“I really love people, so in the end that’s kind of how you teach,” says the associate professor who teaches in the Faculty of Social Work.

“I teach social workers [that you] really have to like people, because if you don’t it’s probably not a good fit,” she laughs.

Levine has taught a foundational course in clinical and applied social work protocol in the faculty for 28 years. She estimates more than 1,500 students took the introductory courses with her.

In fact, when she approached the podium to address a recent conference of Manitoba school social workers, she had a startling realization — she recognized 90 percent of the crowd as her former students from almost three decades as a UM professor.

“It was just so good to see the students that have evolved into these amazing practitioners, all sitting in front of me,” Levine says. She says the Yiddish expression—nachas—describes the special combination of pride and happiness she feels for these former students who’ve achieved such great things.

“It was really meaningful for me.”

Levine started her UM career as a field instructor in The Pas, Man., providing practicum supervision for Indigenous child welfare workers. After completing her PhD in 2003, she continued to teach practice-based and family-focused social work courses, eventually becoming an associate professor in the faculty.

Children and adolescents have always been Levine’s passion, including issues around mental health and child welfare, which are part of her current research.

In the disability community, she volunteers as the chairperson of Opportunities for Independence, an agency that works with cognitively impaired individuals who find themselves in conflict with the law.

Visionary practice as an educator

As a teacher, Levine places a high value on experiential learning.

“I’ve always infused my teaching with practice examples from my social work career, mostly my mistakes, which provide lots of learning. And I always bring my research into it,” Levine says.

“I think at the post-secondary level, the critical difference is that we are bringing our applied practice and our research into our teaching so that it makes it real. It highlights some of the ethical dilemmas we encounter on a daily basis as social workers.”

Levine also invites community leaders into her classroom to recruit student volunteers. First year students are eager for the real-world experiences these agencies and organizations can provide, she says.

Levine’s visionary practice as an educator was recognized in 2020 when she received a Scholarship in Teaching and Learning (SOTL) funding award.

The award allowed her to create a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary course with colleagues from the Faculty of Education to develop a shared understanding of how kids can be supported within the child welfare system. The unique course is the first of its kind to bring together these two key professions of educators and social workers, she says.

A ‘community of learners’

It’s important to Levine to help build a community of learners.

“Our job is to learn from each other. [The] job for students is … to learn from each other and to connect with each other because, in practice, they will need each other. My teaching philosophy is we will all do better when everybody does better in this world. And so I think that’s teaching a life philosophy.”

Levine applauds the University for keeping classes small and promoting inclusion and cooperation between students. She says an attitude of care sets UM apart from other institutions where these goals are not always a priority.

“Just making yourself available to students is really critical. I love getting to know students. I love inviting students to share their personal experiences within the class setting,” says Levine, who has been recognized for her consistently high student ratings.

Levine says she’s proud of UM social work graduates who are now professionals in Manitoba as well as those who work outside the province.

“Students have gone off and done amazing things across the world,” she adds.

It’s one example of exciting areas of exploration and experimentation of music and composition in relation to technology.

Sandred: ‘Art is very close to research — you are reaching to the unknown’

Sandred uses computers a lot, he says, but he is a composer of both instrumental and computer music. His instrumental works range from music for Symphony Orchestra to solo instruments, and several of his later compositions expand the “expressitivity” of acoustic instruments with live electronics.

Sandred uses technologies within his pieces and in composing them, and also teaches methods of composition in the Faculty of Music’s Studio FLAT, the studio he founded for computer music research and production.

Many of his own compositions are the result of his search for new methods of composition and use computerized rule-based systems (a sub-branch of artificial intelligence) to formalize the musical structure.

For Sandred, composition is very closely linked with his research and he is fascinated by the complexity of music. And it’s fascinating to hear him discuss music, as well as composition and art more generally.

When I ask Sandred where “Ice Fog” started, for instance, he politely defers, smiling. “I prefer to talk about music in different terms. As a composer, you deal with how to communicate, and music is about communicating.”

