Mark Canada, Ph.D. |
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Portfolio
Other
Updated
October 29, 2003 |
Language means everything. Both our key to the world outside and the most human part of ourselves, language empowers and defines us. Our parents remember our first words, and our children remember our last. To know our world and ourselves, then, we must know our language. As an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, I strive to give students the guidance, the tools, and, above all, the practice to become masters of their language. By reading and writing regularly, engaging in discussions, and giving presentations, my students learn language by using it. Along the way, they grow in other ways, as well, as they interpret facts and opinions, collaborate in groups, conduct research, and explore their rich literary heritage. In short, my approach to teaching is to help students become their own teachers. An active reader and writer myself, I also conduct research on a number of subjects, particularly American literature, the English language, and teaching and technology. My recent projects include a volume on service-learning and articles on online courses and the short story in Southern American literature. I draw on some of these interests, as well as others, in my service to the university and the larger community. |
Mark
Canada, Ph.D. |
Background |
EducationPh.D., English, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 1997. Major: American literature before
1900. Minor: English language. Dissertation: Poe in His Right Mind.
Job ExperienceCopy
editor, The
News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1991-1992. HonorsOutstanding
Teacher Award,
University of North Carolina at Pembroke, 2000.
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SummaryA few years ago, as I watched my infant daughter trying to absorb the intricacies of the belt in her car seat, I understood a personality trait that perhaps led me to become a teacher: I like success. I don't favor any special kind, such as financial success--thank goodness--but rather the general fulfillment of potential, what the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing." Like Benjamin Franklin, another favorite of mine, I believe humans have tremendous potential, and I can think of no more appropriate or fulfilling job for me than helping them to realize that potential. I got my first job helping people be their best when I became an undergraduate resident assistant at Indiana University. I thrived on the experience of advising residents, planning programs, and generally interacting positively with men and women negotiating a crucial stage of their lives. Another guiding principle of my life and career has been a love for language. Since my years in elementary school and junior high, when I dabbled in the underappreciated genres of game-show and soap-opera parody, I have been fascinated by words and have delighted in putting them together. I studied journalism in college and later went to work as a newspaper copy editor. Although my interests eventually turned to creative literature and more sustained analysis, I value my journalism experience. In addition to providing a unique opportunity to analyze language, this experience left me with a background and a deep interest in the means of written expression, particularly in areas such as typography, design, and First Amendment issues. More than a decade ago, before we were married, Lisa gave me a simple clay coffee mug as a gift. Although I don't drink coffee and don't collect things, especially mugs, the message she painted on the side revealed how well she knew me even then. It reads: "The glory of God is man fully alive." For me, being fully alive means immersing myself in this glorious world: wading in a cold creek in the Appalachian Mountains, eating a deli sandwich in Central Park, reading by a single light in a dark room, discussing books with interesting students or colleagues, pouring a Mozart symphony into my ears or singing along with Hank Williams, catching my little girl after she soars down a slide, and doing almost anything--except shop for fabric--with my wife. If I collect anything, it is experience. Inspired by my reading and by the infectious zest for life I have witnessed in my wife and daughter, I want not only to see, hear, and feel the world, but through my senses to know it. |
Teaching |
CoursesUNC-PembrokeFRS 100: Freshman Seminar ENG
223: American Literature Before 1865 UNC-Chapel HillENGL 36: English Grammar (online) MethodsResourcesI post
online lesson plans and study guides featuring unit objectives, assignments, bibliographies,
background essays, and exercises. ExercisesHaving
covered background material in online lesson plans and study guides, my
students and I are free to use our classtime to engage course material
through group and class discussions, individual and pair exercises, student
presentations, tours, and workshops. AssignmentsThe culmination of my teaching philosophy is All American, a World Wide Web site where I publish student projects. Because they require research, analysis, writing, and revision, these projects resemble traditional assignments in many respects. Unlike those assignments, however, they also give students the opportunity to produce real scholarship for a real audience and to develop important technical skills. · Allegory · Parable TravelI believe
that experiential learning--the process of immersing oneself in a subject and
engaging all the senses possible--deserves a place in a college
education. To encourage this kind of learning, I plan and lead trips
for North Carolina Teaching Fellows and other students. AssessmentAlthough
I may teach as many as 100 students in a given semester, I use conferences,
interviews, and individual progress reports to teach students one at a time.
