07/05/2002

Learning about teaching Canada

By Peter Black

I’ve just spent a couple of days with some Canadian cultists in the United States. Actually, cultists is somewhat misleading, since the word implies some sort of wrongdoing. The cultists I visited were dedicated to doing good, that is assuming educating Americans about Canada is considered a good thing.

I had the good fortune to be invited to talk to a group of educators attending a week-long workshop on teaching Canada to American schoolchildren.

My first surprise, naturally, is that Canada is taught at all to American youngsters. The second surprise was how enthusiastic and well informed these teachers were and how dedictated they are to illuminating their charges about this vast unknown land, as author and historian Bruce Hutchison titled a seminal book about this perplexing nation.

The program offered by the Canadian Studies Department at Western Washington University in the lovely and historic city of Bellingham is quite probably unique among the opportunities for getting personal with the Great White North among the Canadian Studies units found at various universities in the U.S.

For the past 24 years, the folks at WWU have been putting on a summer seminar/workshop specifically targeted at grade-school teachers. The goal is to provide teachers with the ideas and materials to create a Canadian studies component for the classes they will be teaching.

Besides moi — who provided what I suspect was a bit of comic relief — the workshops featured talks from highly qualified professors of Canadian economics, politics, history and geography, the latter given by Professor Emeritus Bob Monahan, one of the founders of the Canada program at WWU. Students were also treated to the insights on Canadian culture from native Canadian author and playwright Lee Maracle, the visiting professor in residence at the Canadian Studies program.

They also got a taste of two of Canada’s more colorful politicians, former B.C. Premier Dave Barrett and former Liberal MP Roger Simmons of Newfoundland. The latter is just wrapping a three-year term as Canada’s consul general in Seattle.

Simmons was paired with his U.S. counterpart, Hugo Llorens, who was completing his term as U.S. consul general in Vancouver before heading off to his new gig working with National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice at the White House. Simmons and Llorens resisted the temptation to beat each other with verbal 2x4s over the softwood-lumber issue.

The reason I mention this Who’s Who is to illustrate that, even though the workshop is for mostly grade school teachers, the program organizers have refused to "dumb down" the content to the level of 10-12 year-olds (with the possible exception of yours truly.)

The most fascinating part of the program, at least for me, was to see how the teachers in the group, about 20, coming from Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, Utah and, of course, from home state Washington — took the learning amassed during the week and transformed it into practical, interesting and hands-on lessons for their students on the basics of Canada.

Beyond the marvel of hearing how Canadian facts and figures could be packaged for consumption by American students, the session showed just how much energy and imagination it takes to be a teacher of anything these days, in the U.S. or Canada.

The challenges teachers face in these frantic, high-speed times, are or a more complex and frustrating nature than those previous generations had to deal with, and I was exposed a bit to this through my father, the grade-school teacher and principal.

The Internet and its potential for cheating (or just lazy learning), attention spans erased by video games, not to mention the heightened threat of violence — these, I venture, are day-to-day challenges that would foil even the most ardent proponent of the strap and dunce cap.

So here’s to the teachers who took a week out of their well-earned summer vacation to soak up the mysteries and wonders of Canada at the Study Canada Summer Institute. Credit, and lots of it, goes to the staff at the Center for Canadian Studies, who have put together a program that keeps on drawing a satisfying number of student/teachers. Most of the attendees connect with the program, I am told, through positive word of mouth.

I have had the pleasure of experiencing only one other Canadian Studies program in the U.S. That would be, of course, the excellent school at SUNY in Plattsburgh. On that visit, I had a chance to sit in on a lecture and study session. I found myself experiencing a weird sensation, a feeling that came back to me at WWU.

Canadians are, by and large, a pretty unassuming, modest and self-effacing lot. It’s not that we are not proud of our history, or whatever scattered details your average citizen has retained, it’s just that we are used to having our history compared to the American saga of guts and glory in extremis. As rich as our story has been, it pales in terms of drama and human suffering with that of the U.S. Canadians are also clearly outmatched in myth-making.

So hearing Canada taught, to Americans, no less, from a detached, non-political, academic perspective is like hearing it, in a sense, the way Canadians should hear it. It’s a story, after all, that is worth teaching, and the proof of that is the steady, if not rampant interest in studying Canada demonstrated by the thousands of U.S. students every year.

I made a little joke in my talk to the effect that the fact some Americans turned up to study Canada probably meant the Icelandic Literature seminar was all full up. I realize now that my smarty-pants quip was an insult to the people of Iceland, but more so to the student/teachers whose passion for bringing knowledge of Canada to their students from Arizona to Idaho, is more than a summer fling.