Kelly Rankin

Music education helps students to excel in all aspects of school life, says Susan Raponi, a doctoral candidate in music education at the University of Toronto and elementary school music teacher for grades 4-8 at George Peck Public School in Scarborough.

“Music education has been proven in research to really support literacy and numeracy because it teaches a student to focus with others,” she says. “That development of attention really develops [students] in all areas of the curriculum.”

Earlier this month, Raponi received a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence for her approach and commitment to music education as well as her research on teaching music – including teaching students with autism or other learning challenges. (Scroll down to watch Raponi's interview with Global TV.)

“This has been really humbling for me,” says Raponi. “To have been nominated was an honour in itself, but actually winning this award was beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

“The recognition of the music teacher as a whole and the encouragement I’ve received from my peers is really heartwarming.”

Raponi spoke with the Faculty of Music’s Peter Herriman about her research and the award.

Tell us about your research.
I recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in music education. My field of music research focused on urban diversity, social justice issues and the transformative impact of instrumental music education in high priority urban communities.

I completed my thesis on the role of the wind band educator as community leader, integrating cultural identities and core values of communal music-making towards a new vision of a multicultural wind ensemble.

How will your work enhance music education?
I am developing a curriculum of wind band education that works on a unified numbered approach based on the first five notes of the B flat concert scale. This curriculum eliminates the staff and basic notation in order to allow students on different instruments to play music by focusing on one unified line of numbered patterns that they can play in unison, guided by the instructor.

The primary focus for my PhD studies will be in the area of elementary wind band education. I believe the development of an effective elementary wind band curriculum should inspire young people for the purpose of social transformation through the act of sharing music with others.

What are your plans to further enhance your teaching abilities and methods?
In the past, I have worked hard in creating a stimulating and innovative learning environment. I have had guest speakers work with our children, taken them on exclusive field trips where they have been invited to observe and participate in rehearsals and made lasting connections with the University of Toronto.

I am currently doing research with learning differentiated students and those students that face learning challenges through autism and a wide variety of mental health and learning disabilities.

Also, I am currently writing a new band methodology for these students that will work in conjunction with current band method books. This methodology is based on a numbered system, outside of traditional staff notation, that allows these students with challenges to play with students in a mainstream music classroom.

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Meet Amy Luo, winner of the Canadian Art Foundation's 2014 writing prize

sgupta — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 09:09:35 +0000

Meet Amy Luo, winner of the Canadian Art Foundation's 2014 writing prize sgupta Tue, 07/29/2014 - 05:09

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The work and activities we undertake on our own volition, beyond mandatory degree requirements, are probably what we will remember most fondly about being in university years down the road," says Amy Luo (photo by Melina Mehr)

Kelly Rankin

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Kelly Rankin

Faculty of Arts & Science

Art

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"The Art History Department offers credits for relevant internships, so I’ve been able to gain real-life experience and earn credits toward my degree at the same time"

Founded in 2009, the Canadian Art Foundation Writing Prize is a juried prize designed to encourage new writers on contemporary art. This year’s jury included Melanie O’Brian, director of the Simon Fraser University Galleries; Jonathan Shaughnessy, associate curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada; François LeTourneux, associate curator at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal; and Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art.

The winner of this national competition is commissioned to write a feature story for Canadian Art Magazine and receives a $3,000 award, while two runners-up each receive recognition in the magazine and a $1,000 award.

This year members of the University of Toronto community took two of the three prizes. Amy Luo, a fourth-year undergraduate and work-study student, is the recipient of the grand prize and Daniella E. Sanader, who works for the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto Art Centre, was a runner-up.

Writer Kelly Rankin caught up with Luo by email to ask her about the competition, what kind of career she imagines for herself and balancing academics with extracurricular activities.

What is your program of study?

My subjects of focus are Art History, Philosophy, and Women and Gender Studies, and I’ll be finishing the last semester of my BA this fall.

When did you first become interested in writing?

In elementary and high school, I found a lot of enjoyment in writing fictional stories. But writing is not something I’ve considered undertaking in a serious manner until more recently.

Though it sounds banal, I probably developed a serious interest in non-fiction writing from working on essays for my university courses. Through essay-writing, I’ve learned to present and argue for ideas with both complexity and precision.

What attracts me to writing is that it allows very precise articulation of thoughts and at same time adequate room for play. This is also why I enjoy reading academic writers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and John L. and Jean Comaroff, who show both erudition in their ideas and finesse in their style.

You hold an internship at C Magazine, served as this year’s art editor of the Hart House Review and you work at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. How do you manage to do all of this and keep up with your studies?

It’s definitely challenging and often stressful to work and participate in extracurricular activities on top of a full course load. But I think that the work and activities we undertake on our own volition, beyond mandatory degree requirements, are probably what we will remember most fondly about being in university years down the road.

The University of Toronto is a huge and diverse institution with a lot to offer beyond the classroom in terms of supporting students in pursuing their interests and goals, and one would be remiss not to take advantage of that.

Work-study positions, like the one I’m holding at the JMB Gallery, have flexible hours and are a great way to become acquainted with faculty and staff doing interesting work.

The Art History Department offers credits for relevant internships, so I’ve been able to gain real-life experience and earn credits toward my degree at the same time. I’m also a proponent of the credit/no credit option offered by the University; by selecting this option for one of my classes last year, I was able to learn challenging material I was interested in without having the pressure to earn a high grade.