Sandred: In music composition, ‘the tools you use will affect the outcome.’

The method you choose will influence the result, however. “I do believe the tools that you use will affect the outcome — and you can do that unintentionally but often deliberately as well,” he explains.

“If you are a painter, for instance, you choose your tools with a very clear aim for how you want it to look, for the expression you intend. So I pick my tools for the result I want, and if I’m not happy with them perhaps I could switch my tools.”

The question of intuition is also interesting, he says.

You apply a lot of structure, knowledge, experience and rules that you have internalized or that are in your unconsciousness. “As a professional composer, I want to bring those into consciousness in order to work with them compositionally. If you only rely only on intuition, you tend to repeat a lot, because you are not aware, and you fall into similar patterns.”

It starts with composition rules or formalizations from 100 years ago applied to the computer, he says.

“So if they formalized certain rules for composition in the old days, say — for example, it could be rules about what chords generally follow after one another, or a rule such as returning to the tonic to end a piece – you can use the same language of formalization, so to speak. But you might end with another chord, maybe it’s not the tonic but a newer-sounding chord.”

And there are many other details as well, which the computer can track and analyze, and that Sandred can then alter. “That just would not have been possible before,” he says.

That modernist expectation of “making something new” is still very strong in art music, he says.

“As in other forms, rather than repeating something that has already been done, [the motivation is] to go to the unknowns. This is where research comes in.

“Art is very close to research, I think — you are reaching to the unknown. Sure, art is self-referential to some extent, but it is also about expressions of human mind and perception and emotion. Ultimately, I think that is where you end up .”

Q & A

Activities outside work: Since I spend my working days mostly at my desk, I try to be physically active with my family over the weekends. This winter, I enjoyed the river trail very much: a unique possibility in Winnipeg.

Best place to visit: This year I enjoyed revisiting Shanghai, which is a very interesting city. Every year I go back to Paris for work: a city full of life and cultural events.

Favourite music: I tend to like composers that were active during periods when music changed. Monteverdi brought music into a new phase in the early 17th century, just as György Ligeti did in the early 1960s.

Faculty Profile is a regularly appearing column that features faculty of the university in the context of their research. This article first appeared in the April 5, 2012 edition of The Bulletin.

The distinguished professor of psychiatry recounts an anecdote from Michael Bliss’s biography of William Osler, Canadian forefather of modern medicine. In the story, a colleague knocks at the great professor’s door only to be greeted by choking and gagging sounds from within the room. He enters upon the scene of Osler threading a tube down his own throat.

“Is everything all right? What are you doing?” he asks, stricken. Responds Osler, offering his colleague another tube so he can join in: “We place these down many patients, and I thought I ought to know what it feels like.”

The colleague politely declined, Chochinov says, smiling. The point is that “Osler had these amazing insights about medicine — he understood that there were many things you could touch and feel that had to do with anatomy and physiology.

“But he also knew that there is this whole human aspect of care that really is about feeling, and unless you appreciate that, you aren’t going to be able to connect with or understand what your patients are going through.” In short, he says, “Osler understood the importance of humanity and of the humanities for the world view of the healer.”

Chochinov is the recipient of many awards and accolades. In addition to making “dignity therapy” an internationally recognized approach within his speciality of palliative care — incorporating disciplines from across the medical spectrum — he also has a number of other disciplinary aces up his sleeve. In fact, he solidly qualifies as artsy, with strongly developed interests and skills in music, history and literature.

His latest book, Dignity Therapy: Final Words for Final Days, just won the 2012 Prose Award for Clinical Medicine (the American Publisher’s Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence).

It explains the approach developed by Chochinov and his research team over a period of about 20 years. While there have been other aspects to come out of the palliative care research (such as the issue of “personhood,” a key component of “dignity-conserving care”), he says, dignity therapy is one that’s gained international attention.

Chochinov says he has spent much of the past decade on issues related to dignity.

