Childhood and Youth Studies student Glenisha Austin-Clarke got the unique opportunity to complete her practicum at her alma mater Elmwood School – who were so delighted to have her back, they featured her in the school newsletter! 

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A group of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students took home top awards at CityStudio’s 2024 Event on April 12.

Held at the end of each academic year, HUBBUB is a networking event and exhibit showcasing a curated selection of student projects from each of the participating institutions.

At the event, students with top projects from each institution pitched their project or spoke about their CityStudio experience. Submitted projects are judged by a committee of one professor or faculty member from each institution and one City staff representative. The projects are scored for innovation, impact, scalability and problem-solving.

Childhood and Youth Studies students in the Critical Approaches to Child Development course taught by Prof. Alexandra Arraiz Matute (Interdisciplinary Studies)  produced resources for Ottawa Public Health’s youth engagement strategy, and some of the groups submitted their work to a city-wide competition.

Students from the course won the top ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ award and also placed in the top 12 groups amongst submissions from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, University of Ottawa, and Algonquin College.

Project The SATURN Method: Self Advocacy for Children and Youth in the Healthcare Setting, led by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students Chloe Sykes, Will Bordeleau, Jemma Woschitz, and Natasha Kislev were among the winning groups.

Group member Chloe Sykes says the experience helped her realize her aspirations to positively impact the youth healthcare system.

Kate Belanger, a student in the group recognized as one of the top 12 city-wide, says the experience inspired her to continue her community efforts.

Mayor Sutcliffe congratulated all participants noting that CityStudio is a platform to share ideas, bring together different perceptions, and build meaningful relationships across organizations for mutual benefit. 

is a partnership between the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, City of Ottawa, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, and the University of Ottawa. It aims to explore municipal challenges from different perspectives by bringing together students, faculty and City staff.

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The Raven Saxophone Quartet will be competing in the semifinals of the International Chamber Ensemble Competition at the New England Conservatory in Boston on March 7, 2020.

The Music Department’s saxophone Instructor and Director of Saxophone Ensembles (including The Raven Saxophone Quartet), Mike Tremblay says the Quartet has achieved this amazing feat through talent, diligence, and fantastic chemistry.   

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Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

— Plato, Republic 536e

Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities, Gregory MacIsaac must have been aware of these words when he held a very non-traditional course on the fourth-century Greek philosopher, Plato.

Professor MacIsaac ventured outside the confines of the classroom by offering two of his undergraduate students, Joey Baker and Ekaterina Huybregts, course credit to meet for weekly discussion and debate on the final two of three Platonic dialogues, Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist, that MacIsaac had been working on for the better part of a decade.

This learning model was non-traditional in many senses – Huybregts and Baker weren’t required to write exams or hand in papers, and were graded solely on the quality of their discussion; meetings were held once a week in MacIsaac’s office, instead of a classroom; while formally a series of directed studies courses, the three held a continuous meetings for a year and a half, working even through the summer. “I just happened upon this course set-up without really choosing it consciously,” said MacIsaac. “I did choose a discussion format, but once we agreed to make our meetings open-ended we found it possible to have an incredible depth of discussion, because we could take our talks in whichever direction we liked for as long as we liked. Sometimes we’d spend an hour and a half on a single paragraph. We could look at both the forest and the trees.” Early on their plan became to continue reading and discussing until they finished the two dialogues that MacIsaac had left to work on, however long that would take.

MacIsaac knew that Parmenides and Sophist were two of Plato’s most complex dialogues and quickly realized how much his own research would benefit from his students’ two additional perspectives.

“A Platonic dialogue is a philosophical conversation where different ideas are put into the mouths of different speakers,” explained MacIsaac. “So in order to see why particular ideas are expressed, you have to think about the dramatic setting, the characters, and minor details like jokes. Plato doesn’t come right out and tell you what perspective to adopt in reading the dialogues, conveying it instead through his dramatic details, and these require interpretation. Kat and Joey’s insights were invaluable, often leading me in directions I very likely would not have taken on my own.”

MacIsaac gave structure to their conversations by supplying an overarching interpretation of the dialogues. Against most scholars, MacIsaac contends that Plato is presenting his predecessors’ ideas in Theaetetus and Parmenides, in order to show how his own theories are superior, in Sophist. This dialogue, he thinks, is a sort of justification of all of Plato’s philosophy.