What kind of career do you imagine for yourself?

My career plans for post-graduation are still nebulous, but I do hope to continue to write about contemporary art and culture. I can see myself enjoying magazine or book publishing, or curating. What attracts me to these undertakings is that they both represent a means to disseminate ideas on issues that are important to me, and also that they provide a context for content-creation that is more slow-paced and creative as opposed to, say, real-time journalism.

The jury unanimously agreed that your writing stood out from all the submissions “for [your] ability to bring together significant observations on contemporary art and larger topical issues.” Please tell us about your submission.

For my submission, I wrote an article on Melanie Gilligan, a Canadian artist who works primarily in video and film. Her work deals intelligently with various aspects of capitalism in its lived reality, from the extension of market rationality into all areas of life in contemporary neoliberal societies to the precarity of the working class since the late 20th century.

I’ve been acquainted with academic texts on these topics from my studies, but Gilligan’s videos have much more to offer than their intellectual and factual content. Her videos are affectively stimulating (she cites David Cronenberg as a major aesthetic influence), contain a good dose of humour, and often come packaged in the form of a television series.

What makes her work effective both as art and as protest, I think, is that it engages us not only intellectually but from many angles, through our senses, through humour and through popular entertainment forms that we’ve all grown up with.

In addition to $3000, you won a commission for a feature article in Canadian Art Magazine. Can you tell readers what that article will be about?

I’ll be working on a new feature article for a future issue. I’m meeting next month with Richard Rhodes, the editor of the magazine, to discuss ideas for the piece. This is a fantastic opportunity and I’m very excited to work with Canadian Art.

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Pan Am Parapan Am volunteering: meet Terry Jones, water-ski enthusiast

sgupta — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 09:38:33 +0000

Pan Am Parapan Am volunteering: meet Terry Jones, water-ski enthusiast sgupta Fri, 07/25/2014 - 05:38

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This is where my computer experience meets water-ski venue and operations," says Information & Technology Services' Terry Jones (photo by Paul Ruppert)

Kelly Rankin

Author legacy

Kelly Rankin

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Certified Pan Am judge and U of T staff member to supervise venue technology, scoring and results

Few people realize that water-skiing and wakeboarding are competitive events at the Pan Am Games.

In fact, both sports made their Games debut in 1995 at the 12th Pan American Games in Mar del Plata, Argentina and, in the last five Games water-skiing accounted for 4.7 per cent of Canada's medals.

With the official countdown to Toronto 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games (TO2015) underway, writer Kelly Rankin asked Terry Jones, a University of Toronto IT Analyst, Pan Am Games volunteer and water-skiing aficionado about the sport and his role at the Games.

How did you become interested in water-skiing?

I have been interested in water-skiing since I learned at a friend’s cottage when I lived in Winnipeg at about age 12 or 13. I skied whenever I could, but that was usually only a couple of weekends every summer.

That changed when I was a student at U of T. I sailed Laser sailboats with another U of T student, Geoff Chandler, and we were relaxing after a sail down at Bluffers Park in Scarborough when he asked if I liked water-skiing. I said I love it. He said, “let’s buy a boat.” That’s when I became a water-skier. It has been a passion, or maybe obsession, since then.

What is your role in the TO2015 Games?

My official role at the Games will be supervisor of venue technology, scoring and results for water-skiing. I will be responsible for planning site setup prior to the events and making sure things like computer-scoring information is transmitted to the Pan Am scoring systems. This is where my computer experience meets water-ski venue and operations.

I am also a certified Pan Am judge, and will judge events if called upon.

Preparations for the 2015 Pan Am Games have been underway for literally years and many of the Ontario officials, myself included, studied and wrote exams to earn our Pan Am Level Judge ratings so that we could judge the events. Whether I will judge or not depends on how many volunteers we have from all over the Pan Am Regions, but I am ready if needed.

How are computers used in the water-skiing events?

We use special computers with video cameras to measure how far ski jumpers fly before they land by capturing a short movie of them landing in an area that has survey markers in the water.

Ski jumping is measured like the long jump, but in our case the landing area is water, not sand, so we have to record the splash to measure where the skier lands.

We can move a video frame forward or backward to find where the skier first touches the water. We then mark that point on the screen and, since we have told the computer where the survey markers are on the screen, the computer can quickly extrapolate where the skier touched the water first.

How do you feel about the Pan Am Games being hosted by Toronto, with many events taking place at U of T?

I think Toronto is a great place to have the Pan Am games and I am sure the people of Toronto will make all the Pan Am visitors welcome. The preparation for the games, especially at U of T, will leave a legacy of amazing sports venues for years to come, such as the field hockey venue on the back campus and the aquatic facility at U of T, Scarborough. Hopefully this will lead to future Pan Am and Olympic champions coming from U of T.

What are some things judges look for when scoring competitive water-skiing?

Unlike some sports, water-skiing is not a subjective sport when it comes to judges. There are three events in water-skiing; slalom skiing, tricks competition and the jump event.

Slalom is measured by how many passes a skier can make through a course of six buoys, where each pass is made more difficult by increasing the speed - up to a maximum of 58km per hour. Once maximum speed is reached then the skier’s rope is shortened making it more difficult to get their ski around the buoys. A missed buoy ends a skier’s slalom attempt.

