From Canadian music (Arcade Fire, Neil Young, Nelly Furtado, Joni Mitchell, the Barenaked Ladies, Leonard Cohen, and Avril Lavigne to name a few), to Canadians in film and television (actors like Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Seth Rogen, Kiefer Sutherland, William Shatner and Keanu Reeves; directors such as James Cameron, Atom Egoyan, and David Cronenberg; and newscasters such as John Roberts and the late Peter Jennings), to Canadian literature (authors such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje), Americans hear, see, and read work by Canadians on a daily basis.
Yet if you ask the average American about Canada, you’ll find that most know very little about this mysterious land north of the US, labeled on most American maps as nothing more than “Canada.” In this course’s exploration of Canadian culture, we’ll “travel” from coast to coast to coast in our quest to learn more about the people, culture, politics, and history of Canada, the United States’ largest trading partner and one of its most important allies. Throughout our journey, we’ll be paying particular attention to Canadian literature, music, television, and movies.
As this is an English course, there will be a strong emphasis on Canadian literature; the books we read will help to give you a sense of the broad diversity of the country’s peoples, history, and regions as well as of the richness of its literature. This will also be a technology-driven, writing intensive course that will see you writing, blogging, and even podcasting about your new discoveries about Canada. The course will include a mandatory class trip to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, during which we will visit Parliament, the National Gallery and Museum of Civilisation, and, yes, even attend a hockey game.
This class will be a Residential TAP course and most students will live in Living/Learning’s Global Village Residential Learning Community as part of "Canada House." This will allow for a number of extra-curricular activities outside of class time and will enhance the course experience significantly. Those not living in the Global Village will still be required to participate in extra-curricular events connected to Canada House.
For the duration of the course, each student will also be loaned an iPod loaded with Canadian music, audio books, and lectures connected to the topics we will be studying.
Technology
One of the exciting things about this course is that it will be breaking new ground at UVM. For the duration of the Fall semester, you will all be loaned Apple 20 G color iPods and Griffin iTalk microphones to use in this course and, if you wish, for other classes. This project will allow us to test this technology as a teaching tool that, hopefully, UVM will be able to deploy on a wider scale in coming years for courses that would most benefit from access to audio materials. Texts we will be using the iPods to access will include a wide variety of Canadian music, readings or lectures from important writers and thinkers, and excerpts from Canadian radio with a particular focus on comedy programs like The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, the Vinyl Cafe, and the Vestibules. You will also be watching some Canadian TV.
When you receive your iPod it will already be preloaded with a great deal of content. Take time to explore as much music and other content as you can. Every week, or close to it, there will be listening assignments and, on at least a couple of occasions including our trip to Ottawa, audio recording assignments. Treat these assignments as you would any readings for the course. They will be part of your overall exploration of Canadian culture. The audio files I want you to listen to each week will likely be conveniently arranged as "playlists" on your iPod.
There will be several classes over the course of the term where we will focus on how to use the technology, so don't be alarmed if you've never used an iPod before or don't yet know a lot about blogging, or even computers.
The course blog is located at http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu/005 You are required to read the content on the blog regularly. There will also be assigned online discussion topics and opportunities for you to blog further about content connected to the course. To create your own personal blog, visit http://www.uvm.edu/blogging to sign up for your own blog on the UVM system.
An important note about the content I am distributing to you on the iPods:
You not be allowed to share any of the music you are being lent nor will you be allowed to make permanent copies of it. Once the course is over, you are obligated to delete any copyrighted material used for the course from your computers. This course-use of the copyrighted material is permitted under the provisions of the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act enacted in 2002 as an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1976. (See http://www.usg.edu/legal/copyright/teach_act.phtml for further information).
Field Trip!
One of the great things about being so close to Canada is that it's easy for us to zip across the border to study first hand our neighbors to the north. Reserve October 18-20 for our class field trip to Ottawa, Canada's capital. If you need a note for any other instructors to explain your absence from their classes on Oct. 18-20, I will be happy to provide that. The trip is mandatory for this TAP class and will be optional for my students in English 180, the Canadian literature course I am teaching this fall. Around 100 students in total will head to Ottawa early Thursday morning and, over the course of two and a half days, we will do everything from attending a sitting of the House of Commons to seeing a hockey game (the Ottawa 67s). The full itinerary will be announced closer to the trip.
There is a fee for the trip which likely be around $180, which includes all transportation, admission fees, two nights in a nice hotel in downtown Ottawa, and a dinner on Thursday night.