“We were continually testing whether my overall interpretation could make sense of each part of the argument. But along the way Plato discusses what knowledge is, how material objects participate in ideal forms, the character of true and false language, and the catalogue of fundamental metaphysical concepts,” said MacIsaac. “By figuring out these dialogues, Joey, Kat and I had to think about all of these topics. So we were also learning how to think about core philosophical ideas.”

In assisting MacIsaac with his reading of the dialogues, the students themselves were learning how to read a rhetorically sophisticated text. “If you have an entire dialogue, like Theaetetus, that tries to figure out what knowledge is, but ends in failure, you have to ask yourself why Plato would write something like that. Are the theories in it Plato’s own or someone else’s? These two possibilities yield completely different philosophical results, so it presents you with demanding interpretive as well as intellectual hurdles,” said MacIsaac.

Although the subject matter was challenging, the three were able to concoct an effective research and learning setting.

“It was very informal and comfortable. I sat on one couch while Joey and Kat sat facing me on the other. Normally, I would begin by giving a recap of what we discussed the previous week. Then we would read the next section of text together. If there were any tricky words or phrases, I would consult the Greek text. Finally, we would discuss what we read,” said MacIsaac.

Their discussion always focused on how the argument of the 200 pages of text worked. The group would often struggle to decipher Plato’s meanings in the paragraph they had most recently read, but more often than not, they were also figuring out how the text fit into Plato’s argument as a whole.

“Plato gives seven different definitions of a sophist in the dialogue Sophist,” explained MacIsaac. “It’s not enough to understand each definition on its own. You have to ask why there are seven of them and why they are given in that particular order. Do the later ones replace the earlier ones or are they complementary? How do the definitions which make up the first half of the dialogue relate to the abstract metaphysical investigation of Being and Non-Being in the second half of the dialogue?”

Everyone who has every urged us to say just how many beings there are and what they are like…appear to me to have been telling us a myth, as if we were children. One tells us that there are three beings, and that sometimes they’re somehow at war with each other, while at other times they become friendly, marry, give birth, and bring up their offspring. Another one says that there are two beings, wet and dry or hot and cold…And our Eleatic tribe…tells us their myth on the assumption that what they call ‘all things’ are just one.

— Plato, Sophist 242c-d

What do you signify when you say the word ‘Being’? Obviously you’ve known for a long time. We thought we did, but now we’re confused about it. So first teach it to us, so we won’t think we understand what you’re saying when just the contrary is the case.

— Plato, Sophist 244a

Considering these dialogues have been grappled with for two millennia, carrying on an exhaustive discussion of them was not a light task. The two students began reading Plato in September of 2014 and kept reading each week, with a few interruptions, until they finished Sophist and Parmenides, in the summer of 2016 – a week after they both had graduated.

“The directed studies experience gave me the opportunity to read and think in a much more focused way than in any other aspect of my degree,” reflected Baker. “Having the study structured by Professor MacIsaac’s own career-length research project provided an especially unique and advanced opportunity to become a better student of Plato in particular, without the years of work and responsibility involved in conceiving and executing such a project.”

“I doubt I could have learned nearly as much about philosophical method or any particular subject matter in a regular course, seminar or tutorial at the undergraduate level.”

Both the students and professor found this non-traditional learning and teaching undertaking to be very rewarding in a variety of capacities. “A big advantage of this way of working was that we were not pressed for time. The dialogues that we read were very complex and contained many obscure passages. Sometimes we spent an entire session on a single paragraph, or even on a few lines. Because the work was open-ended — early on we decided to keep on reading together as long as they were both in town — we could spend the time we needed to get to the nitty-gritty of things,” said MacIsaac.

MacIsaac asserts that they did just that. He believes there was not a single part of their readings that they did not come to fruitful conclusions about. Reading closely together without a timetable made for a truly creative collaboration of three minds.

“In a nutshell, we had the intellectual satisfaction that comes from really getting to the bottom of something,” said MacIsaac, “which of course requires spending as much time as it takes to figure each problem out.”

The students also found this format satisfying. “Participating in such a close directed study of Plato with Professor MacIsaac gave me insight into what research in academic philosophy could be like,” said Huybregts, “Being a part of a project of this size and at this level gave me skills and confidence that I will carry into all of my future projects, regardless of the subject matter.”