For tricks, the skier has two timed 20-second passes in which they can complete as many tricks as possible. Each pass starts when they attempt their first trick. Each trick is assigned specific points based on the degree of difficulty. There are no partial points, either a trick is done according to the criteria or it is not. Each pass ends when they fall or when the 20 seconds runs out.

In the jump event, skiers ski over a ramp that is between five and six feet high off the water. The computers and cameras measure how far they have jumped. The key to greater distances is going as fast as possible over the ramp by waiting as late as possible before cutting towards the ramp, timing your upward spring precisely while on the ramp, and maximum aerodynamic form while in the air.

However, regardless of how far the jump is, skiers have to ski away to get credit for a jump. Spectators can expect to see jumps up to 70 meters long! That’s two-thirds the length of a football field in the air! It’s spectacular to watch.

At the moment water-skiing is not an event in the Parapan Am Games. Do you know if there are any plans to change that?

It is unfortunate that water-skiing is not a Parapan Am sport at present. Canada has a strong adaptive water-ski program and regularly competes in the Adaptive World Championships. I hope water-skiing will become part of future Parapan Am Games.

What are you doing to support the games? Let us know your plans to volunteer in the coming months, your dreams of competing, coaching, or simply attending the games. Email the editor at U of T News: uoftnews@utoronto.ca.

Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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Drama Centre students invited to perform durational project in Berlin

sgupta — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:46:25 +0000

Drama Centre students invited to perform durational project in Berlin sgupta Tue, 07/22/2014 - 06:46

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(All photos courtesy of the University of Toronto's Digital Dramaturgy Lab)

Rebecca Biason

Rebecca Biason with files from Kelly Rankin

Kelly Rankin

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Rebecca Biason with files from Kelly Rankin

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Stare.Print.Blue - Voyeuring the Apparatus

Stare.Print.Blue - Voyeuring the Apparatus is a durational performance-installation project produced by the University of Toronto’s Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL).

The project examines our relationship to time and technology. It explores elements of endurance and the movement of the body through time. And it explores the colour blue as it relates to our history and understanding of the world – particularly its appearance in most digital or technological devices.

In August 2013, Antje Budde, professor and associate director (graduate) at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and founder of the DDL, started work on Stare.Print.Blue. It debuted on October 5, 2013 at Videofag’s storefront as part of the renegade Le Rues des Refuses programming at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Festival. Later this summer it will appear in Berlin at Survival, the International Performance Art Festival organized by Open Space Berlin.

Among Budde’s collaborators on the project were three U of T graduate students from the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies: Myrto Koumarianos, Michael Reinhart and Nazli Akhtari.

Each student felt a different connection to the work depending on their input, but all three felt that this practical work was essential in enhancing the academic nature of their work in the graduate program and in the field of theatre.

Here they discuss Stare.Print.Blue and how participating in this exploratory piece was a means for combining both the academic and practical side of their work within the theatre program.

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PhD student Koumarianos, who has worked with Budde on many occasions, is the performer in Stare.Print.Blue. She says the emphasis placed on duration and slowness with respect to time in the piece was intriguing.

“Whatever I did I needed to do it in slow motion,” says Koumarianos. “I had to find this fine balance between being ready to go and energetic, while remembering to move slowly. There was a rhythm to this piece that I could not break.”

She also notes that it was strange to experience elements of performance from both the point of view of the performer and the deviser. “I was essentially creating the piece and improvising; particularly towards the end,” adds Koumarianos.

Reinhart, a PhD student and Stare.Print.Blue’s choreographer, says he found the aspect of slowness just as difficult as Koumarianos.

“My role in the piece was to keep Myrto moving. It was interesting for me to watch the visual relationship we have to duration and time, and the frustration that can result from this,” says Reinhart.

Stare.Print.Blue’s emphasis on slowness was a challenge to perform because of how difficult it is to deliberately move our bodies so slowly. However, this wasn’t the only difficulty Kourmarianos faced.

Reinhart also discovered, while rehearsing and performing the piece, that other obstacles arise from working with technology in this way.

“I would find myself ready to perform but the technology wasn’t ready to go, so much of it required human attention, as did the analog chair that I performed with throughout the piece,” says Koumarianos.

Reinhart also mentions that, by performing the piece in Videofag’s storefront and subjecting Koumarianos to the critical gaze of the public, they were evoking the element ‘Stare’ that appears in the title.

“There was never a sense of certainty that you get with other pieces that you know are rehearsed over and over again,” says Akhtari, a master’s student and assistant on the project.

“You never knew how Myrto was going to respond to her environment, it was intriguing,” she adds.

The idea of altering our perception of time and reality is further played out with the final elements of the piece, ‘Print’ and ‘Blue’ as Koumarianos meticulously documents time by dipping her hands in a bucket of blue paint and imprinting them on a wall.

“The documentation of time with the blue handprints on the wall was something I really connected with as it was ‘screwing’ with time in a way that forced the audience to look at it through a different frame,” says Akhtari.

The painstaking movements of the performance confront the viewers’ expectation of time and duration while the blue handprints reference the blue glow of the digital devices that have become so familiar to so many. The coupling of these contradictions, the slow movement of the body versus the instantaneity of the digital accentuated the accelerated experience of our everyday lives.

Although ‘Blue’ emphasizes documentation and time, for Koumarianos it also represents joy and relief.