Required Texts:
Books:
Thomas King, The Truth About Stories (purchase the book and also listen on our iPods to the lecture series)
Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Norton Critical Edition)
Michael Ondaatje (ed.), From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories (purchase directly from Professor Martin)
Other photocopied readings
A journal or notebook devoted solely to in-class writing
(Unless otherwise indicated, I encourage you to purchase your books from the campus bookstore. A number of the books I've chosen are not normally available in the United States and the UVM bookstore has gone to great efforts to track them down for us. You will find it easier and not likely much more expensive -- if at all -- to buy these books on campus rather than online)
Audio:
Content distributed on the iPods
Assignments
N.B. Late assignments will be penalized one grade increment per day past the assigned deadline, unless accompanied by a doctor's note outlining medical reasons for the delay.
Tentative Schedule
Aug. 28: Introduction; Canadian geography; why study Canada?
Aug. 30: Canadian history; group organization
Sept. 4: Blogging workshop (Center for Teaching and Learning, Bailey/Howe Library Room 303)
Sept. 6: Library workshop (Library Instruction Center, Bailey/Howe Library)
Sept. 11: Canadian history (cont.); iPod distribution (FIRST GROUP BLOG POST DUE)
Sept. 13: The Canadian political system; Canadian news sources
Sept. 18: Canadian literature, HAVE SUNSHINE SKETCHES FINISHED BY TODAY
Sept. 20: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Sept. 25: James Douglas performance
Sept. 27: Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Oct. 2: Atlantic Canada: stories in From Ink Lake by Alistair MacLeod (1-8, 682-704), Hugh MacLennan (74-80), David Adams Richards "from Blood Ties" (129-140), poetry by George Elliott Clarke (watch video at http://www.uvm.edu/~canada/podcasts.html)
Oct. 4: Québec history and culture, stories by Jacques Ferron (115-26), Mordecai Richler (151-74)
Oct. 9: Québec history and culture, cont.: stories by Madeleine Ferron (203-206) and Marie-Claire Blais (326-31)
Oct. 11: MIDTERM
Saturday October 13: Hockey Night in Canadian Studies (589 Main Street), 6:30 PM
Oct. 16: Hockey and Canadian culture. Clark Blaise (194-202); Richard Harrison (photocopy and audio); Roch Carrier (audio)
Oct. 18 - Ottawa Trip!
Oct. 23: First Nations: Thomas King, The Truth About Stories (FINISH BY TODAY)
Oct. 25: Ottawa debriefing, The Truth About Stories, stories by Eden Robinson and Thomas King (photocopies) (watch video of Eden Robinson at http://www.uvm.edu/~canada/podcasts.html)
Oct. 30: Northern Canada, story by Richard Van Camp (photocopy)
Nov. 1: PODCASTING WORKSHOP
Nov. 6: SPRING ADVISING MEETINGS
Nov. 8: Ontario: Atwood, Munro,
Nov. 13: Thomas King, short stories
Nov. 15: Screening of The Rocket, Library Media Room (Bailey-Howe library basement)
Nov. 19-23: Thanksgiving
Nov. 27: PODCAST ASSIGNMENT DUE, multiculturalism and Canadian culture: readings by Mistry, Brand, and Austin Clarke
Nov. 29: The prairies! Readings by Stegner, Vanderhaeghe, Wiebe, and Gabrielle Roy
Dec. 4: BC: readings by Kogawa, Hodgins, and Wilson
Dec. 6 - Canada/US relations (last day of class)
Dec. 14: TERM PAPER/FINAL PROJECT DUE
]]>Group 1: BC and the Territories
Group 2: Atlantic Canada
Group 3: Ontario and Quebec
Group 4: Prairie Dawgz
]]>The final project for this course will give you the opportunity to write a paper on anything connected to Canadian culture that interests you. This could stem from something we've covered in the class, something you learned about in Ottawa, or anything else about Canada about which you'd like to learn more. When you're thinking about what to write, cast your net widely. Your paper could be on an historical event, an aspect of Canadian politics, hockey, Rick Mercer and Canadian satire, any of the books we've read this semester, a Canadian artist or musician, etc.
That said, your paper must also have an argument, a thesis that you are setting out to prove with the research that you've done. When using your research, make sure that we still hear your voice and ideas and that you're not simply stitching together many different pieces of information that you've picked up from elsewhere. Finding that balance between simply describing your topic and analyzing what you think is interesting about it is one of the things you need to do to write a good research paper.
Your paper will, as I suggest above, need to to involve a fair amount of research. You can use the internet, but you also will need to use the library. At least two of the sources you cite in your essay must be PRINT sources that you located at the library. It's time to put some of those research skills to use that we learned from our visit to the library. You can include images and even multimedia if you wish (you could send your paper to me electronically or even make it a blog posting!), but not to such a degree that it overwhelms your text.
Word length: 2000-2500 words (roughly 8-10 pages)
Due date: 12/14 (at the very latest)
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail, IM, or call me. I'm also happy to look over outlines or drafts if that will be of help to you. I also strongly encourage you to talk with me about your topic before you get too far into the project. 2500 words sounds huge, but it's not. Make sure that your topic is manageable within that length of an essay.
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