The thoroughness of their discussions has paid dividends. MacIsaac recorded every session, fifty hours of slow, methodical work through the dialogues, that he plans to hire a work-study student to transcribe. When added to his already completed efforts on the first of the three dialogues, this will allow him to produce a solid first draft of a book-length commentary on Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist. The transcription won’t yet be a final text, and will have to be cut down quite a bit, but it will provide a thorough philosophical core for his interpretation of Plato’s argument.

Concurrently, he is also working on a final draft of a textbook on how to write a university paper, called The Humanities Writing Guide. This textbook will be based on his work in HUMS 1200 Humanities and Classical Civilization, which is a required writing course in the Bachelor of Humanities program.

With this course now in his rear view mirror, and Huybregts and Baker both pursuing post-undergraduate ventures, MacIsaac maintains that the format he and his two students used could be a more common undergraduate practice given the right circumstances. He believes the key ingredient is highly motivated and engaged students who are interested in pursuing a longer-term scholarly journey.

He has already signed up a few new students and a retired professor of English for a challenge a little further from his own research, Heidegger’s Being and Time, which they plan to begin reading this September.

*The image in the banner is a panoramic view of Professor MacIsaac’s office — the meeting place for MacIsaac, Baker, and Huybregts.

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Despite the fact that the English Department’s Creative Writing Concentration was only formally established in 2011, the English Department at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ has a longstanding tradition of encouraging students in their creative-writing efforts. For many years, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s English Department has offered creative-writing workshops in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and stage-and-screen writing. Additionally, students have benefited from encounters with faculty members who went out of their way to mentor students and to provide them with unique opportunities for exposing their work within Ottawa’s vibrant literary scene.

Given the richness of the creative-writing curriculum, the numerous opportunities to form networks with fellow writers and literature enthusiasts, and the mentorship provided by a warm and engaged faculty, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s English Department is the perfect environment for aspiring writers to flourish. The following publications by current students and alumni serve as a testament to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s creative-writing accomplishments.

, for example, completed a Combined Honours degree in English and Film Studies; he followed up this undergraduate degree with a at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Today he is an author, ghostwriter, and writing coach; as he put it, writing is his life on three different fronts. The works under his own name include the YA fiction trilogy , instructional writing manuals such as , and children’s picture books such as . Johns has also co-authored many additional works in his role as ghostwriter for various clients who, he explains, “have ideas to share with the world but who don’t necessarily have the skillset to get them written.” For those people who want to see their ideas bear fruit in their own words but need assistance in completing their writing projects, Johns offers his services as a writing coach. As he explains, “I work one-on-one with writers to help them identify their goals, develop plans for achieving those objectives, and then provide support and accountability as they work towards them. Writing a novel is a long, lonely process and having a coach in your corner to cheer you on, providing tips on the craft of writing, and monitoring progress can be enormously valuable. I find it endlessly rewarding to work with aspiring authors and help them improve their writing, reach their goals, and achieve the success they deserve.”

Johns developed the skills that he parlayed into a career during his studies at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. He still recalls with appreciation the breadth of the literature courses he took as an undergraduate at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. Indeed, Johns was so pleased with his undergraduate experience in the English program that he ignored the common wisdom that one ought to earn one’s degrees at different institutions and decided to remain at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ for his MA degree. Johns also speaks highly of the faculty members he encountered during his time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´: “Instructors such as Professors Jodie Medd, Arnd Bohm, and Brian Johnson were all fantastic teachers and mentors throughout my academic career.” One of the most important beliefs that Johns says he took away from his studies at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ is that literature matters. “Art isn’t just a part of culture,” he elaborates, “but rather the very substance from which culture is formed. Literary scholars take their work very seriously, and that is as it should be. The respect and rigour with which art is studied in the English program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ inspired me to follow my own artist pursuits and gave me confidence that a writing career is a worthy one.”

Like Johns, completed both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. The former, completed between 2005 and 2009, was in English Literature; the latter, completed between 2010 and 2012, was in . Ladouceur has published a series of poetry chapbooks and a critically acclaimed poetry collection titled . Published by the Toronto publishing firm Coach House Books, the collection was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Ladouceur traces his decision to become a poet to his experience at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´. Recalling “The Poetry of Witness” course taught by Professor Brenda Vellino and “The Montreal Modernists” seminar taught by Professor Collett Tracey, he notes that “those classes seemed like the only places in the world where I could find human beings who had substantial respect for poetry as a medium.” Ladouceur notes further that Professor Tracey has had a meaningful impact on his life as a writer: “She taught me (and so many others) not to study literature from a distance, but to consider myself an aspiring member of the Canadian literary continuum. I learned from her that a poem might be best responded to not with an essay but with another poem.”