“When I got to the bucket of blue paint it was pure joy,” she says.

“The tactile nature of the paint, the fact that it was cool to the touch, was so inviting after working and becoming entranced in the stark whiteness of the space.”

The students also said that working on Stare.Print.Blue was a great opportunity to practice their craft, to learn the theory behind theatre and performance and to work in partnership with programs such as U of T’s Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Digital Media Program at York University.

“This is a really exciting time to have pieces come out of the Drama Centre that are more exploratory in nature,” says Reinhart.

Budde, Reinhart and Koumarianos are currently in Berlin preparing for the festival. Their participation is partially funded by the German, European Research Study Fund of the Faculty of Arts And Science, University of Toronto and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

Rebecca Biason is a writer with the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie

sgupta — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 10:32:46 +0000

Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie sgupta Wed, 06/25/2014 - 06:32

Kelly Rankin

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Kelly Rankin

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Breaking Research

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Political Science

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

History

Books

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research

Operation Valkyrie – the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and popularized in the 2008 film Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise – happened nearly 70 years ago.

Randall Hansen’s latest book, Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance After Operation Valkyrie is about the period following the last attempt on Hitler’s life and the impact German resistance had on the final months of World War II.

Hansen is a professor of political science and director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Affairs at the Munk School of Global Affairs. His research examines migration and citizenship, demographics and population policy, and the effect of war on civilian populations.

Writer Kelly Rankin spoke to Hansen about his research, Disobeying Hitler, and what drives people to disobey authoritarian regimes.

Tell us a bit about your research. How does your work on immigration and integration in Europe and North America relate to your research into German history, in particular during and after World War II?

In all my research, I am not much interested in contrasting good and evil, ‘us’ and ‘them’ but, rather, in exploring the interaction of the powerful and the powerless.

For example, my work on immigration examines the effect of public policy on migrants. My book on bombing, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945, examined both Allied and German strategy during the air war and the experience of living through carpet-bombing in Britain and Germany. My work on eugenics and sterilization told the story from the perspective of leading eugenicists, doctors who coercively sterilized people with mental disabilities, and the sterilization victims themselves. And Disobeying Hitler looks, in part, at how average Germans experienced the last months of the Second World War.

What inspired you to write Disobeying Hitler? And why is it important to tell this story?

Well, I’ve long had a personal fascination with the German resisters who gave up their lives trying to stop Hitler. Why, when so many slavishly followed Hitler to the awful end, did others consciously risk everything to stop him simply to show the world that there was another Germany?

But there’s been a lot of work on the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life and the events leading up to it. It’s been largely assumed that there was no resistance after that date. I began with the hunch that there was more resistance than scholars had allowed; there was, and it had a material impact on both the course of the war and German recovery after it.

I was also interested in questions of broader appeal: how do people react when military duty and citizenship demand that they obey orders that they know to be irrational and immoral? How do they resolve the conflict between their citizenship and their consciences? And how, if it all, does the process differ between senior military officers on the one hand and ordinary people on the other?

So, the book matters both for a fuller, and perhaps more nuanced, account of the last year of the war and for a broader understanding of how and why people disobey authoritarian regimes.

Would you say more about what drives people to disobey authoritarian regimes?

There’s a large and complex literature on this point in political science, but the central conclusion of the book concerns the moment when regimes crumble under external or internal pressure. At that moment, as chains of command break down and the old regime shows its weaknesses, the bar to resistance lowers and more people disobey. It’s an exciting and hopeful moment, but also a dangerous one because what follows can either be stability (Germany, Japan) or political chaos and/or sectarian violence (Libya, Syria, and in a more complicated way Egypt).

Would you call Operation Valkyrie a catalyst for German resistance?

Without a doubt it was.

In the military, Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of Paris, knew and respected Claus von Stauffenberg (the leader of the Valkyrie plot). Many of his subordinates in Paris had actually been directly involved in the events of July 20 in Paris, when the entire SS and Gestapo was arrested and the German resisters prepared to hand Paris over to the Allies. Among average citizens, many saw themselves picking up the torch of resistance that had fallen from Stauffenberg’s failing hands.

Is there any evidence of a German resistance before Valkyrie?

Absolutely.

The first resisters to Hitler and the Nazis emerged from the political left – Social Democrats and Communists; the Gestapo, relying on informants, arrested most of them, and many died in concentration camps.

The Kreisau Circle was a group of aristocratic resisters, including the famous Adam von Trott zu Solz and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. They were opposed to killing Hitler. They thought Germany had to be totally defeated and met to write about how to create a postwar Germany.

We also shouldn’t forget Georg Elser, a lone working-class resister, who came within a hair’s breadth of killing Hitler in a Munich pub in 1939. In the Wehrmacht (the German military), there were resisters from the mid- to late 1930s, and the first plan to depose Hitler dated to 1938. It involved waiting for the Allies to reject Hitler’s debates for the Sudetenland at Munich and then to arrest him. However, it didn’t work out that way.

There was a similar plan for 1939, but Hitler’s stunning victories in Poland and, in 1940, in Western Europe scuttled all resistance efforts. The slaughter on the eastern front, including the murder of the Jews, rekindled the flame of resistance, and the first military attempt to kill him occurred in 1943, when Henning von Tresckow planted a bomb on Hitler’s plane; it failed to go off and Tresckow had to retrieve it before being found out.

