By Jess Wind (The Cascade)– Email
Print Edition: September 11, 2013
UFV instructors are developing special topics courses that go beyond the basics of paper writing and classic novels.
English professor Andrea MacPherson is teaching “The Dark Side of Suburbia” asEnglish 170 this semester. After discussing the idea of suburban literature on a panel, she recognized the need to have students study it at UFV and decided to spend her summer selecting readings.
“It takes an incredible amount of time and energy. The selection for readings can take months, and then there is the job of determining how said readings fit together, how they will best be used in a class. It’s something like fitting puzzle pieces together,” she explains.
The course begins to address gaps in the English timetable and takes on more contemporary themes.
“We see a lot of discussion of the urban, but not a lot of attention is paid to suburbia, even though many writers tackle the subject,” MacPherson explains.
“I’ll be looking at place, how we are affected—both positively and negatively—by where we live, and how we interact with the world. We’ll also be exploring the idea of the American Dream, and how the suburbs initially represented that.”
MacPherson is not the only instructor seeking to explore common themes in new, creative ways.
Media and communication studies (MACS) instructor, Darren Blakeborough is gearing up to teach his new course: “Wrestling with Culture – Inside the Squared Circle”. Despite being a niche area of entertainment, and arguably one that has passed its heyday, he believes that the themes to be discussed are highly relevant.
“When we talk about wrestling, we’ll be talking about spectacle and then spectacle will at some point go off into a tangential relationship with political economy and then Karl Marx’s name will come up,” he describes. “It takes a lot of those old dead white guys and it recontextualizes them in a modern sense so you understand how a 150-year-old theory is still a relevant lens through which we can examine the world around us today.”
Blakeborough goes on to explain that getting a unique course added to the timetable was relatively simple.
“I’m doing my PhD dissertation on professional wrestling and [the department asked], ‘Is that something you’d be interested in teaching?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I definitely would’,” he says. “I explain what I want to do and why I want to do it and they’re 100 per cent supportive.”
Courses like these run under a special topics course number, allowing them to be offered once, and if they are popular they may be offered more regularly.
“We have a mechanism in place for what can be teaching a one-off course,” he says. “It’s in the department and you go to your department head … and there’s your professional wrestling and culture course … It really exists just as an opportunity to create a new and different curriculum at times for faculty.”
MacPherson confirms that new courses are as much for the instructors as they are for the students.
“New classes often bring excitement and energy – both on the instructor’s and student’s part,” she explains. “The thematic concept is up to the instructor, so you typically see topics that the instructor is genuinely interested in. You might see nods to areas of specialization or research interest.”
With UFV’s newly approved exempt status, there is hope for more unique classes to bolster interest in departments hoping to expand, as is the case with MACS.
However, Blakeborough foresees it going the other way.
“I think we’re going to see a shrinking of budgets and a tightening of belts, and anything that was kind of seen as superfluous and costly, we won’t see anymore,” he explains. “I’m scared that we’re going to lose a lot of these kind of fringe courses that, from my perspective are crucial … otherwise you’re just going to be churning out a very homogenous group of students that all kind of think the same things.”