During his time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Ladouceur served as an editor of In/Words magazine and participated regularly in the English Literary Society’s Monday night writers’ circles. When the Monday night group grew too crowded, he personally hosted a second writers’ circle on Wednesday evenings. “I enjoyed all of it,” he recalls, “and many of my dearest friends come from that world.” The poetry he produced during this time was shortlisted twice for the English Department’s George Johnston Prize. But the most important lesson Ladouceur claims to have learned during his time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ is the notion that writers are simply people who write. As he explains, “There’s no specific appearance or personality or temperament that writers have in common. The only thing they all do is write. So if you want to be one, you have to do that.”

Another ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ graduate who is passionate about poetry is . Clarke completed her with a Major in English between 2004 and 2008, and like Ladouceur, she considers Professor Brenda Vellino’s poetry courses as having played a key role in her development as a writer. As Clarke recalls, “I was taking a Bachelor of Humanities concurrently, and though I loved learning about Aristotle, Heidegger, and the Bhagavad Gita, I felt an electric pull towards the poetry taught in Professor Vellino’s poetry course. This poetry was modern, diverse and closely engaged with current social and political issues. Professor Vellino not only exposed me to new ideas, but also encouraged me to pursue my own particular interests within the scope of the class.” She felt similarly about Professor Dana Dragunoiu’s fourth-year seminar on Nabokov; she likes to joke that “Her inspiring teaching and breadth of knowledge actually fooled me into thinking for a while that I might also want to be an academic!” ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ her general experience as an English student at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Clarke commented, “I was already in love with reading, writing and poetry in particular well before I went to ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, but my time there solidified and reshaped that love. I was introduced to so many texts that still resonate with me today and shape the subject matter of my poetry.” Since graduating from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Clarke has earned a Master’s in English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and has made her publishing debut with a collection of poems titled . Published by ECW Press, the collection provides (to quote a review from The National Post) “nuanced examinations of the relationships between people and animals, domesticity and the wild.” More recently, Clarke has spent time in Texas and Alabama doing research and finding inspiration for her second collection of poems.

Another alumnus of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s English Department who has done a significant amount of travel for his creative-writing projects is . After graduating from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in 2006, Thom attended a clown school in Vancouver. His education in a wide range of creative media—literature, music, and the performing arts—provided him with a unique skillset that he has placed into the service of a career as a performance artist.

When studying English Literature at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Thom enjoyed especially reading and learning about Victorian authors who also specialized in children’s writing, such as Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll, and more recent children’s writers such as Shel Silverstein. The whimsical nature of these writers’ works appealed to Thom and served as inspiration for the characters at the heart of Thom’s work as musician, storyteller and puppeteer. In addition to being the founder of Beat Creatures (furry drums for kids), Thom writes children’s books that are at once light-hearted and educational. His most recent endeavours include the heartwarming children’s book and a debut seven-song album titled Snowdragons. Thom speaks fondly of his time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´; he recalls with affection the warmth and encouragement of faculty and peers he met not only in his courses, but also in poetry clubs and late-night music sessions hosted by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Music Department.

Like Thom, is no stranger to branching out creatively. Hanson-Finger completed his BA with a Combined Honours in English and Communications in 2009 and an MA in English a year later. One of his favourite aspects of his English degree is the wide range of critical and theoretical approaches he encountered in his courses. At the time, he admits, he was under the impression that most programs offered such a breadth of perspectives, but after speaking with students at other universities he discovered otherwise. He recalls being intellectually invigorated by the theory courses he took with Professors Brian Johnson and Rob Holton as well as the creative-writing workshops he took with Professor Armand Ruffo and ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s 2007 Writer-in-Residence Ivan Coyote. He remembers with special vividness an insight shared with the class by Coyote: paraphrasing an unknown author, Coyote told the class that “in the same manner as leaving your tap running to flush out rusty water, you should write until it runs clear.”

During his time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, Hanson-Finger won the George Johnston Prize in 2009. This led to the inclusion of his prize-winning poem in Susan McMaster’s anthology Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry, a collection of poetry that also featured the work of Margaret Atwood. Since completing his studies, Hanson-Finger has written two long essays for the online journal Puritan and a short story titled “Microcosm” for the online magazine Joyland. He also served as co-editor of the online literary magazine Dragnet. As a technical writer at Shopify, he considers the writing and editing skills he acquired at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ as key assets. He is also in the process of putting the final touches on a novel provisionally titled Death and the Intern. Scheduled to be released by Invisible Press in the spring of 2017, the novel takes place in Ottawa and is in equal parts hospital drama and hardboiled fiction.