Then came Stauffenberg and his 1944 attempt. Overall, there were fifteen attempts by Germans to kill Hitler; with what Ian Kershaw calls “the luck of the devil,” the dictator survived them all, and the entire world – including Germany itself – paid an incredibly awful price.

View a panel discussion about Disobeying Hitler with Hansen, Professor James Retallack and Professor Doris L. Bergen.

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U of T's David Briskin performs for 1100 audiences worldwide – at the same time

sgupta — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 12:17:44 +0000

U of T's David Briskin performs for 1100 audiences worldwide – at the same time sgupta Thu, 04/24/2014 - 08:17

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David Briskin conducting the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra (all photos by Richard Lu)

Kelly Rankin

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Kelly Rankin

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Global Lens

Global

Music

U of T in the community: free classes for members of public

sgupta — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 10:14:01 +0000

U of T in the community: free classes for members of public sgupta Mon, 03/31/2014 - 06:14

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Law students Bobby Leung, Matthew Lau and Annie Tayyab with participants in the University in the Community program (all photos by Kelly Rankin)

Kelly Rankin

Joanne Mackay-Bennett with files from Kelly Rankin

Author legacy

Joanne Mackay-Bennett, with files from Kelly Rankin

Topic

Subheadline

Long-running program opens University doors to eager minds

Imagine the courage it takes to step onto a university campus as an adult learner with little or no previous experience being a post-secondary student.

There are a number of reasons why some people find their way to higher education later in life, from a misspent youth to putting family responsibilities first or just believing university was simply out of reach.

Whatever the reason, it’s never too late to start, and the options are many.

For those interested in pursuing a degree there are programs such as Woodsworth College’s Academic Bridging Program. For people interested in participating in lectures taught by university scholars but not quite ready to commit to a degree or unsure that’s even what they want, there are programs such as University in the Community (UiC).

Since 2003, U of T has been working in partnership with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) to present UiC. But its relationship with WEA dates back to 1918 when Sir Robert Falconer, the 5th president of U of T, played an instrumental role in founding the Workers’ Educational Association of Canada.

Falconer became an honorary president of WEA upon his retirement as U of T’s president. Since then, many of U of T’s notable academics have taught for WEA including Bora Laskin, Harold Innis, Harry Arthurs and Sir Frederick Banting.

“[Falconer] was interested in establishing a forum for liberal arts learning in the community,” says Wendy Terry, president of WEA.

That initial focus is the core of the UiC program today. Humanities courses are offered to adults who are interested in learning about and exploring the big questions about life.

“While skills-related courses tend to focus on getting students into the global marketplace, the humanities encourages students to envision new possibilities that will lead to making changes in their lives and their communities,” says Professor Emeritus Peter Russell, principal of Senior College.

For UiC students such as Paul Oxley the program is more than an opportunity to learn; it also helps develop self-confidence and provides fellowship. “I now sit on a Board,” says Oxley. “My daughter who is entering university now has a role model – an example. I can talk to her on her level.”

When UiC was first established, it ran as a partnership between Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre and Woodsworth College. For nine years, J. Barbara Rose, a senior lecturer at Woodsworth College worked diligently as UiC’s academic coordinator and enlisted U of T graduate students to teach courses in their chosen fields. Eventually, the program expanded to include Senior College and Innis College.

“Professor Emeritus Peter Russell, principal of Senior College, Professor Janet Paterson, principal of Innis College and Senior College’s UiC committee have been an invaluable resource for us,” says Terry.

As have professors Frank Cunningham (philosophy and political science), Dennis Duffy (English), Donald Gillies (Media and Communications, Ryerson University) and Dr. John David Stewart (Faculty of Medicine).

“Not only have they taught classes,” she added. “They have been stalwart supporters of the program whom we regularly call on for help and advice.”

Students learn about the program through the network of Toronto Community Centres, through Learning Curves (a WEA publication) and by word of mouth. They also hear about the program through outreach activities.

For example, on February 27, a group of enterprising U of T law students, Annie Tayyab, Bobby Leung, Matthew Lau and Jonathan Preece organized a literary moot for UiC’s benefit – they raised over $3000 for the program. (Pictured at right: Tayyab, Leung and Lau with organizer Joanne Mackay-Bennett.)

“The course has introduced us to the community at large via museums, libraries and outreach activities,” says Anna Brown, a UiC student. “We have made a community amongst the participants and through getting to know the various presenters.”

Many of the UiC students say the accessibility of the lecturers is important both intellectually and personally.
“For many students, it is a huge confidence booster to discover that they can have a conversation with an expert and not feel intimidated,” says Terry.

The program runs twice a year with a 10-week session in each of the fall and winter semesters. Innis College provides classroom space for the weekly, two-hour lectures, courses are free and are taught by volunteers - usually PhD students or retired university professors.

UiC doesn’t grade students or offer credit, but students are expected to attend lectures regularly and receive a ‘graduation certificate’ if they attend 80 per cent of a course. Assignments are minimal with an emphasis on full participation in class discussions.

Classes are capped at 30 students per class in order to make the relationship between lecturer and student as informal as possible and thus to encourage questions and discussion.

“I am better able to express myself and speak in front of a group which I was unable to do previously,” says UiC student Rumana Khalifa.

And what about the faculty involved?

Russell says U of T faculty who teach UiC classes always have the same reaction: it is among the most rewarding teaching experiences of their university career.

March 31 to April 6 is Adult Learners’ Week in Canada. http://unesco.ca/en/home-accueil/alw-saa

Joanne Mackay-Bennett is a writer with the UiC and Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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Perspectives: National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

sgupta — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 12:42:59 +0000

Perspectives: National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women sgupta Wed, 12/04/2013 - 07:42

Kelly Rankin

Author legacy

Kelly Rankin

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Experts reflect on the meaning and 'call to action' of Dec. 6

In 1991, the Government of Canada declared Dec. 6 the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. Established to commemorate the 14 young women murdered during the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, the day also provides an opportunity to consider the continued violence perpetrated against women and girls around the world.

Since then, the day has come to mean many things to many people, sparking conversations ranging from our fascination with extreme acts of violence, to the role that social media plays as a venue for abuse and threats, to the plight of women and girls whose everyday reality is violence at the hands of their family and loved ones.

But remembering is only one aspect of this commemorative day’s purpose. The other purpose is action.

Writer Kelly Rankin asked U of T experts what role a Day of Remembrance can play in spurring action against gender violence.

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Erin Tolley, assistant professor, political science, U of T Mississauga
December 6 is a reminder of the distance that we still need to go to achieve gender equality. Yes, a majority of provinces are currently led by female premiers, universities now graduate more women than men, and as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg tells us, if we just “lean in,” we really can have it all. And yet, a Canadian woman is sexually assaulted once every 17 minutes, the gendered wage gap persists with female workers earning just 72 cents on every man’s dollar, and frosh are still being welcomed to university campuses with sexualized activities and rape chants.

While the tragic scale of the shooting at L’École Polytechnique was in some ways an outlier, this day reminds us of the everyday inequality, misogyny and violence that underpinned those events. These things are not simply artefacts of the past.

With public discourse and media coverage focusing on the “shattering” of glass ceilings and the few women who have succeeded in relatively high-profile domains, we often forget that inequality still exists. While we should celebrate women’s achievements — and there are many — we cannot let those accomplishments detract from the broader institutional changes that are needed to address gendered assumptions about women’s position in society, systemic inequalities in working conditions, and a culture that downplays, fetishizes or ignores violence.

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Leslie Shade, associate professor, Faculty of Information
December 6 allows us to commemorate women whose lives have been cut short by senseless acts of violence and misogyny. It is a moment and a space for us to be strong together and to reclaim our private and public spaces — our communities and our campuses — for our own safety, empowerment and strength.

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Ramona Alaggia, associate professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
In approaching December 6 as 'that tragic day 24 years ago when 14 women were gunned down and murdered simply for being women, with numerous others injured in the Montreal Massacre,' I am tempted to be swept away by sentiments that we as a society have been transformed and are "moving on."

And while that might seem to be a comforting sentiment to cling to, it is clear to me that there is much more work to be done through the violence against women movement — as part of the larger women's liberation movement — in memory of those women who have lost their lives to violence.

Any social movement as significant as this needs a full 100 years to mature and given this context we are not even halfway through such monumental social change. Today, as I write this, I observe an unfortunate continuing stance of hyper-vigilance adopted by women in their everyday lives that stems from ongoing societal, cultural and structural violence. Having to use panic buttons for protection at night on campuses across the country; covering one's drink to protect against rape drugs; women enduring assassination attempts for seeking an education; how the simple act of taking a bus can become a site of sexual violence; not to mention the numbers of missing Aboriginal women unaccounted for across our country. These are but a few examples of why our work as feminists is not nearly done.

This hyper-vigilance is further fuelled by social media abuses. Cyber stalking of women is on the increase and the internet is used as a tool of sexual harassment. "Slut shaming" and "rape culture" are unfortunate realities. One only needs to Google slut and rape jokes to bring forward a proliferation of websites that spew forth the language of violence against women.

Yet at the same time we have unyielding evidence of acts of resistance with the emergence of Slut Walks across the globe, men working as allies through the ‘White Ribbon Campaign' to end men's violence against women, Take Back the Night still marches on, and as well we have the Green Dot campaign on our own campus. These are important acts of solidarity aimed at ending violence against women and one day, as the movement has reached its goals, these will be only reminders of a darker time long gone.

(Ramona Alaggia’s response first appeared on the Human Resources & Equity website.)

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Atiqa Hachimi, assistant professor, historical and cultural studies, U of T Scarborough
As a sociolinguist, I am trained to explore the connections between language, discourse and power. Events such as the Day of Remembrance have the potential to propel a cultural politics that renders unacceptable discourses that accept and even celebrate male violence in its varied forms.

Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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Nifty assignments: Teaching & Learning Symposium 2013

sgupta — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 09:15:12 +0000

Nifty assignments: Teaching & Learning Symposium 2013 sgupta Wed, 10/23/2013 - 05:15

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Lecturer Mairi Cowan (pictured here with replicas of the Lewis chessmen) will be speaking about "nifty assignments" at the Teaching and Learning Symposium

Kelly Rankin

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Kelly Rankin

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UTM

Teaching

Faculty of Arts & Science

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Mairi Cowan, Department of Historical Studies

On Oct. 28, the University of Toronto will host the eighth annual Teaching and Learning Symposium where faculty and staff exchange ideas and novel approaches to teaching. This year’s theme is Learning Across & Beyond Borders.

One of the speakers in that session is Mairi Cowan, a lecturer at University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM), who teaches History. She spoke with writer Kelly Rankin about her voluntary course assignment “Cultural Events for Participation Marks” and some of her favourite memories both as a teacher and a student.

How does your voluntary assignment, Cultural Events for Participation Marks, fit into the theme of learning beyond borders?

“Cultural Events for Participation Marks” is an assignment that I offer in my second-year courses on medieval and early modern European history. Students choose an event from a list I prepare, attend the event, and then write a brief report that includes a discussion of how the event has enriched their understanding of the relevant historical period.

At a basic level, the assignment gets students to reconsider the space within which a university education takes place by having them cross the perceived border between a history course and the wider world. Students bring their learning from the course to their appreciation of something outside the course while, at the same time, they bring their enjoyment of something outside the course to their understanding of course material.

The assignment also provides students with an opportunity to cross beyond the border of their conventional agency as students, which I had not anticipated when I first created it. It seems to encourage them to take more control over course material and how they learn. I’ve noticed that students are more forthcoming or even unguarded in writing about their experiences at these events than they are in their essays, perhaps because they feel less pressure to provide the “right” answer.

You are one of the presenters in the session Nifty Assignments. What makes your assignment nifty?

In reading students’ reports, I have been struck repeatedly by their surprise when they see how their understanding of history leaks out beyond a narrow curricular context. I’m struck not so much because students transfer course learning to situations outside of the course – we should expect that to happen – but rather because they develop a growing awareness of this transferability. That’s pretty nifty.

For example, a student who attended a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert described it as “foreign” at first, but then also made a connection to the course with real emotional resonance when he began to understand the surge of romantic nationalism around the time of Napoleon through hearing Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

A lot of students are very busy not only with their courses but also with other obligations, and many probably feel that the responsibilities of jobs and family leave little time for cultural engagement, however nifty. I know that most students in a history course won’t become professional historians, but I do hope that they all continue to learn about, and from, history; I hope that when they finish my course, when they finish their degree, they stay engaged with the material they have studied. Cultural events would be a great venue for that.

What is the best question a student has asked you in your courses?

I don’t just want to teach students about history; I want to help them think like historians. So the best questions, for me, are those that show curiosity about the past and involvement with the often messy process of historical understanding.

In an upper-year seminar on medieval and early modern Scotland a couple of years ago, we were reading about the courtly culture surrounding James IV, who reigned as King of Scots from 1488 to 1513. A student asked me whether I thought that a group of people at the royal court, described in the court’s records as “Moor” or “black,” were enslaved. I said that I thought not, based on their salaries and freedom of movement, but that I wasn’t entirely sure and that more research needed to be done.

This student then decided to take on the research herself: she wrote a research paper tracking the movements of a Moorish drummer at court, and then she pursued her research still further over the following summer, arguing in the end that there were sub-Saharan Africans at the Renaissance Scottish court and that they likely were enslaved.

I thought that her findings were really significant not just for Scottish history but also for Atlantic history, and the two of us are now co-authoring a paper featuring the Scottish Moors.

So I guess my favourite type of question is one that makes me think in new ways about what I’m teaching, one that forces me to think more carefully about what I thought I understood. I’m especially happy when I get a question that challenges something I’ve said in lecture, because it shows that the student trusts me enough to disagree with me.

What is the most useful thing a student has ever said to you?

Students have said all sorts of useful things to me. The backgrounds of UTM students are highly diverse, which provides very useful assistance in my first-year world history course: students help me with the pronunciation of the names of historical people and places in different languages, they show me their photographs of locations that I have talked about in lectures, and sometimes they even share with me their personal stories of living in a part of the world that we’re studying.

One student, whose family was from Ecuador, approached me at the conclusion of a lecture on the Inca Empire. She told me that she was descended from the Inca, and that she was really interested to hear a different version of the history of the Spanish conquest than what her family had heard: they had been told that the Inca had behaved foolishly and almost deserved to be conquered, whereas in this course she was learning that the Inca leaders had behaved perfectly reasonably within their Andean context. She then offered to show me an Inca axe head that had been passed down through her family and only just recently authenticated by a museum. I must have sparkled with enthusiasm, because she came to my office the very next day, gently unwrapped the precious item, and told me the family’s history of how they came to have it.

Students provide useful teaching advice as well, sometimes even without meaning to. A student doing a directed reading course on medieval education re-introduced me to Hugh of Saint-Victor, a teacher from twelfth-century Paris who gave an inspiring piece of pedagogical advice: “Learn everything”, Hugh wrote, “you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous.”

That courageously expansive approach is definitely useful, especially for someone who gets to teach world history!

Who was your favourite teacher? It can be any teacher from Kindergarten up.

Can I say Hugh of Saint-Victor? Because I’ve been thinking a lot about his advice. All right, I know that he died more than 800 years before I was born and that some people would argue that technically he therefore couldn’t have been my teacher, but I should like to point out that Petrarch, the fourteenth-century humanist, wrote that he spoke eagerly with friends who had died several centuries before him, so I might be able to claim a historian’s prerogative here!

I have had a lot of favourite teachers, from a music teacher who had us taking musical dictation in primary school to a doctoral thesis supervisor who guided me patiently through the process of visiting archives in Scotland. What they all have in common is that they all set high expectations but also quietly showed the confidence that we, their students, could reach these expectations, and they did not just transmit information, but also engaged in the process of learning themselves. Now I just hope that I can do the same for my students.

