“The tools have a transformative effect on the way in which we think and the things that we can do,” he says. 3D printing technology has changed the way Enns prepares his students for a career as a professional architect. 

There’s still the need, he explains, “for architects to understand how heavy a concrete block is, how to assemble a brick wall and how to work with combinations of glass and steel—the real things. But in addition to that, there’s this new layer that’s so expressive and dynamic.”

He says students are keen to gain proficiency with 3D technology when they join the faculty. “Students have a premonition that these skills are going to be important,” he says.

Enns: “Students have a premonition that these skills are going to be important.”

Making an object in the 3D printer. // Photo by David Lipnowski

In fact, in 2015, Enns created a new course offering, called Future Studio, inspired by a request from environmental design architecture students who wanted to gain more experience with 3D software, technology and media.

3D printed model of Winnipeg’s downtown The Bay building. // Photo by David Lipnowski

Students’ enthusiasm to understand and use this new technology has contributed greatly to the success of FABLab, the 3D fabrication lab at the U of M. It takes both institutional investment and an investment on the part of students, he notes.  

“Everybody can come in there and experiment, everybody can come and take workshops on the software,” he says. “In that way, this lab is phenomenal.”

 

A shift in student focus to the possibilities of what they can create

A BIG PART OF ENGINEERING is using existing technology to solve new problems,” says Nishant Balakrishnan, laboratory instructor and manager of the Computer Assisted Design (CAD) Lab at the U of M. 

With 3D printing, “the ability for [students] to try out new solutions and prototype them is where the innovation lies.” 

All of this creates an immediate sense of ownership, motivating students to create early on, he explains.

Nishant Balakrishnan, manager of the Computer Assisted Design (CAD) Lab at the U of M. // Photo by Adam Dolman

Students want to do more than just what’s assigned, he adds. Their focus has shifted to the possibilities of what they can create. 

For example, second year mechanical engineering students “without a lot of background” are working with Manitoba Hydro to develop an automated tool to de-ice hydro wires. It’s a complex process, but students are inspired by 3D technology to find innovative solutions. 

Detail of the de-icer prototype for the Manitoba Hydro project. // Photo by Adam Dolman

It also means that engineering students gain advanced skills earlier in their education and graduate with a more applied skill set, he says. 

Another project in the CAD Lab is by biosystems engineering students who are using 3D printing to create an automated lake algae skimmer to remove algae from northern Manitoba lakes or water bodies. 

Students were challenged to build a small device that moves between two drones to remove algae blooms, he explains. They came up with a completely new approach. “Nobody has ever tried to approach lake algae skimming this way,” says Balakrishnan. 

“Students are being pushed to think outside of the box.” 

This is an excerpt from a story on the impact of 3D printing on architecture, medicine, fine art and engineering at the U of M; read the rest of the special feature in the Spring 2017 issue of Teaching Life online.

“I would say that everything we do here [at the department] has to do, in some part, with the earth itself,” says Sinclair.

Indigenous education is a more holistic approach to learning that sees the earth itself as a knowledge keeper. Sinclair acknowledges that books are an important element of learning — but they’re not the only element. 

Sinclair: “The earth reminds us that it’s a textual place, it’s a place of knowledge, it’s an archive.”

“”The earth reminds us that it’s a textual place, it’s a place of knowledge, it’s an archive,” he says.

“When I teach literature, I teach [students] to see a text as more than squiggly lines on a page, which is the only way that Europe likes to view language. I say, ‘How is a moccasin a text? How is that a novel? … And if that’s the case, then who’s the author of the moccasin?’ It’s not just the human hands, it’s the moose and it’s the water that fell on the moose, and it’s the birds that live above us in the sky. It’s all the things that happened to make that moccasin possible.” 

Another example of Indigenous land-based education in practice is the Native Studies Field School at the U of M, facilitated by Ryan Duplassie, PhD candidate and instructor in Native studies. Along with discussion of scholarly texts, the program includes a two-week experiential learning component in Grassy Narrows First Nation. 

According to the course description, students “develop an understanding of their place as Treaty people by engaging the environmental and cultural politics of the Anishinaabe community.” 

Students learn about Indigenous grassroots efforts to preserve and protect Indigenous traditions and home territories, and contribute to community-led development projects. They also have the opportunity to learn practical skills for living off the land, such as how to build trapping cabins, how to catch and cook fish, and how to make traditional tools such as wooden paddles. 

“What we often teach in university is the students’ agency and individualism as most important and that’s what we have to worry about,” says Sinclair. 

