Students

For twelve students this summer, the classroom is going global. When course work meets citizenship, the result is Sociology 435. The course integrates regular classroom-based teaching with experiential learning, connecting theoretical knowledge to everyday practices and encouraging students to be responsible citizens globally and locally.

Students Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle use their training in the Social Sciences in their jobs as research assistants in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

Where carbon cash flows, and international intrigue coincide, there you will find Arts undergraduate students Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle. Hailing from the International Relations Program and the Department of Economics respectively, Travis Allan and Bryn Runkle are using the skills they’ve learned in Arts to help an agricultural sciences professor study some of the implications of the Kyoto Protocol. “Other faculties don’t always have people with the skills we learn in Arts,” says Runkle. “The fact that we are in Arts allows these professors to tap into different sources of expertise.”

After searching for research opportunities on campus, Allan and Runkle secured positions with Professor Katherine Baylis, a professor of food and resource economics who teaches in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC.

Baylis says she had never hired undergraduates as research assistants before meeting Allan and Runkle. But she was quickly impressed with the skills of both students. “I was very lucky with both Travis and Bryn,” she says. “Very good students, very intelligent.”

Coffee and Carbon Training

Under Baylis’s guidance, Allan and Runkle have taken part in several long-term research projects over the past year, exploring subjects ranging from the legal acrobatics of the softwood lumber dispute to the actual fairness of Fair Trade coffee. More recently, they’ve been studying a process known as carbon trading, one of the procedures put forward by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As Allan explains, carbon trading allows a company emitting less than its quota of greenhouse gases to sell “credit” to another company that is exceeding theirs.

It might be very expensive for a factory owner to make the necessary structural changes to reduce emissions in his own plant, says Allan. By the rules of the carbon trading system, however, he could pay a farmer to adopt low-till plowing methods, which keep more greenhouse gasses trapped in the soil. The result would be the same overall reduction in high-atmosphere emissions, at a potentially much lower cost.

The process becomes more complicated in cases where the companies engaged in trading are based in different countries and governed by different laws. It’s this type of study that depends on Allan and Runkle’s backgrounds in political science and international economics. “A lot of the time it’s trying to sleuth down information in terms of what the governments are doing, because it’s not necessarily transparent,” says Allan. “When you’re looking at governments, it’s not as cut and dry as just saying, ‘Oh, we have strong property rights.’ or ‘Oh, the law says this.’”

“My International Relations and Political Science training has been really invaluable at providing me with deeper insights.”

Realizing the Relation between Research and Arts

Before they began working, however, neither Allan nor Runkle were sure there was a market for these kinds of skills in a research position. “I thought research was only something that Science students did,” says Allan.

But having developed a rapport with a number of professors during their third year, Allan and Runkle began asking around to see if any them would hire undergraduates to do research work. After several months of trying, both students succeeded in obtaining research positions with Baylis, and have been working with her ever since.

Allan and Runkle agree that the skills they’ve developed doing research for Baylis will be of great use to them in their further studies; Runkle in his Economics Honours degree at UBC, and Allan at the University of Toronto Law School.

In giving advice to undergraduate students looking for research work, Baylis suggests taking the initiative and approaching professors directly. “Going in and asking and being a bit proactive about it is useful, because most of the time money comes from grant applications, and professors don’t necessarily think to request specific funding unless they’ve been approached,” says Baylis. “Totally believe in yourself,” adds Runkle.

The interdisciplinary studies program has allowed Alvin Singh to customize his education. His program is centered on three core components: political science, international development, and policy studies. “A specialized education doesn’t always give you the skills necessary to function properly in a flexible work environment. More and more I’m finding that the jobs I’m attracted to — jobs that a lot of young people are attracted to — are extremely flexible.”

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today, a film documenting the responses of nine students to intentional and unintentional occurrences of racism.

Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault say their video project began as a vent session in a course they were taking with First Nations Studies Professor Linc Kesler.

“We would start the class by telling stories about classes we were in,” relates Crey, a recent graduate of the program.

The stories, she adds, were a way of dealing with some of the offensive and ignorant statements they had heard about Aboriginal people — not on the street, but right in their classes at UBC.

“They were kind of funny, they were, of course, kind of absurd,” Crey says of the remarks of some UBC students and professors.

The statements were profoundly hurtful, often for no other reason than the fact that non-Aboriginal students sometimes forget that in talking about the historic challenges faced by Canada’s First Nations, they are talking about issues that Aboriginal students among them have experienced themselves.

Noting a pattern, Kesler observed that it would be a good idea to gather the stories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students alike.

That suggestion lit a fire under Crey and Perreault — both senior undergraduate students at the time. They were highly interested in developing a resource that would help fellow students and faculty discuss sensitive inter-cultural issues without hurting, or alienating people.

As a directed studies project in the First Nations Studies Program, Crey and Perreault recently completed What I Learned in Class Today.

Video, they discovered, was a perfect medium, especially for getting uncomfortable first-person experiences out in the open.

They’ve screened a preliminary version of the video at several forums, including UBC’s Realities of Race conference in March 2007. In each case, audience members have been struck by the honesty of the students, who express their stories in their own words.

“You read a report, you can look at statistics, but actually being faced with students at UBC right now who are experiencing these things is pretty powerful.”

Dara Kelly is one Aboriginal student interviewed in the film. A member of the Fraser Valley Le’qa:mel First Nation, Kelly was in an English class with a focus on Aboriginal authors last year when one student prefaced a group discussion by asking why Aboriginal people were so “screwed up.”

For Kelly, that comment felt like a slap in the face, and in the film she candidly discusses why she finds the remark totally unacceptable.

“At the same time, when that kind of incident happens, it’s almost so shocking, or unbelievable, or hurtful that nobody says anything, and nobody knows what to do,” she says.

That’s one of the reasons Crey and Perreault created the video in the first place — the aim is to talk about these discussions, and to acknowledge that these aren’t just difficult for Aboriginal students.

People may recognize that something is racist, or insensitive, but not know what to do, or say, underscore Crey and Perreault.

Crey and Perreault say they intend to widen the scope of the project and add more interviews, as well as related classroom material, to accompany the film.

With the broad goal of removing an institutional barrier to Aboriginal post-secondary education, they plan on crafting their project to make it a resource for teachers at UBC and other institutions, something relevant to larger, multi-ethnic audiences.

“This video is here and it’s available,” Perreault says, “so let’s start talking about it instead of not talking about it, or talking about it in the hallway after class.”

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By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.