By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: June 17, 2015
Prof Talk is The Cascade’s oral history series, featuring the people best qualified to talk about what UFV has been like over the course of its first few decades: its professors. Each week we’ll interview a professor from a different department, asking them what UFV was like before it was UFV, and how they expect things will continue to change here.
Jan Lashbrook Green is a library technician professor at UFV. She has been a professor here for 14 years, and her teaching focus is on self-knowledge in learning. Green was recently awarded the UFV Teaching Excellence award at the 2015 convocation last week.
What brought you to UFV?
I actually came as a student in — I think it was September ‘96. I was looking around for what to do with the rest of my life, and I knew that I wanted to work in libraries, although I never had before. I had a BEd from UBC. I graduated in ‘72. So, in my mid-40s I went, “I’m looking for something different and challenging.” And so I came to the library technician program as a student and found that it suited me so well in so many ways. I loved it.
So you’ve been in BC for a long time?
I was raised in BC. I was born in North Van and raised in West Van and lived in West Van and then in Victoria and then back to West Van and then eventually, my husband and three kids, we moved to Port Coquitlam. And it was there, when my kids were sort of scattering, I had some time for myself, and I was kind of going, “What am I going to do?” So I looked around and, there were actually two programs, because we have the program here, but there’s actually a library and information technology program at Langara College. And I chose very consciously not to go to Langara for many reasons. And coming to UFV — well, it was UCFV at the time — it was one of the best things I ever did.
When you started teaching, what did you start with?
Well, it’s funny because I did the whole program as a student, and I was hired as a sessional here in the program in January of 2001, and I taught a course I hadn’t actually taken as a student. It was called Database Management or something like that. One of our most technological courses, though all of courses have some measure of technology. This was all about creating and managing databases to solve specific problems. And so I leapt in and went for it.
In the meantime, after having done my technician program here, I had worked as a technician for a while, then I went back to UBC to do my master’s, because of course you can’t teach without it. So I had my BEd, as well as the library and information technology diploma, and then my master of library and information studies. So it was a great combination.
What kind of changes have you noticed in what you’ve had to do as a teacher?
We’ve actually changed our approach to how we teach technologies, and we don’t focus so much on particular systems because they change so quickly. We now focus more on how you as a student — and therefore you as someone working on the job as a technician — interact with technology. It depends on how you learn to use it, because it may be one version now, but you don’t know if next week or next month or certainly next year it will have changed.
Technology changes so fast and is so much more complicated and nuanced now than when I first came into the program. When I first came into the program as an instructor, we had students who didn’t know anything about computers and were very afraid of computers. Now you see people coming in with much more exposure to digital devices of any kind and so they are much less reticent to attempt something. So now it’s more about teaching them how to roll with the punches of the change and, because they’re working with people on the job all the time, teaching customers. It’s a lot of teaching, one-on-one, hands-on, and you might be teaching a five-year-old, you might be teaching a 95-year-old. You have to really like people and want to help them solve their problems. So that hasn’t changed! But it’s the various types of technology — they’re much more personalized now.
Are there any other ways you’ve noticed students have changed?
The expectation is I’m not going to tell you, in a step-by-step process, how to do things. I tell my students, when I learn a new technology, I just fiddle around with it. And so instead of me saying, “Push your computer start button, turn your screen on,” which we used to have to do, it’s all about, “Look at the interface, what do you see there? What intrigues you? Pretend that you’re a customer and you want to do something. What does that button say? That link, where is it going to take you?” So it’s about being curious and that’s the term that I use — I’m sure my students are tired of hearing me say it — “You’ve got to be curious.” You’ve got to want to know how this happens, why this happens, how to manage whatever this tool is.
What kind of projects have you worked on at UFV?
When I did my sabbatical a few years ago, I did a lot of research on self-assessment. Is it a valid learning- or technique-assessment technique and how can it be incorporated in the learning experience? In order to think about where you fit on the job, because we’re an employment-based program, the idea is to prepare for employment, but there’s many different places you could find yourself. Well, if you don’t know yourself, you can’t establish or even think about your best fit. So I help my students do a lot of private reflection on what their educational preferences are, if they are interested in particular aspects of the job or what aren’t they interested in, what intimidates them, that kind of thing, so that they can get a sense of, “Okay, this is my strength; I really am an exploratory learner,” or “I am somebody who needs to read the manual from cover to cover.”