“In Native studies, we do it kind of the opposite. We say, ‘How does the world see you? How are you going to act in relationship to the earth so the earth sees you as a responsible, active, empathic citizen?’” 

This is an excerpt from the story on land-based education; read the rest in the Spring 2017 issue of Teaching Life online.

Professor of finance Usha Mittoo [MBA/81].

A challenge to be innovative and creative

Usha Mittoo [MBA/81] is a groundbreaker — and she traces it back to her own classroom learning. The first female finance professor at the I.H. Asper School of Business remembers worrying as a University of Manitoba student that she didn’t have the background to follow the case studies they were doing in her course. She had just come from India and was the only foreign student in her program.

“I understand,” said her prof Ross Henderson, a Harvard-trained PhD who used the Socratic method in his courses, when she went to see him after class. “But you are coming with new insights rather than looking from the same perspective as everyone else.” He challenged her “to be innovative and creative,” says Mittoo. 

That lesson never left her. After completing her PhD at UBC, she joined Asper School of Business in 1988 and currently holds the Stuart Clark Professorship in Financial Management. Mittoo has lectured and presented all over the globe and has received many awards for her research and teaching; her work on Canadian markets and international finance has been cited in many top academic and practitioner journals and textbooks. 

Her professor, she says, “was receptive to my perspective and encouraged me to grow what I saw as a weakness into a strength — to take risks and to think outside the box.” 

—Mariianne Mays Wiebe 

Luke Nickel [B.MUS. (COMP.)/11]

Luke Nickel [B.MUS. (COMP.)/11]: A sense of boundless possibility

In 2008-9, my third year as an undergraduate student at the University of Manitoba, I was enrolled in the XIE ensemble, or eXperimental Improv Ensemble, under the direction of Dr. Gordon Fitzell. Unlike other musical ensembles where students would perform existing repertoire at lunchtime concerts at the Desautels Faculty of Music, the XIE taught an improvisatory approach — both musically and in respect to its own organization. Dr. Fitzell worked with us to organize our own off-campus events. The events ranged in size from small jam sessions to larger multidisciplinary shows.

I will never forget when Dr. Fitzell proposed that we fundraise for Amnesty International by cooking and serving a meal to over fifty people. The catch? We were to do it while musically improvising using cutlery, food-processors, knives and food. This experience was extremely inspirational to me at the time.

Dr. Fitzell taught us the fundamentals of event organization, but also the hard-to-teach capability to dream as big as our brains would allow us. I carry this sense of boundless possibility with me in my work as a festival director as well as into my own artistic practice.

Award-winning Canadian interdisciplinary artist and researcher Luke Nickel just completed his PhD at Bath Spa University and lives in Bristol, UK. His work investigates notions of notation, re-performance, loss of fidelity and memory. He cofounded and continues to co-direct Winnipeg’s Cluster Festival of New Music + Integrated Arts, which in March 2017 celebrated its eighth year. 

For more alumni memorable moments, read the rest of the story in the Spring 2017 issue of Teaching Life online.
 

Creative writer and English, film and theatre PhD candidate Kirsty Cameron brings us the inside scoop.

Kirsty Cameron.

IT IS THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER and we are gathered in the media lab in University College.

A group of 23 students has been meeting since the school year began in September. Our current focus is deciding on the foundational story in the making of what will become a completed film, fully edited for viewing, ideally by spring. It’s going to be a busy eight months!

Last night, we finished our third creative writing workshop for the course, Film Production: Advanced Camera Acting, Directing, Script-writing, Production. The six credit-hour course, taught by film chair and distinguished professor George Toles, has been running in the University of Manitoba’s department of English, film, and theatre every two years for 13 years.

This is the seventh time the course has been offered to students who have at least completed the department’s introductory film course.

The course provides opportunities for students to learn a number of roles in filmmaking, with directorial, camera, management, art and technical positions. Some students will fill more than one position.

The task

I’m one of the co-facilitators of the writing workshop portion of the course, alongside teaching assistant and line producer Paymun Nematollahi and film student/through line coordinator Corey Rademaker.

The group’s task is to adapt an existing screenplay, crafting a personalized version of a shooting script of a little over 60 pages for a full-length feature film close to two hours running time. We will meet for three hours once a week into December, to hash out the intricacies. 

The writing process entails a scene-by-scene working over and rewriting of a script according to the group’s story choices.

Of the students in our writing group, several will direct. The main actors and actresses are in the writing group. There are sound people and art people here and the student production manager will attend each writing session, too.

Paymun Nematollahi and Jim Agapito.

