Professor Kanina Holmes has won a Teaching Achievement Award. She was one of five instructors at Carleton to be selected for this honour by the Provost and a committee of former award winners.
The award comes with a $15,000 grant in recognition of excellence in teaching and to provide financial support for innovative teaching and development projects at Carleton. Prof. Holmes won the award for her proposal to run a collaborative, experiential and digital learning opportunity in the Yukon where she has lived and worked as a journalist for CBC radio and television.
The territory and nearby northern British Columbia are still filled with traces of past dreams of gold and the stories of the people who migrated here only to find unexpected riches.
The one-month half-credit field course at the 4000-level would be open to both senior undergraduate and graduate journalism majors as well as a mix of students from other programs. Prof. Holmes hopes to run this course in the summer of 2017 under the theme of reconciliation, in recognition of a call to action issued by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to rebalance the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.
“The painful recollections of witness after witness at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made it clear there is a multi-generational legacy of residential school abuse. The wounds left by neglect, abuse and ignorance are still raw and they infect even those who never set foot in the state-sponsored and church-run institutions mandated with crushing Aboriginal culture. For decades, political and popular narratives have excluded or diminished the ability of many Canadians to see Aboriginal people as full citizens with equal rights. Those narratives are starting to change and I see this course as one approach to telling a different, more honest, more accountable story,” says Prof. Holmes.
The curriculum will be designed in consultation with Yukon First Nations and will give students and Yukon youth the chance to reflect on the meaning of reconciliation. Students will be based in the Yukon capital, Whitehorse, with several field trips in the territory during the month to give students a chance to explore and start understanding, firsthand, what life is like in Canada’s North. The students’ research and experiences will be reflected in multimedia projects.
A trip to the Yukon would not be complete without a hike up the King’s Throne, overlooking the shores of Kathleen Lake.
This project represents a long-time dream of Prof. Holmes to find a way to connect the journalism program with her love of all things North.
Prof. Holmes hopes this initiative will become the first of many summers of experiential learning in the North that, in future iterations, could also explore the themes of climate change, political engagement and Northern culture. Ideally, this course will also mark the beginning of an exchange between both Carleton and Northern students.
Anyone who is interested in learning more about this initiative is asked to contact Prof. Holmes directly at: kanina.holmes@carleton.ca
Monday, February 8, 2016 in Journalism News, News
Share: Twitter, Facebook
