By Dan Rubinstein
Photos by Chris Roussakis
For the past 16 years, working in various capacities in Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) at Carleton, Patrick Lyons — the office’s current director — has seen how much people are drawn to stories.
On campus, stories abound. “We tune in to and have strong emotional responses to narratives about student success and faculty doing amazing things,” says Lyons, “but we don’t necessarily see what’s happening inside our classrooms.”
This disconnect spawned an idea, and on February 14, 2019, the result of about three years of side-of-the-desk labour by TLS staff was launched — Courage, Curiosity, Teapots and Snakes: Stories of Teaching at Carleton University, a collection of 67 short stories about teaching and learning from the perspective of Carleton’s faculty members, contract instructors and teaching staff.
Patrick Lyons
The stories vary widely and wildly, from finding out the university president’s wife was one of your students or that you dated a student’s father 30 years ago, to reflections on foreign travel, personal loss, and watching students excel in a class or in their careers.
At the launch, Systems and Computer Engineering Prof. John Chinneck read from his piece, “The Giant Plane,” in which he recalls using a surprise attack as a teaching moment.
“It takes a while to learn how to control a large class,” Chinneck opens the story. “As a fresh young professor, I was teaching a huge engineering class in one of the big, bowl-shaped lecture halls. One day, as I was writing on the board with my back turned to the class, a paper airplane sailed out of the upper reaches, smacked into the board and fell to the floor. A challenge!
“I picked it up and looked it over. It was a standard paper airplane made from a piece of 8.5 x 11-inch paper. I turned to the class and said: `You call THIS a paper airplane? You can do better than that!’ They were engineering students, after all.”
Deeply Personal Stories
Lyons, who wrote the foreword to the book, had initially hoped to publish it to coincide with Carleton’s 75th anniversary. But the project grew in scope, as did its editorial team, and he realized more time was required.
“We like telling stories and listening to stories,” says Lyons, “but publishing stories is a lot of work.”
At first, contributions were solicited from faculty who had won teaching awards. But then the net was cast as widely as possible, through email and word of mouth, with support from the provost’s office and Human Resources Department, to reach out to current professors and contract instructors, as well as retired faculty.
“In many ways, these are deeply personal stories,” says Lyons. “Stories about a transformation. I was stunned by the variety and breadth of topics. I thought we’d get a lot of humorous stories and a few that were heavy, but we got a lot of everything in between.”
The stories came from teachers in all disciplines, not only English and the humanities but also areas such as engineering and business, which told Lyons that the care people put into teaching at Carleton is universal.
David Hornsby
“There’s a real culture of caring and being passionate about teaching here,” he says. “It’s really embedded at Carleton — that’s what this book shows.”
And although the university is very good at recognizing teaching excellence and is home to a number of provincial, national and international teaching award winners, every single person who steps to the front a classroom — or leads an online course — is doing their best to ignite a spark in the next generation.
“Often, we don’t take time to recognize the quiet excellence that takes place in our classrooms,” says Lyons.
That notion gave birth two and a half years ago to the Raving Ravens initiative, which calls upon students to send digital or hard-copy postcards to educators to thank them for their work. More than 400 have been sent so far.
“Teaching is the most critical thing we do at the university,” said David Hornsby, Carleton’s associate vice-president (Teaching and Learning). “We need many opportunities to recognize good teachers and what they do to foster student success.”
Fueling a Growing Interest Through Teaching and Learning
At the Feb. 14 event, a pair of students who sent Raving Ravens postcards shared their stories.
Sociology master’s student Elle Reid talked about initially enrolling in university to humour her parents and check off an educational milestone. But then, in instructor Ariel Fuenzalida’s social theory class, Reid was able to submit a rap video for her final project instead of writing a report, which helped fuel her growing interest in the subject and propelled her into graduate studies.
Zeinab Fashwal tells her story.
Biology undergraduate Zeinab Fashwal talked about overcoming her fear of bugs and realizing that her degree could lead to many more options than medical school when a lab co-ordinator encouraged her to touch one of her “pets” — a cockroach.
“I didn’t know the impact of that moment,” said Fashwal, “until I realized that there’s a whole different world out there and I never knew how to look at it.”
Hearing these student stories and reading the Raving Raven postcards has given Lyons another idea and another potential book project: a collection of student and alumni stories about those hidden classroom moments and the positive impact that instructors had on them — “those little things,” he says, “that really transformed their experiences at Carleton.”
Proceeds from the sale of Courage, Curiosity, Teapots and Snakes (about $7 per book, after the cost of printing is subtracted) will be donated to the Campus Community Campaign Bursary.
“I can’t think of a better way,” says Lyons, “to tie everything together.”