Paymun is a master of logistics and he’s set us up with a schedule of writing deadlines for each of the three acts of the screenplay, with a final deadline of December for the whole script, leaving room for on-set revisions later.

Three principal writers, led by head writer Corey, have stepped out of the larger group to become responsible for the writing of acts after our group discussions, returning every week with edited pages.

After shooting wraps at the end of March, producer Jim Agapito will guide the film editing process with a group of student-editors, using the tools in the media lab.

By next spring, every one of the students in the course will be a filmmaker.

Everything begins with the writing. Our workshops should be a place of conversations necessary for turning a script into a work of collective art.

The goal for this group of committed students is to experience the collaborative art of filmmaking to professional industry standards. By mid-winter, at least three people in the writer’s room will be screenwriters, with the whole group credited as writing assistants.

By next spring, every one of the students in the course will be a filmmaker.

FLASHBACK:

Early on, George starts a workshop session by prompting the group to consider ways to view and develop the film’s characters.

He brings Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy into the initial workshop session and reads passages from the psychotherapist’s tale of grappling, as writers must grapple in drafting characters, with psychological motivation, states of being and personal empathy in his relationships with his clients.

Yalom explains: “Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will never identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcend category.”

The weeks of workshop discussions must be underscored by the questions: What are our tendencies as readers or viewers of film? Are we punishing in our orientation toward character? Do we tend to be forgiving? Can we avoid crass labelling or an oversimplification of characters? Can we treat our characters justly?

Read the rest of the story in the online issue of Teaching Life.

…Students are also expected to create an expressive, end-of-term project. For many of them, it’s a first foray into dance.

Brenda Cantelo directs “Bodies of Water.”

Dance and religion may not seem to hold much in common at first glance, yet the relation between the two is a productive one, notes Cantelo. She cites dance practitioner and theorist Kimerer LaMothe’s
ongoing investigation of a dialogue between the body and religion through consideration of various sacred texts, historical artists including Graham, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Robert Dunn and John Cage, and the ideas of philosophers such as Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared, somewhat sardonically, “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” (He also called his daily dancing his “divine service.”)

Some religions accept and use dance as a vehicle for the sacred, Cantelo says, and there are some other religions that reject it all together as inappropriate for the sacred.

In the course, she explains, “we look at the curriculum, of dance and world religion, and [students] are thinking about dance and the way in which practitioners could connect movement to higher levels of understanding or expression or spirituality.”

Cantelo took the idea a step further. In the fall of 2015, students from the course had the opportunity to collaborate on an interdisciplinary performance with award-winning local choreographer Stephanie Ballard and students from music professor Gordon Fitzell’s eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE) in the Desautels Faculty of Music.

After working together on improvisational exercises and elements such as rhythm, space, sequencing and force, Cantelo’s students shaped their dance performance and entitled it “Bodies of Water.” The narrative of the dance was based on water: life coming out of the water, sailing through happier moments and into the storms of life struggles and ending in death, with dance movements to represent birds skimming the surface of the water and then flying into the sky.

— Mariianne Mays Wiebe

Read the rest of the story in the Spring 2017 issue of Teaching Life online.

I was walking across the Osborne Bridge with a grad student I was advising, someone who was also teaching at the time, someone very wise; we were heading to a coffee shop to talk about her work— and something she said really struck me. This happened about 15 years or more ago; I’ve been at the University of Manitoba for 24 years.

We were talking about some of the students in our inner-city program [in social work] and I was saying that it’s nice to see students “with promise” get into the university and be in a supportive environment.

She stopped and looked at me; we stood on the bridge and she said, “It’s nice for those students; they’re the lucky ones. The ones I think are more important are the ones who don’t have that chance, that we don’t even know about, that could achieve certain things and they might not even be noticed.”

I’ve never forgotten that. I still remember that when I think of her, how meaningful and how moving that was to hear. And how it kind of shook me, in a good way.

I started to see students differently after that. I really started to see everyone as having gifts and promise, even though I couldn’t see it, or it wasn’t showing up at that time. There’s always next year, or the year after. It may not be [immediately] evident to us.… We’re used to looking for signs of success. If someone gets a prize in this, we think, let’s give them more prizes and more opportunities to get better. And then what about those students who are struggling to get even to that point?

Sometimes when you plant a seed, it can grow so quickly—and so beautifully—and it can bloom into something that you wouldn’t have expected could happen.

It was a lesson that stays with me today and I tell it to others and people say, “Aha! Of course.”

— Tuula Heinonen, professor, Faculty of Social Work, and Interprofessional Education Initiative, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences