some ways, Professor Tina Loo wants to be the Al Gore of the history department.
“He’s a masterful teacher,” says Loo, who saw the former U.S. vice-president deliver his history-making slideshow in Calgary in 2007. “It’s not everybody who can speak for two-and-a-half hours about a bunch of really boring atmospheric science and make it seem interesting and be full of passion,” she adds.
Loo was impressed by how Gore handled a tough crowd: an auditorium filled with oil barons and top politicians in a province quickly becoming Canada’s biggest carbon producer.
Both Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) figure in a first-year course on global warming that Loo, an environmental history expert, will teach this fall from the Dept. of History. Called “History 105: The Global Environment,” the course explores, among other things, why Gore received a standing ovation at the end of his Calgary presentation — a surprising finale for many. “Environmental issues are really shaping political engagement,” says Loo, who believes the current climate change debate is politicizing people beyond the existing categories of left and right.
By exploring that shift with students, Loo hopes to “get beyond the paralysis of that all of us seem to feel on the issue” of global warming.
That approach to a troubling topic echoes her work on other themes. As the Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Loo studies how government policies and social discourses impacted the environment in 19 and 20th century Canada.
Loo specializes in uncovering how past rationales have led to modern environmental dilemmas. Her research has focused the era of mega-projects and hydroelectric dams in BC, as well as Canada’s history of wildlife management, both subjects on which she has authored numerous books and articles. In her work on state power projects, for example, she explored how governments banked on public optimism and confidence in the state in the 1950s through 1970s. The belief that damming rivers for electricity could result in a better society for everyone helped shape the provincial landscape we know today, she says.
“That was a very particular historical moment that to a certain extent has passed,” she explains, adding that she thinks people now are quite cynical of the ability of government and suspicious of the notion of experts. “Partly because expertise has got us into a lot of trouble,” she says. “Science has not necessarily resulted in the better world that people hoped for.”
Loo’s work with First Nations has tried to show how emotional and anecdotal experiences of environmental change are just as important as the official research carried out by government scientists.
If there’s one thing she’s gleaned from her work digging through archives — which she likens to “an Indiana Jones experience” — it’s that individuals and local groups can impact outcomes, including global warming.
“I think that history tells you that things aren’t inevitable, and they could have been different,” she says.
By Bryan Zandberg (BA ’06), former editor with The Ubyssey.
Meet Trevor Barnes: Discovering where ideas come from
Discovering where ideas come from.
Ever since he joined the Department of Geography in 1983, Professor Trevor Barnes has tried to do more than expand the minds of his students. He has tried to expand the narrow focus of his own discipline. “I always want to say to my students, ‘Where do ideas come from?’” Barnes explains. “They don’t just come like lightning out of the blue sky, but they come from particular kinds of practices, which are bound up with culture, with politics, with cultural division.”
Origins of Geography
Barnes says we need to look no further than the first geographers for an example of what he means. During the 19th century, when the colonial powers were scrambling to lay claim to vast swaths of Africa, rulers turned to geographers to survey and understand the wealth of the land — and more often than not to fight wars over their respective empires. “That’s where the discipline gets going,” says Barnes, who started out as an economist — a field he says he found too “narrow, purified and abstract” — before going into economic geography.
“Geography is so much about variety, diversity and context that it just doesn’t fit with the notion that there are these essences, that there are these unimpeachable cores,” he says.
Research and Recognition
Beyond the classroom, Barnes has been a leading figure in re-theorizing economic geography through a close analysis of its underlying values. He has shown how dominant social attitudes have influenced the work of geographers just as much as rational scientific practices. The results have earned Barnes many distinctions, including the Presidential Award of the Association of American Geographers in 2006.
These days, his research focus on the topic of creative cities — urban centres such as Vancouver that are moving beyond an industrial economy. He is especially interested in how they vie with each other to lure an educated workforce in the information age. Aside from his interest in modern cities as a subject of research, he says it’s also a subject he likes to teach. “I think that’s the course that students enjoy most, because it’s about them and their lives; they can step out of the classroom and they’re there.”