I think it’s a more nuanced program than it used to be — we ask a lot of our students, in many ways, but we really want them to understand themselves as a person, because we don’t want them going out on the job, getting a job, and finding out, “Oh, this was a terrible choice.” And it may be that that’s how you explore and they may be willing to say, “Okay, I’m going to take this job even though I know it’s not my best fit, but I’ll learn lots of things.” But you want them to have some self-knowledge, so that when they’re in an interview, you know how to actually deal with that.
Have there been any colleagues or students who have been particularly influential to what you do?
Absolutely. When I was here as a student, there were two full-time instructors who were very supportive of me. One of them is Kim Isaac, who now is the university librarian, and the other was Tim Atkinson, who is actually now the university librarian at Vancouver Island University. Tim supported me as a student; he was an excellent teacher. He really opened my eyes to a lot of issues that I really hadn’t taken the time to think about. And then he really encouraged me to go and get my master’s. He was just an excellent mentor to me, and he’s still a close personal friend.
And there was a history professor, Bonnie Huskins, who is now at the University of New Brunswick, who was supportive of me — the writing that I did, and she encouraged me to take part in conferences, so I’ve really benefited from her mentorship as well. And there have been students along the way who have, for whatever reason, helped me understand how to be a better teacher, how to address the needs of students, and you benefit from everybody, in one fashion or another. And my colleague, Christina Neigel, she and I have worked very closely together, because there were only two full-time faculty in the department. We support each other, we learn from each other, we taught a lot of the same courses in rotation, those kinds of things, so a very collegial department. And now we have Dr. Kenneth Gariepy as our new department head, and he’s been instrumental in helping Christine and I understand some of the nuances of being university-driven rather than university-college-driven.
Another mentor I should mention is Wendy Burton, and she’s just retired in the last couple of years as the director of teaching and learning. She was terrifically helpful in my development as an instructor. If I was looking to do something a different way, or I was struggling with something that didn’t seem to work the way I thought it would, I would head over to the Teaching and Learning Centre and just sit and chat with her. She really encouraged me to try things that I was thinking about and she also encouraged me when she understood what my scholarly interest was.
What about the culture of UFV and its place with the broader geography of the Fraser Valley?
I think it’s always been the intent to be central to the Valley. And of course the Valley’s changed, but it’s still made up of communities that are centred around families and church and friendship and people wanting a job, not necessarily to leave the Valley — they want to stay in the Valley because they value what it has brought them and what they can contribute.
As I said to my students in one of my courses, it’s all really about how do you put food on your table? When I was a newly minted teacher out of UBC, I actually didn’t know where I was going to go. I happened to be getting married at that point, which was very typical in the early ‘70s, and I was going where my husband’s job was. Well, you always go where the job is. So if there aren’t jobs here, we have to have instilled enough confidence in our students so that when they graduate, they can look outside the Valley. But they take their values with them, and they promote the Valley. One of the reasons I came here rather than Langara as a student was just the beauty of the physical Valley, and I still appreciate that. Whenever I drive here, even when it’s raining, I still appreciate the beauty of the Valley.
Is there anything that I’ve missed with my questions about the teaching experience?
It is a huge challenge to teach. I didn’t understand the challenge of it until, of course, I was teaching. Every time I teach a course, I change it, because I see, or at least I hope I see, better ways to teach the concepts, more ways to involve students in both the teaching and the learning. We have to keep on top of things, but it’s hugely gratifying.
For me, I’ve been a teacher all my life. It’s just been so important in my life, and that’s why UFV morphing into a teaching university was so important for me as a person, as a professional, as a teacher — that we value teaching. And that’s what we have to remember when we go forward. Students and graduates talk about the value of the teaching experience, the learning experience that they have here at UFV, and that’s our core value. That value of the teaching-learning exchange. And I talk about it in my course syllabi, the teaching and learning process is inevitably linked. That my responsibility is the teaching, with the end goal of you learning, but we have to do it together. It’s always been exciting for me. You run into all kinds of things you never expect.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