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PhilosophyMy approach to teaching has grown very naturally out of my own background and personality. As a person who himself loves both to learn and to teach, I believe that education is the most effective, enjoyable, and satisfying when students become teachers--that is, not just absorbing knowledge, but using and sharing it. The reasons can be understood by anyone who has ever begun to master a second language, a dance step, or a computer program. For one thing, actual engagement in an activity encourages the mind and body to act, to encode knowledge and skills in memory, and to confront unforeseen complications. In other words, practice makes perfect--or at least proficient. Perhaps more importantly, when students teach themselves, they feel the joy and confidence that come with success. In short, whether I am teaching composition to freshmen, literature to juniors, or linguistics to graduate students, I seek through my teaching to produce the knowledge, skills, joy, and confidence that will continue to breed success long after students have left my classroom. ObjectivesThis experiential approach to learning is most effective and worthwhile when students believe that what they are learning means something outside the classroom. While I believe that my literature, linguistics, and composition courses provide students with a strong foundation for graduate school or other academic pursuits, I also seek to help students develop knowledge and skills that will make them effective workers, parents, and citizens. As I explain below, my specific objectives are to help students deepen their appreciation of language, explore core ideas in the human experience, and sharpen their research and communication skills. Language: Success in college and the world beyond requires more than basic literacy. Students must learn not only how to decipher language, but also how to analyze it for clues about purpose, audience, and agenda. To this end, I help students to appreciate language at every level, from diction to syntax to semantics. My literature students, for example, learn to look beyond mere content and to examine the way form shapes meaning. Specifically, they study allusion, figurative language, rhythm, and dozens of other formal features and apply their understanding of these concepts to interpret challenging literary works in a variety of genres. My linguistics students take a more technical approach to studying language. In their dissections of words and sentences, they become conversant with concepts such as coinage, transformation, hypernym, and Standard English. Finally, my composition students study syntactic and semantic concepts, including paraphrase, logical fallacies, and propaganda. Thus, whether they are wrestling with Emily Dickinson's conceits, dissecting syntactically ambiguous sentences, or determining the agenda of a World Wide Web site, my students are preparing themselves to interpret the complex, often veiled messages they encounter in law, business, and the media. Furthermore, because of the allusive nature of all language, particularly literature, names constitute a crucial part of a person's vocabulary. For this reason, I frequently use background essays, quizzes, maps, subject encyclopedias, guest lecturers, and study guides to expand my students' cultural literacy and, in turn, to make them more knowledgeable and active participants in their communities. Finally, while appreciating language and literature is a means to many valuable ends, it also is a worthwhile end in itself. Like its cousins music, painting, and sculpture, literature is an art, and much of its appeal lies in its impractical nature--its beauty, its humor, the way it makes us feel. By exposing students to some of the world's most beautiful pieces of literary art, I hope to elevate and enrich them in ways impossible to quantify. Ideas: Edifying and elevating in its own right, language is also a means for expressing ideas, and one of my chief objectives as a teacher is to help students explore those ideas. Thus, in addition to analyzing symbolism in Moby-Dick, a motif in "The Turn of the Screw," or the epistolary structure of The Color Purple, my literature students and I confront the questions that these works and others ask about the individual's role in the community, the nature of knowledge, and human relationships. Similarly, students in my linguistics courses use their understanding of usage, dialect, euphemism, voice, register, and other concepts to deepen their understanding of politics, advertising, and relations between the sexes and races. Research: Students in all of my courses learn to complement the knowledge they glean in class with knowledge they gather on their own through research. My composition students, for example, learn how to use key words and Boolean operators to locate information on computer databases and how to evaluate the credibility of the information they find. So that they can incorporate this information effectively in their own arguments, they also practice paraphrasing, quoting, summarizing, attributing, and documenting source material. These research skills empower students, preparing them to make informed decisions and arguments in their professional, civic, and private lives. Communication: Knowledge confined to a single person's brain has limited use. It is through sharing this knowledge that humans make progress in medicine, science and technology, politics, and every other human endeavor. For this reason, I emphasize communication skills in all of my courses. In composition, for example, students explore every major component of effective rhetoric, from well-formed arguments and general organization down to precise, lively words and carefully placed commas. In a unit on professional writing in these courses, I even introduce students to the fundamentals of graphic communication, particularly the principles of typography. These students learn to use serif and sans serif fonts, white space, and bullets effectively to produce an attractive resume. Through group work, presentations, and poetry performances, students in my various classes also practice effective oral communication, exploring concepts such as pronunciation, intonation, and pace. Finally, in addition to writing and speaking, my students learn to use technology to communicate effectively. By the end of most of my courses, students can send and receive e-mail, perform research on the Internet, exchange ideas on an asynchronous discussion forum, and build a World Wide Web page. MethodsMy teaching methods reflect my educational philosophy in
that they encourage students to teach themselves. Through various resources,
exercises, assignments, travel opportunities, and assessment tools, I provide
students with guided experience. |
Research |
Articles in Journals"The
Paperboy Turned Novelist: Thomas Wolfe and Journalism." The Thomas Wolfe Review,
forthcoming. "Flight
into Fancy: Poe's Discovery of the Right Brain." The Southern Literary Journal 33:2 (Spring 2001): 62-79.