Challenging Students
But Barnes also likes to leverage the shock value of the dramatic changes he sees unfolding in the world’s economy.To get his students thinking about globalization and consumer culture, for example, he tells them how Wal-Mart imports about 15 per cent of China’s total manufactured output. China, he reminds his students, is the biggest manufacturing country in the world.“You almost hear this collective sucking in of breath, when you say a fact that they didn’t know before.”
Still, facts by themselves don’t make a good course, nor are they going to help students understand a complex, changing world. “They have to be placed within a larger context,” he says, which is where his particular perspective comes into play.
“My stories tend to be critical. I mean, I’m on the left, politically, so I’m suspicious of what goes on in the name of capitalism. And so I try to raise those issues about some theme below the surface.”
Meet Dr. Stephanie Spacciante: Soaking up Culture
Stephanie Spacciante says she launched the Summer Study Abroad program in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies with one thing in mind: that you can only do so much in the classroom. “You can learn a language,” explains Spacciante, a lecturer in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies and founder of of the Summer Study Abroad program, “but you can’t learn the culture unless you’ve lived there.”
Meet Neil Guppy: Using Sociology to support students
Sociology Department Head and Professor, Neil Guppy, believes in the power of student initiatives, especially Student Directed Seminars.
Guppy has been the Sociology Department Head for 4 years, in which he has worked to ensure the best possible experience for UBC students and faculty.
“My most important duties are hiring new faculty in conjunction with my colleagues, trying to provide a supportive environment for learning and research, and trying to represent the interests of sociology students and faculty, and the university more broadly,” he described. In addition, Guppy teaches several sections of Sociology 100, a popular first-year survey course.
During his UBC career, Guppy has had a hand in some of UBC’s most popular outlets for student engagement; including working with UBC’s unique first-year orientation, Imagine UBC, and helping to create the Student Directed Seminars (SDS) program.
Guppy coordinated the inaugural SDS program with former AMS president, Vivian Hoffmann. Hoffmann was interested in creating opportunities for students to lead learning. She based her proposal upon a program she witnessed while studying at the University of California, Berkley. Hoffmann brought her idea to Guppy, looking for support and guidance.
“She came to see me because I was the Associate Dean, and most responsible for student issues,” Guppy remembered. “She and I constructed and implemented what is now the SDS seminar.”
The SDS program is an extension of UBC’s Directed Studies program, which allows students to work one-on-one with a professor doing research in a narrow field. SDS courses are designed and directed by students with the assistance of a volunteer faculty member. The SDS Advisory Committee reviews and approves final course outlines before they are offered for registration. Guppy has served as chair on the SDS Advisory Committee for the past six years.
Proposed classes must be on a topic that is not offered at UBC, and have a minimum registration requirement of eight. Students in third year and above are encouraged to submit applications by the deadline. Past courses have included: Think Globally, Act Locally: Citizenship in Vancouver; Chick Lit: Making (Over) a Context; Lifting the Veil: Representations of Middle-Eastern Women; and Graphic Novels: Legitimizing the Genre. SDS courses can span across all faculties and departments.
“We did it as an alternative way for students to engage with topics that weren’t in the UBC curriculum.” Guppy said, explaining that students flourish when they are given the chance to pursue topics they are passionate about. “I believe it’s been tremendously successful. Students are very engaged with learning in the program.”
“My favourite example is the concluding workshop that students had in a hotel in the Downtown Eastside, where they had been exploring alternative ways of representing social change. It was just a very moving, very involved, very passionate three hours of presentation and debate and dialogue with 40 or 50 members of the Downtown Eastside community.”
“Like Imagine UBC, which I was also very involved with when it started, it happened because a student at the University had a really good idea and we were able to jointly implement it,” he said.
“Many of our students have had many good ideas and have been able to push and work them in ways that are beneficial to generations after them.”
By Meghan Roberts (BA 2008, English Literature and International Relations).