I am happy to welcome you to English 470 Canadian Studies: a course I like to call Oh, Canada …. Our Home and Native Land? This is a course in Canadian Studies that is most dear to my heart and I am extremely happy and excited to begin teaching it for the sixth time. You can learn more about me on the Instructor’s Bio page.
The Basics:
- The course is made up of four Units and each Unit has three lessons, each lesson is a week’s worth of work: Four units, 12 Lessons: one lesson per week.
- At the end of each lesson is a Blogging assignment. Follow the due dates on the syllabus. All assignments are due to be posted before midnight.
- You will note that your reading assignments include the instructor’s blog and classmate’s blogs. This is an interactive and collaborative course of studies and your participation in online discussions and research constitutes the majority of your grade.
- Each lesson begins with a list of learning objectives, a description of the lesson and reading assignments for the week. At the end of each lesson you will find instructions for your assignments with a schedule and guidelines on expectations.
- Upon completion of this course students will be able to
- discuss the historical and critical processes involved in developing a Canadian literary canon.
- Students will be able to explain the relations between canon building and nation building in a context that includes what has too often been excluded: First Nations participation and agency in this process.
- Students will have developed new reading strategies for recognizing allusions and symbolic knowledge other than Western.
The end goals for this course are
1) to be able to recognize colonizing narratives and representations,
2) to be able to discuss, research, and write about the intersections and departures between literature and story,
3) to pursue research that will allow you to speculate on the future of literature and story in Canada and, in context with the new social media tools and technologies.
The Instructor’s blog is your lifeline.
The instructor’s blog is where you will find further instructions as the course progresses, reminders about due dates, hyperlinks to your blogs and general commentary on the progress of our readings and blogging. I will sometimes hyperlink supplementary readings, images and videos for your interest.
And — there is also our Face Book Group page. Please be sure to join the group today.
One unusual element of this course, for some of you, will be the assignment of a grade for comments and hyperlinks you make on each other’s blogs. Just think of this as a grade for class participation, which is a higher percentage than usual because the media tools we are using enable a much higher level of thoughtful discussion and the inclusion of hyperlinks involves much more work than speaking up in class. Indeed, as the term progresses, your blogs will become central to our course content. This will happen on a couple of levels that you should grasp now.
Each week, your instructor’s blog will include a synthesis and summary of one or two class blogs along with some discussion on your answers. It is quite possible that one of your blog answers will prompt new questions worth our consideration as a class. This means that your blog content may end up on the instructor’s blog and become a part of the course content.
As the term progresses, we will create research teams for our end-of-term project, A conference on the future of Canadian literature and story, ideally each team will have four members. You will self-organize — which means that you will read each other’s blogs and comments and make connections with classmates that have common interests and organize your own research team – in place of having a team assigned to you.
This is a fourth year class and I expect you to have knowledge of how to use correct citation and avoid plagiarism. There are numerous resources on U.B.C.’s website for your reference :