Articles in Books"The
Short Story, Beginnings to 1900."The Companion to Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2001. Presentations"The Paperboy Turned Novelist: Thomas Wolfe and Journalism." Annual meeting of Thomas Wolfe Society. Burlington, Vermont. June 6, 2003. "Teaching
Literature Online: A New Twist on Student-centered Learning." The Teaching Literature
Conference. Rutgers University. New Brunswick, New Jersey. March
24, 2001. OtherDeveloping and
Implementing Service-Learning Programs.New Directions for Higher
Education 114
(Summer 2001): 45-50. Co-editor with Bruce W. Speck. |
SummaryLike my teaching interests, my research centers on American literature. Within this broad field, I sometimes focus on antebellum and Southern literature. I also work in the field of the English language. My interests in American literature and the English language have come together in two projects relating to the literary creative process. In one of these projects, I have drawn on modern neurological research to examine the role of Edgar Allan Poe's right brain in his artistic method. Details of Poe's life and work--including his fascination with music, dreams, and the "Imp of the Perverse"--suggest that he possessed an extraordinary right cerebral hemisphere. By exploring these details in light of both current and nineteenth-century models of the divided brain, I have tried to expose the process by which Poe used his unusual brain and his knowledge of phrenology to produce works unique in their visual imagery, musicality, surreal details, emotional appeals, and potent effect on readers. More recently, I have turned my attention to the creative processes of a very different group of authors. From Captain John Smith to Janet Cook, many American writers have dabbled in both fact and fiction. Some, such as Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, achieved fame for journalistic fiction. Others, including Cook and Steven Glass, became infamous for their fictional journalism. Drawing on my own experience as a journalist, as well as my background in linguistics, I have begun to explore the forces that have driven so many American journalists to turn from writing fact to writing fiction. One of these forces, I believe, is purely rhetorical: in terms of syntax--and, more broadly, style--writing fiction is easier than writing journalism because the fiction writer can invent the necessary details to create a style that fulfills readers' rhetorical expectations, while the journalist--at least an ethical one--must write within the confines of the facts. Since becoming a professor, I also have done some work in pedagogy, particularly in the areas of Web-enhanced instruction and service-learning. Having taught a number of online and Web-enhanced courses, I am interested in how the recent explosion of technology can create a richer learning experience for college students. While many teachers and students seem to think only about what the Internet can bring into the classroom, I focus on what it can send out. In a recent presentation called "Real Work" and an upcoming article called "The Internet in Service-Learning," I have examined ways that the Internet allows students to find an audience for their research and writing. This notion of using the Internet to connect students with the outside world lies at the heart of All American: Literature, History, and Culture, a World Wide Web site I created and edit. Designed to serve as a clearinghouse for credible information about American subjects, this student-produced site contains biographical outlines, critical notes, and bibliographies on some 30 American writers, along with essays on American history and culture, historical chronologies, a reference guide to American literature, and online quizzes. It has been recognized by homeworkspot.com and http://www.top20americanliterature.com/. |
Service |
Presentations"The
Horror! The Horror!" University of North Carolina at Pembroke. October 2001.
CommitteesAd Hoc
Committee on Continuing Education Units. UNCP. Fall 2003. Program
Committee. South
Atlantic Modern Language Association. Spring 2003-present. Administrative
Fellows Committee. Chairman.
UNCP. Fall 1999-present. Executive Steering Committee. Southern American Studies Association. Fall 2000-Fall 2002. Search
Committee for ETL Librarian. UNCP. Spring 2001. Search
Committee for Reference Librarian. UNCP. Fall 2000. OtherMentor. North Carolina Teaching Fellows.
UNCP. 2000-present. |
SummaryI welcome opportunities to strengthen my university, especially in the areas of technology, faculty development, and recruitment efforts. As one who has seen technology enhance his teaching in exciting and productive ways, I have been pleased to share my discoveries in faculty development workshops sponsored by the university's Teaching and Learning Center. In these workshops, as well as one I gave to my colleagues in the English department, I discussed tools such as electronic course packs and student Web projects. I also been part of an effort to improve technology resources in education. For example, I have represented my university in two technology planning sessions sponsored by the University of North Carolina General Administration. As chair of my department's Instructional Resources Committee, I have helped coordinate a number of developments related to our department's library and computer labs. This year, for example, our library is becoming part of the university's library system, and my committee is revising and creating policies on circulation and acquisition. When I am sold on something--be it a book, a teaching technique, or a whole university--I enjoy sharing my enthusiasm for it with others. As the chief developer of my department's World Wide Web site, I cooperated with two colleagues to build an resource that I hope will, among other things, attract students to a strong department characterized by talented, dedicated faculty and a well-rounded curriculum. As a member of my department's Graduate Committee on English Education, I have helped to revise our graduate program to make it even more rewarding and rigorous. In particular, I have taken a leading role in the development of a new Capstone Experience, in which Master of Arts candidates must prepare a teaching portfolio and presentation. Finally, I have played an active role in attracting strong eductors to our campus. In the fall, I chaired a search for the university's new associate provost for outreach and served on committees that hired a new composition instructor and a new librarian. |