“What we discovered is that even for people with advanced illness, there are a multitude of things that can influence a patient’s sense of dignity — everything from how well pain is controlled to whether or not they feel that people, including health care workers, still recognize them for who they are, for their worth, and confer honour and respect. In essence, attentiveness to dignity at end of life yields the very best that palliative care can deliver.”

While Chochinov is modest about the diverse talents that have led him to where he is now, he notes that it seems as though his past experiences and skills have prepared him well for what he is doing today.

“I’ve been fortunate, in that they have all come together in a particular and unique way to inform what I do,” he says.

Chochinov: “Everyone in health care needs need to understand that we are implicated in the success or failure of our interactions with patients.”

“The interest in literature informs my writing. I believe that how one says things matters. Certainly, as a clinician and someone in palliative care, I know that words, and how we choose to express ourselves with patients, can shape the entire tone of care.”

“With both history and literature, we gain so much wisdom about the human condition, which, in essence, is what I’m trying to understand in an empirical way, in palliative care research. Whether I’m assigning a short story by Chekhov or something by Tolstoy, these are wonderful teaching tools because they come from people with profound insights about being human, being vulnerable and being mortal,” he says.

According to Chochinov, all of medicine could benefit from the humanities. In fact, he’s working on a new book, which he hopes will be for everyone in health care “from the receptionist who works at a medical clinic to the person who makes the first incision.

“It seems to me that everyone in health care needs to learn something about communication skills; in particular, we need to understand that we are implicated in the success or failure of our interactions with patients,” he says.

Chochinov would like future psychiatrists to see palliative care as a tremendous career opportunity — psychiatrists have been slow in entering the field. “It can be tremendously gratifying,” he adds.

Palliative care, he says, has been growing both nationally and internationally. “The piece that our group has tried to add to that whole dynamic of growth is attention to psychosocial issues, understanding that, in addition to the medical expertise involving symptom management, that holistic palliative care requires attention to the physical, as well as psychological, spiritual and existential, issues that patients and families confront near end of life.

“The wonderful thing about the work one does in palliative care is that usually one knows very quickly whether or not you’ve made a difference. And how many jobs can you say that about?”

See more on Harvey Max Chochinov here.

Q+A

WHO INSPIRES YOU TODAY AND WHY?
I admire people who have the courage of their convictions; people who are able to put the needs of others ahead of their own; those who live their lives with passion and strive to make a difference in this world in whatever way they can. I have been fortunate to have found such people in friends, family and colleagues; my children inspire me.

BEST PLACE YOU’VE VISITED; SOMEWHERE YOU LOOK FORWARD TO VISITING:
In my work, I’ve been privileged to speak and travel around the world. My memories and most vivid impressions are of people; and I’ve met wonderful people in China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore; Australia, New Zealand; Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, and the list goes on. I’ve been invited to give some talks in Prague and Budapest this coming May. Not having done as much travel in Eastern Europe, that is a trip I am very much looking forward to.

A RECENT BOOK YOU’VE ENJOYED:
I loved Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln [the movie is based on this book]. Not only is the story telling gripping, but the lessons about leadership, vision and power are insightful and contemporary.

ON MUSIC:
Music was a big part of my childhood. I studied classical violin and along the way, also learned to play guitar. When I was nine or ten years old, I remember being taken to hear Itzhak Perlman play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto; it was a mesmerizing and transformative experience. It introduced me to what has remained my favorite violin concerto, and affirmed that, lacking Perlman’s talent, I was not destined to be a professional musician.

ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE OF WORK:
Anything having to do with the arts; film, theatre, music. I love reading, particularly books that provide new insights about the human condition. And of course, spending time with family and friends.

Faculty Profile is a regularly appearing column that features faculty of the university in the context of their research. This article first appeared in the March 21, 2103 edition of The Bulletin.

