Last Thursday the institution held his first-panel discussion featuring Canadian educators. For about an hour three professors examined the challenges and responsibilities faced by those scholars who decided to work and research in the neighboring country.
The event was a novel initiative of the Canadian-American center due to the increase of this foreign community here in Umaine. Assistant Professor of Communication in University of Pennsylvania Sharrona Pearl, Assistant Professor of History and Canadian Studies Mark McLaughlin and assistant director of the Canadian-American Center University of Maine Frédéric Rondeau were the participants in this panel.
All three panelist are Canadian but each of them was born and raised in different parts of the country: Pearl comes from a big urban city, Toronto, Rondeau is Quebecois and McLaughlin used to live in New Brunswick province. They all agree this is an essential fact when you are trying to analyze how a Canadian educator must face the challenge of being a professor in the United States. Toronto is a multicultural environment, as most of the American big cities are. On the contrary, New Brunswick is a small rural area with cold weather. So for McLaughlin getting used to UMaine location was an easy process. It certainly wasn’t like that for Frédéric Rondeau, being French his native language.
The panel first focused on discussing how to properly represent their country and present themselves as foreigners in an American class. According to Pearl, it is a difficult task explaining to students that, despite coming from a great country, they´ve chosen to live in the United States. American patriotic nature sometimes creates a wall between a foreign teacher and the students in his class. This attitude is linked to another challenge they approached later in the discussion. As McLaughlin stated “Since America is such a powerful country, most students don’t think in international terms. Break through that mind (through showing that everything they do here it is not unique or best) is necessary to get to them”. One way to do it is by explaining them the Canadian history from a native perspective. By following this strategy it becomes easier for students to analyze their own national past.
This lack of knowledge about Canadian (and other countries) tradition can also be an upside. ”When you teach American undergraduates they know little about these topics and that allow educators to fill those blanks,” said McLaughlin. In Rondeau´s opinion, another defiance lies on trying to merge both the teaching of the francophone culture with providing language skills.
During the final round of questions, the audience showed interest in exploring Canadian education policy versus the American one and comparing both teaching experiences. The panel members clarified that what the idea of college represents in Canada is different. In the United States, the legacy culture (family tradition) is a really strong fact. On the contrary in Canada, due to the high amount of immigration, the current generation is usually the first one studying at the university. This implies that things like Greek life do not exist in most parts of Canada.
Regarding government policy, even though the high-level education system is private in the northern country it also receives substantial public funding, so university fees are considerably lower than in the States. As a result, the socioeconomic aspect is not a crucial one for accessing to college. Another key difference between American and Canadian System is the age students graduate in high school. In Canada, they arrive at college one year later and according to the participants in the panel this “Makes a difference. They are more mature and they have to decide a study area during freshman year because they already had time to think about their future.” In their opinion this is also related to the legal drinking age: “American students tend to party a lot during their first year. Canadians do it too but they are able to keep a balance between this and academic records more easily” said Pearl.
At the end of the event, the approached another interesting topic, research. Although getting funding in Quebec was easier for Rondeau the lost of intellectual freedom was also higher. For Pearl, not receiving found from the government but from local institutions means also more autonomy to research. Lastly, McLaughlin pointed that “if you work in a larger institution control is also bigger
Connections between the United States and Canadian educators are, as this event showed, stronger than ever. Getting to know how they face this change of scenario was one of the goals of this panel discussion. The other one was making the audience reach a full understanding of the differences and similarities between both systems.
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