Bridgewater Review

Volume 29 | Issue 2 Article 10

Dec-2010

Teaching Note - Then and Now: Canadian andAmerican Students Discover Each OtherAndrew C. HolmanBridgewater State University, a2holman@bridgew.edu

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Recommended CitationHolman, Andrew C. (2010). Teaching Note - Then and Now: Canadian and American Students Discover Each Other. BridgewaterReview, 29(2), 24-27.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol29/iss2/10

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Tinseltown,her fellow townspeoplebecame experts in modern communica-tions technology. In one ad,Page visitsher old elementary school,whose chil-dren report that the class was just aboutto go on a field trip… to China! “Wow,”responds Page sheepishly,“when I was akid,we would just go to the farm,”while a scene of children being intimi-dated by a barnyard animal plays.“No,seriously,where are you guys going?”The students point to a large monitor atthe front of the room where a classful ofwhite-shirted, red-scarfed Chinese chil-dren burst out of their seats waving andshouting:nǐ hǎo! “Nǐ hǎo!” the youth-ful Nova Scotians shout back, and thecommercial ends with the company’stag:“The new classroom.See it.Live it.Share it.On the human network.Cisco.”The ads are light and humorous, but thereal cleverness in them resides in some-thing more urgent and unsaid.They playon the premise that, even inbumpkinville, people can be connected inways that make them more knowledge-able and worldly, so those of us in morecivilized locales have no excuse.“Seehow video on the human network ischanging the way we live,” the com-pany’s website chirps,“[o]ne town at atime.” It might have added“or get leftbehind.”

As a cultural artifact, the ad campaignresonates with people like me whoteach and write about Canadian-American relations.Little Lunenburg(pop.2,317) is caricatured by a largeAmerican corporation as the essence ofquaintness, its people a collection ofharmless,well-intentioned rubes withfunny accents.A small Canadian townbecomes Anywhere,America to conveyhow easy it is to operate the“humannetwork.”For me, the Cisco educationad looms largest because of what it saysabout students. It champions video con-ferencing as a window on the world, theway through which NorthAmericanstudents can discover others.The stu-dents are the active agents and there isno going back to Page’s day,when a pas-sive farm tour constituted discovery.“How ya gonna keep’em down on the farm,after they seen Paree?”or Beijing.

Via high technology,or not, studentshave been doing this for a long time.Long before the days of“connectivity”or“human networks,” students havebeen our most prodigious ambassadors,conducting their own public diplomacy,describing and explaining their owncountries to their fellows internationallythrough formal student exchanges andconferences and informally throughtheir own travels.There is no scholarly

study of Canadian orAmerican studentsabroad,but maybe there should be.Folkslike me have credited diplomats, busi-nessmen and NGOs perhaps too muchas our nations’ public faces.Populardiplomacy has always been conducted ata more grassroots level.At least twogroups of Canadian andAmerican stu-dents provide good cases in point.

ThenMore than half a century ago, scholarsfrom two little schools in the middle ofthe continent lamented how littleCanadians andAmericans really knewabout one another. Invited to a routinemeeting of business and professionalmen fromWinnipeg,Manitoba and StPaul,Minnesota in spring 1939, ArthurLower, then Chairman of the HistoryDepartment atWinnipeg’s UnitedCollege and Charles J.Turck,Presidentof St.Paul’s Macalester College gravi-tated toward one another.AsTurckrecalled,“Dr Lower came to my homeand we talked about Canadian-American matters…‘If business andprofessional men from our two coun-tries should talk about these matters,isn’t it more important to get youngpeople in college to talk about them?’So we decided to press for a student confer-ence.” Founded in 1941, the Canadian-American Conference (CAC) wasan annual colloquium that broughttogether students and faculty membersfromMacalester and United (nowUniversity ofWinnipeg) for an impres-sive run of thirty-one years.

The conferences rotated betweenWinnipeg and St Paul, a 12-hour tripby train.Discussion topics, determinedby student leaders,were remarkablywide-ranging, sometimes focusing onCanadian andAmerican history and for-eign policy,but often addressing eventsfurther afield, inAfrica, eastern Europeand southeastAsia.Keynote speecheswere delivered by prominent journalists,statesmen or scholars. Students werebilleted with host families and there

TEACHINGNOTEThen and Now:Canadian andAmerican StudentsDiscover Each OtherAndrew Holman

Few educators will have missed the messagesdelivered in a series of recent televisionadvertisements for Cisco© starring Canadian

actor Ellen Page (Juno, 2007; Inception, 2010),whoreturns to her rustic“hometown”of Lunenburg,Nova Scotia to find that while she has been away in

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were grand banquets and dances.Everyautumn,United and Macalester studentsengaged each other in informed publicdebate,which was sometimes reportedin newspaper stories and broadcast inradio debates.The exchanges were cor-dial, but always vigorous and shaped bythe contexts of WorldWar II and theColdWar,which placed Canadians(sometimes uncomfortably) withinthe newAmerican empire.By 1971, astheVietnam conflict heightened, theconference series ended amidst waning

interest and,one suspects, a concern thatthe tone of the deliberations hadbecome unacceptably shrill.

Discovering the“other”was the centralgoal for Canadian-American Confer-ence participants.What is most strikingis the earnestness, even urgency,of theircommitment, and the documents on the

CAC collected and preserved atMacalester and the University ofWinnipeg (conference programs,privatecorrespondence,newspaper clippingsand other notes) reflect this well.Whatthey really did discover about each otheris harder to get at, but some evidence isrevealing.Without doubt,Winnipeg andMacalester students learned from oneanother something about the substanceof the issues they debated – aboutdiplomacy and economics in the Pacifictheatre, for example,or the power

dynamics within the United Nations.But they also learned together some-thing about the spirit of scholarlyinquiry and the thrill of academicendeavor.“It scarcely seems possiblethat the Canadians have come and gonealready”Macalester student CorinneTibbetts wrote to her faculty supervisorJ.H.Dupre in mid-November 1952.

“I felt, as I know everyone did, thedeepest feeling of unity among thegroup. It seems incredible that such abond could spring up in so short a time.But something else impressed me, andthat was, if I may use a trite phrase, theintellectual challenge. It was peopleliving and using knowledge and minds,caught up [in] the passion of a purposeoutside themselves. I feel as if I have aCAC hangover, but it’s the kind I hopewill never leave me.”

But clearly the most enlightening“take away” for these students involvedperspective:how even neighbors as closeas Canadians andAmericans could seethe world differently.The exchangeswere generally reciprocal but asymmet-rical. Macalester students discoveredthat their United College counterparts

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knew a great deal about the U.S. andhad decided opinions about it.To oneobserver of the 1958 conference, itfelt odd to hear Canadians“tellingAmericans the reasons for the natureof theAmerican Revolution.” In this,he continued,“Canadians showedbroad tolerant understanding.”But asthe 1960s progressed,Canadian studentsused the CAC to voice concern about

American ColdWar foreign policy,which made their knowledge ofAmerican affairs less flattering and thesegatherings less comfortable.For theirpart,Macalester students struggled tounderstand the perspective of theirCanadian neighbors.They scrambledto learn as much about Canada as theycould in the months before the confer-ences took place and they presented

and I had a good idea in early summer2008.Though I had known of Dr.Bangarth’s scholarship,our paths had justcrossed for the first time in Scotland,when we presented separate papers at aconference on migration at the univer-sity’s Centre for Canadian Studies.Loathto let the changing of sessions end ourdiscussion,we resolved to carry on at alocal establishment, and least until we

were each due to meet our respectivesupper arrangements.We each teachcourses on Canadian-American rela-tions and our talk turned,perhapsinevitably, to our students.The problemwith my students, she offered, is thatthey think they know a lot about theUnited States and have formed somepretty rigid ideas; the challenge with mystudents, I responded, is that they haven’tbeen exposed much to Canada, and

creditable historical and position papers.But the documents betray a lasting frus-tration with the inscrutability of theCanadians – the familiar,“unexotic”other who, for example, could willinglyfight alongsideAmericans inWorldWarII and Korea,but sit it out inVietnam.In the end, this recognition of difference(and not necessarily its reconciliation)was what the CAC was really all about.

NowThere’s a little pub not too far from theUniversity of Edinburgh calledWilliamMcEwan’sAle House,whose doors haveprobably been darkened by more thantheir share of professors seeking respiteand refreshment.Like many Britishpubs, it is dark (and a little sour), butwell stocked with a variety of libations.It is there where Stephanie Bangarth

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don’t seem to care to be.Talk about amatch made in hell.Naturally,weconcluded that we have to get themtogether.So we decided to press for a studentconference.How? Funding and distanceprohibited any in-person meeting,butStephanie suggested some simple tech-nology: a web camera and Skype.We could have our own“webinar.”The possibilities opened up atWilliamMcEwan’s pub, and we promised to takesome concrete steps as soon as we eachreturned to NorthAmerica.

For the past two and a half years, stu-dents in my upper-level Canadianhistory courses at Bridgewater Statehave taken part in a precarious butcontinuing experiment in Canadian-American student colloquy.SinceSpring 2009,my Canadian Historyclasses have each semester been linkedvia the internet, Skype and a webcamera to Dr.Bangarth’s classes onCanadian-American relations at King’sCollege at University ofWesternOntario for one or more sessions.Bothclasses have read the same sets of schol-arly articles to prepare them for thediscussion.We have devised a roundtableformat:Canadian students first ask BSUstudents a question; then vice versa, fol-lowed by an open floor,when any stu-dent could approach the camera andoffer his or her ideas.Five or six roundsof questions make up the roundtable,covering normally two hours of discus-sion. Stephanie and I act as moderators,though very little intervention hasbeen needed.

From that first pilot session in Spring2009,we have spawned others. InSeptember 2009 and March 2010,werepeated the experiment with ourrespective classes.The first webinar inSpring 2009 discussed“the Melting Potversus Multiculturalism;” since then wechose more focused subjects, theWar of1812 (which polite Canadian historiansassert that both sides won) and French-

actively thinking, contributing, and lis-tening.” But most revealing to themwere the differences in perspective.Almost all of the respondents foundthe experience both jarring and enlight-ening. In response to a lively webinarsegment on theWorldWar II-era intern-ment of those of Japanese descent inboth Canada and the U.S., one respon-dent remarked:“Not only did peoplehave very different views of things suchas racism and nationalism,but each classwas also able to teach the other moreabout their own cultures and politics.”Among our BSU students,most weresurprised to find out how much interestCanadian students had in U.S. andAmerican history and how much morethere is to know about their neighbors.And as I write this, our Can-AmMessage Board is abuzz with entriesabout Roosevelt,Mackenzie King andWorldWar II, the future of the Canadianoil sands, and the merits and faults ofhockey fights!And now I think I under-stand what Professor Lower andPresidentTurck knew. I am humbledby the students’ intellectual curiosityand by their drive to be active agentsin their own discoveries of “other.”

Andrew Holman is Professor of History andAssociate Editor of Bridgewater Review. He isgrateful to Ann Brunjes, Michelle Cox and hispartners in the BSU SummerWriting Institutefor their support and comments on an earlierdraft of this article.

Canadian identity. In Fall 2010,we woveinto our respective classes three webinarsessions, reprising theWar of 1812session and adding two new subjects –Canadian-American Relations duringWorldWar II and Sport and NorthAmerican nationalisms. In all of oursessions, the students performed veryably and asked to continue the discus-sion beyond our planned schedule sothat they could talk informally about avariety of subjects, including the recenthealth care debate in the U.S. and theCanadian model. In Fall 2010,Dr.Bangarth suggested that we add anonline,post-webinar Message Boardso that all students can follow up ourclassroom colloquy with online chat.Early observations showed us that ourstudents have much more to say aboutthese subjects than our webinar sched-ule permits; and the Message Boardallows for students of all participatorycomfort-levels to contribute.

Here, as inWinnipeg and St.Paul somany decades ago, the goal of thesewebinars is to allow our students todiscover the other.There are key differ-ences, of course.The internet hasreplaced the train as the technologythat enables these meetings.They arevirtual,moreover, and cannot replacethe immediacy of face-to-face colloquy.And yet, it is clear that our students’“take away” is very similar to thoseinvolved in the CAC. I am too closeto the experiment just yet to drawobjective conclusions, still the students’responses to assessment questionnairescirculated after every webinar sessionare telling.They, like the United andMacalester students, are enthusiasticallypositive about the experience.One ofthem,BSU’sTim Brown,echoed Ms.Tibbetts’ sentiment of 60 years ago:“The webinar is worth doing again…and again… and again,”he noted.“Itwas exciting and encouraging to beinvolved in a classroom that was so

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