“My first job out of high school was with the U of M libraries,” she recounted. “Managing the Product Catalogue Collection at the Faculty of Architecture, understanding materials was part of my job knowledge, and I was asked to teach a course on materials in interior design.” After completing a fine arts degree with a focus in drawing, Wilson Baptist went on to a master’s in education because she wanted to think more about curriculum-building. She’d been teaching as a sessional in the Faculty of Architecture, when her encounter with education theorist Herbert Kliebard’s garden metaphor for curriculum opened up a world of possibility. “It allowed me to see both the metaphoric roots of curriculum design and that curriculum was socially constructed,” she said.

“The garden metaphor helped me link my own learning and creativity to a model that opened up the idea [of curriculum design] for me,” she continued, “the garden as something that could be wild, but that is also a cultivated entity, illustrates learning as a balance between drawing out tacit knowledge and cultivating independent, critical thought, a place where growth is cultivated.”

Wilson Baptist: Every day, I am surprised and delighted by something I encounter

For Wilson Baptist, the garden’s appeal was also in the balance it represents between reflection and action, and between cultivation of one’s inner world and care of the larger outside world. (Lovely Mariianne!) “Gardens and gardening — and experiencing landscape, generally — are fascinating ways of engaging the world and being in the world,” she said. Hers is a research degree, and she is not a licensed landscape architect, but she considers her work with gardens an integral element of her creative practice.

More recently, her research interests have led her to think about memorial sites, from large public memorial sites to personal, informal ones such as the roadside memorials one might see while driving. It’s a topic she explored in her dissertation, completed in 2010.

“My research surrounds the role of landscape as a redemptive medium following experiences of tragic loss at a range of scales,” she explained. “I describe the state of grief as one of disenchantment, where an individual suffers not just the loss of the loved one but also the loss of a certain way of being in the world. Landscape may take on many roles for the bereaved, including one of a sort of re-enchantment.”

Looking back now, Wilson Baptist can see how it all came together. In her undergrad years, she said, she was “amazed by what a potent learning experience studio education could be.” Her own teachers inspired her to pursue teaching.

Her focus is balanced between sanctioned and emergent forms of knowledge generation within the discipline, as she puts it. “I personally find that literature, poetry, philosophy and the fine arts are rich sources of reading, writing and representing landscape. But of equal epistemological importance is the experience of landscape,” she said.

“Landscape architecture is, by definition, an applied field where professional services respond to the needs of a client. Yet it’s also essential that we grow landscape architecture as a robust theoretical discipline.”

What does she love about her work? “I love that my work is creative, and that it involves, on a day-to-day basis, activities such as reading, writing, drawing and reflection,” she said. “Each day requires invention; there is no script to follow. I am continually surprised and delighted by something I encounter every day.”

**

Q+A

Something that inspires you: I remain inspired by landscape – the sweeping expanses of the prairie, endless blue skies, sunlight twinkling on the surface of the lake, trails winding through park and forest, twilight descending indigo on newly fallen snow. There is nowhere else that I feel more alive than in landscape.

Activities outside work: Long hours conducting research and writing on the computer wreck havoc on your neck and back so I try to counter research activities with an active lifestyle that includes yoga, running and cycling. I also enjoy photography, cooking and reading research texts, as well as novels. My favorite thing, by far, is to walk. I have two dogs so my routine includes daily walks through the neighbourhood. On weekends my husband and I often try to fit in an excursion – longer walks in a large city or wilderness park or “wild” places that we discover in the city –  river trails, poplar forests, and infrastructure corridors. We have a friend who is a pilot and flew this summer to McBeth Point on Lake Winnipeg to explore the shingle beaches. This was an extraordinary experience.

Best place you’ve visited and why: My Ph.D. studies were centred in Edinburgh, Scotland. When I began my studies, I spent a month living in a flat in Dean Village in a converted flour mill, overlooking a private garden. I walked along the Waters of Leith to Stockbridge to fetch my groceries, hiked up past the castle each day on my way to the college, explored nearby cemeteries and visited the seaside. The day after I defended my dissertation, my husband and I rented a vehicle and drove over the Firth of Fife on the Forth Bridge and into the highlands of Scotland. What a liberating experience! I was never one for mountains, but I hiked joyfully up craggy highland trails in endless rain. I would be deeply sorry if my travels did not bring me round to Scotland once more.