For more information about the Teaching and Learning Symposium: Learning Across & Beyond Borders, see the Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation’s website.

Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto

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An uncanny encounter with John Zilcosky

sgupta — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 11:21:46 +0000

An uncanny encounter with John Zilcosky sgupta Mon, 07/29/2013 - 07:21

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Associate Professor John Zilcosky explores the uncanny (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Kelly Rankin

Author legacy

Kelly Rankin

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NEH Fellowship winner discusses upcoming book

John Zilcosky, associate professor of German and Comparative Literature, was awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship for his project and forthcoming book, Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity. (Read about the NEH fellowships.)

Zilcosky, one of four Canadian university professors to receive this prestigious honour in the past eight years, sat down with writer Kelly Rankin to discuss the history of the term ‘uncanny’ and what inspired his project.

What does the term ‘uncanny’ mean?

We use ‘uncanny’ to describe all kinds of things: a haunted house, a scary movie, even a perplexing act of violence like 9/11. Yet despite our reliance on this term, most people—including me, when I started this project—have little sense of what is means or where it comes from. We have chosen a word that means everything and nothing to describe the indescribable. To make sense of things we can’t understand, we use an expression we can’t define.

This conundrum was the starting point for my project. It took me back to the uncanny’s birth years as a concept around 1900 and then even further back, to the very beginnings of its usage.

‘Uncanny’ is the English translation of the German ‘unheimlich,’ which literally means ‘un-homely,’ and, in the Middle Ages, denoted simply someone or something that was not ‘of the home’: an outsider.

Just as English has two terms—uncanny and canny—German has ‘unheimlich’ and ‘heimlich.’ These used to be opposites, but, over time, ‘heimlich’ went from meaning ‘of the home’ to ‘mysterious and secret’ (in the sense that what transpires in our homes is mysterious to those on the outside).

In the late 18th century, ‘heimlich’ started to mean not only secret but also ‘dangerous’ and ‘scary.’ In so doing, the word had evolved into its own opposite: ‘heimlich’ had become ‘unheimlich.’

At the same time that ‘heimlich’ underwent this semantic shift, so too did ‘unheimlich.’ No longer soberly describing what is beyond the home, it adopted its modern psychological connotation of ‘dreadful’ and ‘ghastly.’ A few decades later, German-language thinkers began to attempt to classify the ‘unheimlich’ philosophically. By the early twentieth century, Freud famously defined it as the frightening reappearance of the ‘homely’ where we least expect it. A concept was born.

I attempt to understand the history of the word, but my aim is not to uncover the meaning of ‘uncanny.’ I try to show how the term has changed over time and, in so doing, understand why and how we have named our unnameable fears.

Why did ‘uncanny’ come to epitomize fear in the modern era?

This new meaning gained traction after the Industrial Revolution. Urbanization and industrialization contributed to a general confusion between ‘home’ and ‘not-home’ that would have equated the ‘unheimlich’ with fear. In addition to this, three global developments produced more confusion: the mapping of the world’s last blank spaces; the Westernization of non-Europeans through colonialism; and the arrival of tourists into previously untrodden territory.

Because the ‘unheimlich’ was first conceptualized in Germany and Austria, I focus on the accounts of writers—especially travelers—from these countries. These travelers had expected the spectacularly foreign but found instead the uncannily familiar. By analyzing their encounters, I create an archive of once eminent travel writers and amateur ethnographers, and demonstrate how these travelers’ discoveries of a hauntingly recognizable world stimulated the theorizations of the uncanny by contemporary thinkers such as Freud and Heidegger, as well as writers like Mann, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, and Musil.

Why is it important to understand the term?

It can’t hurt us to understand the nature of the fears that we call uncanny. As a society, we cannot afford to shield ourselves from the things we don’t want to know about ourselves.

Part of my book is based on the assumption that we are always attempting to define home and a sense of self. This self requires an ‘other’—so that we know who we are not. Many crises occur when this ‘other’ seems too similar to us. For this reason, people who hate each other the most are often the ones who most resemble one another.

In today’s mobile, global world, we fear this blurring between ‘home’ and ‘not- home’—between self and other—more than ever. I aim to take a step toward understanding our fears and their destructiveness, and so open up possibilities for personal and political liberation.

What inspired you to write the book?

As a young boy I collected maps, and, as a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, I colored lines on them to mark my own travels, as if to make visible my burgeoning sense of self. Then, one night over dinner, a friend of my parents told me that his own father had studied geography because he was drawn to the last white spots remaining on maps.

Imagine still dreaming of going to a blank space! Even more fascinating for me, though, was to imagine what it was like to live in the moment when that hope was steadily withdrawn. Until that moment in history, around 1900, there were always blank spaces, and European travel stories continually described the fantasy of being the first European to set foot in new worlds. But around 1900 these stories transformed into narratives of shock and fear, many of which I read while researching this book. Travelers voyaged to what should have been utterly exotic worlds only to encounter there uncanny versions of themselves.

It is no coincidence that the uncanny takes on its modern meaning at this moment when the familiar and the foreign became more confused than ever before. These everyday travelers’ shock of the uncanny prepared the way for thinkers to discover a concept that—unlike older ones—depended on the upheavals of modernity for its generation.

Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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