All Posts Tagged With: "undergraduate education"

You can engage a room of 500 students: know the material cold, and know how to share it

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

In 1986, to recognize the importance of university teaching, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada created the 3M National Teaching  Fellowships. Since 2006, Maclean’s has proudly been the program’s media sponsor. Over the next several weeks we will be profiling each of the 10 winners, starting here with  English professor Nick Mount.

It is a rare warm day in what has proven to be a punishingly cold Toronto winter. It is a Friday afternoon—a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. In essence, it is the sort of afternoon for which the playing of hooky was invented. So why is Nick Mount standing on a stage before a sea of first-year students—hundreds of them, piled like waves up the sloping floor of a University of Toronto lecture theatre? “I’m actually,” admits Mount, “shocked you’re here.” He spends the next two hours reminding the class of 450 students why they are.

The topic today is the Chris Ware graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The course is Literature for Our Time, a primer that encompasses all of Corrigan, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness To the Lighthouse, and Toronto novelist Andrew Pyper’s literary noir The Killing Circle. Mount’s close reading of Corrigan, an anti-hero parable of fathers and sons that ends ambiguously with a Superman figure swooping angel like upon the protagonist and carrying him away, is as careful in its attentions as Mount had been with either Woolf or Vladimir Nabokov’s dense, disturbing Lolita.

Suddenly, Mount projects a garish image onto a large screen above him: it is the cover of another comic book, Smooth ’n’ Natural, a clever homage to the blaxploitation B movies of the 1970s. It is uproariously funny. Mount identifies its creator—he is a student, Brian McLachlan, sitting in the hall, totally surprised that Mount knows who he is or what he does. “Did I just embarrass the hell out of you?” asks Mount, who on the contrary, with a magician’s trick, has suddenly summoned the spirit of his theme—Literature for Our Time, the way poetry and fiction really do respond to the world—and housed that spirit in the shape of one of his own students.

“It’s something I learned from Northrop Frye,” says Mount, an expert in 19th-century Canadian romance novels, referring to Frye, the world-renowned U of T literary theorist. “Frye says that romance is the genre that’s best at revealing the wishes of a society—and its fears. An experimental avant-garde novel by some guy wearing a beanie in a café in Yorkville is about his anxieties. But if you read a popular novel, romance or genre fiction up against the culture of their time, they can have really interesting things to say about what that culture worried about, what it hoped for, what kind of heroes it wanted.”

Each Friday, Mount, who’s 47, favours grey stubble over full beard and pairs dark suits with wine-coloured, open-necked shirts, steps onto that stage and holds that mirror up to his 450 students. Somehow—through humour, knowing asides, but above all through a grasp of the material so complete and fluid that it tends to conceal the dozens of hours of prep he dedicates to each lecture—Mount makes the experience intimate. “It’s like I’m just talking to a friend about the book I’ve just finished,” says 18-year-old Alisa Lurie.

It’s not just that he’s passionate about the material (he’s been known to choke up describing how the poet Sylvia Plath placed mugs of milk in her children’s cribs before committing suicide), or that he knows the material cold. These are the basics. Mount recalls that one of his own profs—Patrick Grant, back at the University of Victoria—“broke every rule in the good teacher’s rule book. He read from dusty notes that were clearly 10 years old, he never made eye contact. And I learned more in that class than any other in undergraduate because the guy knew his stuff. And he knew how to share it.”

What the provinces think of the Big Five’s revolutionary ideas for university reform

Diane McGifford, Manitoba’s minister of advanced education and literacy, has a bone to pick with Canada’s “so-called big five” universities. She’s not alone.

Last month, the presidents of five of Canada’s largest universities approached Maclean’s for an interview. Over the course of a 90-minute video conference, the presidents of McGill University, the Université de Montréal, and the universities of British Columbia, Alberta and Toronto, outlined their vision for a veritable revolution in Canada’s post-secondary system—one that could, they claimed, launch our universities to the top of the international ranks. The one-size-fits-all-mentality that governs higher education policy, they argued, must be replaced with a model that funnels research dollars to top-performing schools and lets the rest focus on undergraduate education. And to get there, they went on, Canada needs an aggressive, national innovation strategy.

These bold propositions, coming from five of Canada’s most distinguished academics, have created a buzz, not least among other universities who are unwilling to cede research hegemony to a handful of large schools. But one thing is clear: without support from the provinces—which, more than any other sources, fund post-secondary education—the Big Five’s big ideas are unlikely to be translated into action. So Maclean’s asked provincial education ministers to give us their impresssions of the proposals.

In short, they’re not impressed.

All the ministers interviewed were adamant that no “strategy that zeroes in on just five” institutions is likely to be championed by the provinces, as John Milloy, Ontario’s minister of training, colleges and universities, explained. But the degree of opposition ran the spectrum from more to less muted criticism. Milloy “has trouble with the idea” that Canada has fallen behind in the first place. Rob Norris, Saskatchewan’s minister of advanced education, employment and labour, finds “the specifics [of the proposal] a little bit adrift.” And Manitoba’s McGifford is “skeptical” of what she feels, quite simply, is “not a very good idea”: the division of universities into research and non-research institutions.

For McGifford, the proposal reeks of too much federal influence. A cohesive national strategy on post-secondary innovation, she says, would allow the feds to encroach on a domain that constitutionally belongs to the provinces. “It would almost demand a federal education minister,” McGifford explains, “and that would be a huge political problem.” She concedes that those provinces with a Big Five school might be more inclined to back the proposed reforms. But in her case, the call is clear: “We don’t want a federal minister dictating or directing us in this field of post-secondary education.”

For Saskatchewan’s Norris, the source of discontent is not that the plan entails too much federal co-operation, but that it allows for too little. He wants “a pan-Canadian approach” built on more “inclusive dialogue” among all provinces. A two-tiered initiative that focuses on just a few schools, he says, can’t serve as a foundation for a national crusade. Instead, he adds, we need “shared objectives” that jurisdictions can address together.

Reactions from the Big Five’s home provinces were decidedly more mixed. Ministers from B.C, Alberta and Ontario (Quebec’s education ministry declined to comment) were in agreement that universities are not the breeding grounds for innovation that they could be. B.C.’s minister of advanced education and labour market development, Moira Stilwell, summed it up with the example of Finland—“the poster country of national innovation.” “They hire 16 R & D [research and development] people per 1,000 workers,” she says. “In B.C., we hire about 4.5.” The ministers also concede that a more focused national discussion would be helpful.

Still, the ministers tempered those concessions with the more politic observation that each institution is special and has a place in Canada’s post-secondary family. Sure, big universities, with their more extensive infrastructure, are likely to attract research dollars. But Alberta, B.C. and Ontario argue that the best strategy for directing funds is still the current peer-review system, which evaluates every research proposal on the basis of its merit (and under which, by the way, the Big Five already attract a substantial portion of funding). “I have trouble with the idea of somehow carving out a sum of money for particular institutions,” Ontario’s Milloy cautions. “I prefer to have the situation that’s in place.” The three also touched on a range of other concerns: that specialization would diminish the quality of undergraduate education, for example, or that a national innovation strategy would threaten universities’ intellectual autonomy.