Reading? In between course work I feast on a steady diet of New Yorker magazines. Pleasure reading is a summer activity. Stunners from last summer’s reading include Little Bee by Chris Cleave, a beautifully written but terrifying story of the tragic consequences of a chance encounter. I also read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern – an enchanting and somewhat macabre novel in the tradition of early Bradbury.

Faculty Profile is a regularly appearing column that features faculty of the university in the context of their research. This article first appeared in the Dec. 6, 2012 edition of The Bulletin.

These days it’s become common to bemoan the decline of correct language use, “but linguistics is more about describing and analyzing language and its evolution rather than any kind of prescriptive approach,” she says.

“Linguists don’t really care about ‘correctness’ in language — judgment is not part of the discipline.”

Ghomeshi: ‘Linguists don’t really care about ‘correctness’ in language — judgment is not part of the discipline.’

 

But people do care about language and there’s a real public hunger regarding questions of ‘correctness’ in language, she adds.

This is why, in addition to her academic teaching, research and publications (including work on noun phrases and determiners), Ghomeshi recently published a slim book for a general audience that calls out the superiority complex people apply to language use, called Grammar Matters, and it’s received quite a lot of press, both locally and beyond.

The linguistics prof, who’s taught at the U of M for over ten years, also occasionally speaks to groups outside of the university, something she finds rewarding.

Like her well-known brother Jian, who hosts the national CBC radio show Q, Jila Ghomeshi is quick and charming. With her thoughtfulness and bright, open smile, it’s easy to imagine her presenting for a general audience and to understand why her students like her.

Ones I happen to know who have taken courses with her apply descriptors like “awesome”; as in: “She’s awesome.”

Taking research beyond the university is the social part of her work, as she sees it, “bringing research to that general audience, to serve that interest in language.”

What else inspires her? “Watching children play is inspiring,” she says. “Almost awe-inspiring. They take play and imaginative activity very seriously.”

Ghomeshi is fascinated by language processes and the “pre-structures” that allow humans to acquire it.

 

Ghomeshi is fascinated by language processes and the ‘pre-structures’ that allow humans to acquire it.

 

“We don’t have to think about learning language,” as she puts it. “It happens effortlessly.”

‘I like noun phrases.’

She became interested in the field after taking several linguistics courses during her undergraduate arts degree. The problem-solving aspects offered within linguistics (“solving problems with a limited data set,” as she describes it) appealed to her, as did the fact that it was a relatively new area, with “room to explore new ways of thinking about language.”

Linguistics, she notes, draws from a long and rich philological tradition — largely textual analysis and grammar or comparisons across languages, most often pre-modern — but with the emergence of linguistics through language theorists such as Saussure and Noam Chomsky, the field is now principally characterized by the scientific analysis of language and language theory.

There are also many specialized sub-disciplines (and supra-specialized sub-sub-disciplines) within linguistics, including syntax (sentence and language structure), semantics (how meaning is generated through language/structure), phonology (study of sound in language), typology (study and classification of languages and their structures), socio-historical and applied linguistics (including the contextual, social, evolving nature of language and language use) and language pedagogy and acquisition.

All of which makes linguistics both exciting for those working within it and potentially mystifying to those outside of its academic study.

It’s a burgeoning field, especially when taken with new developments in cognitive science, and how language and the structures of language both reflect and shape the working mind and its underlying structures, says Ghomeshi, explaining her interest.

So how did you come to your particular branch of inquiry, I ask.

“I like noun phrases,” she says, smiling.

Now that would make a catchy t-shirt, we laugh. And what would it say on the back?

“Linguists don’t judge.”

Q + A with Jila Ghomeshi

Someone who inspires you: The linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum for being prolific, witty and so smart in his polemical columns and essays about language.

Best place to visit: I can’t think of anywhere I’ve visited that I haven’t liked. I like big cities: London, Berlin, Moscow. I like Tehran where I still have family. I like Gimli and Winnipeg Beach because they’re close and accessible.

Recent book: Prisoner of Tehran, as one of the books chosen for Canada Reads. I thought it was a compelling story.

Faculty Profile is a regularly appearing column that features faculty of the university in the context of their research. This article first appeared in the February 23, 2012 edition of The Bulletin.

For Joannie Halas, professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management, the goal is to take that embodied experience, as she calls it, and turn it into opportunity.

In educating future physical education (phys. ed.) teachers at U of M, one of her goals has been to encourage and to model a holistic approach to phys. ed. that takes into account diverse physical abilities and cultural experiences.

“Phys. ed. can be a challenging space for young people to navigate because of its social hierarchies. Our bodies and our abilities are exposed. As physical educators, we need to create learning climates that affirm all bodies, all body types, all backgrounds.

“Our job as educators is to take into consideration that entire continuum, from those who love physical activity and are successful and those who struggle with it,” she says.

Many of the students entering university come from relatively privileged positions, notes Halas, and there can be a blind spot when it comes to understanding others’ less-advantaged experiences.

In classes they learn about colonization, the residential school system, poverty and other factors that carry present-day effects for Aboriginal and other marginalized youth. Class members also write “autoethnographies,” in which they explore their own cultural backgrounds, which can be very different from the backgrounds of the young people they will eventually teach.

Growing up in the North End of Winnipeg, Halas worked at summer drop-in centres; after returning to Winnipeg in 1999, she’s been working to increase the diversity of faculty and students in physical education to better reflect the cultural backgrounds of students in schools across Manitoba.

She is particularly sensitive to the role of phys. ed. in engaging Aboriginal youth. In her course “Culturally Relevant Physical Education and Health,” she challenges her university students — future teachers — to take a critical look at their own cultural biases and racialized beliefs. She wants to create a “comfortable uncomfortable” space for students to do that, which can be difficult.

Halas moves with ease in her class. A sort of low key acceptance, humour and sincerity emanates from her, and it’s clear she enjoys teaching. But it’s backed up with hands-on experience and research.

“My own research has focused on the affective domain in phys. ed.: how youth experience physical activity, and the social-emotional connections with their bodies in movement. I’m especially interested in how to create intercultural bridges for Aboriginal youth, and how physical activity can be used to become an invitation into education and learning as a whole.”

Halas’s determination to enlist underrepresented students in the education process became the basis for Rec’ and Read, an afterschool mentorship program/course that was initiated through a community-based research study. Students within the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management learn to act as mentors with elementary and high school students through educational activities, building relationships in the community and providing healthy food and
physical activity opportunities for young people. The program includes two months of planning and preparing and then three to four months of delivering the program in schools across Manitoba.

For Halas, research and teaching practice are intertwined. By recognizing and nurturing leadership in the community, Rec’ and Read builds upon the strengths of inner city youth. “It would be great to have more diversity reflected within our faculty and in future phys. ed. teachers,” she says. A new faculty diploma is in the works that will “bring the university to the community.”

Halas also concurs with Aboriginal teachings about the interconnectedness of life. For her, phys. ed. and activity are more than sports: it is a physical, emotional, social and spiritual engagement leading to a healthy life. These are the benefits that she hopes future phys. ed. teachers will appreciate and communicate in their teaching.

In light of all this, her teaching motto is not that surprising; she takes it from a mentor of hers: “I cast my line and I reel myself to the fish.”

Q & A with Joannie Halas

Perfect weekend: Skiing, skating, sauna, a glass of wine and reading a (really great) thesis.

Recent book: The Book of Hours by Thomas Merton. My mother, who passed away recently, always carried it with her.

Great movie: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, for its compelling female protagonist and dark story.

Inspiration: The energy and spirit of the Aboriginal youth I work with.

Faculty Profile is a regularly appearing column that features faculty of the university in the context of their research. This article originally appeared in the January 19, 2012 edition of The Bulletin.