Though only in her fourth year of study as an English major at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, is already an accomplished writer. Her novella Psychomachia has been shortlisted for the 2015 Ken Klonsky novella prize and is under contract with Quattro Books. Additionally, she has a short story forthcoming in The Antigonish Review and has published a poem in The Steel Chisel. Fejzić describes her time at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ enthusiastically: “I have grown, I have blossomed and I can smell the perfume of literary success,” she observes optimistically. A member of the newly established Creative Writing Concentration, Fejzić has taken all of the creative writing workshops offered by the English department and found them to be very instructive: “The workshops were a place for exploration, experimentation and personal development.” She has high praise for the workshops led by writers Nadia Bozak, Mark Frutkin and Rick Taylor especially, noting that each of these instructors created a unique classroom atmosphere and rich learning trajectory.

Like Ladouceur before her, Fejzić serves as co-editor of In/Words magazine, where she says she has learned a lot about publishing. Together with her co-editors Jenny Greenberg, Geoff Bates, and Drew Douglas, Fejzić has launched a number of chapbooks and will also be launching In/Words’ first-ever themed edition in collaboration with Lisa Rochefort, editor of Arc Poetry magazine. Fejzić takes a very practical approach to writing, explaining that for her writing has to be worked at on a daily basis and is not a process to be romanticized to the point of allowing for writer’s block to slow down one’s productivity. “Finding the right words is supposed to be a struggle, but this can be experienced in a positive light,” she explains, “I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that writing must become a habit before it can become art.”

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Read Erin’s Bio

It’s four a.m., if time can still be said to have a meaning—as of late, it has seemed, to you, to move by deadlines instead of hours, in fits and starts. You sit at your desk, which seems to have developed a fortification of books around its outer border — (“What even are those?” says your friend, a Criminology major, when you plop six ponderous tomes onto the café table. It seems as if the earth itself rattles as they touch down, and you wonder, as a cloud of dust rises from the stack, if you have made a wise decision in unearthing these words. “I haven’t used a source that isn’t available online since I started my degree.”

You tremble, eyes watering. These tears could be dust or sadness. You no longer know.) — inside the walls of your book-prison, loose journal article print-outs have mixed with Tim Horton’s wrappers and post-it notes. The kettle is always on; your very sweat and tears of despair have become a caffeine concentrate. The computer holds a universe that is more real than the world around you; your body twists toward its bright blue light, as if asking for nourishment, or benediction. You can no longer recall the warm touch of the sun.

Somewhere amongst the blurring lines of your readings on postmodernism, you have become convinced that nothing is real—you are not real. Why are you writing? What are you writing? Hands move across the keyboard, but they no longer belong to you.

You enter a kind of fugue state; when you next look up, you find that the essay is done. You go to put on your coat, only to find that you are already in it. Outside, snow collects on the ground. You could have sworn it was spring, but perhaps you have woken up in a different time, a parallel universe.

As you move across the whitened plain, someone calls to you (is that your name that they shape with their foreign lips? You check the paper in your hand; perhaps it can tell you). You try to communicate—you have been on a journey, although you are not sure where you have been. The words in your hand must be sacrificed to a tower in the distance. This quest seems to have been given to you in a dream, or in another world; you vaguely recall that this person was there with you. You feel that you have not always been as you are now.

Your companion disappears. You go on.

A chill wind carries you to your destination. Inside the building, you press a button, and hope to be carried upward. You hear screams from the elevator shaft, but when the doors open, no one is there. Someone has written “this is the worst elevator” onto the ceiling. There are smudges beside the words. You do not know if it is blood.

You make it to your destination safely. Standing beside a small slot in the wall, you scan the pages in your hand, but don’t seem to remember writing the words on the page. You submit it anyway. There is no indication that the wall approves of your sacrifice.

Your quest is complete, but you feel no sense of relief, of resolution. You go back home; you are not sure if your books have rearranged themselves while you were away. From the corner of your eye, you seem to catch a strange glow emanating from under the front cover of one particularly audacious volume; you know this portal must be entered, but tomorrow, tomorrow. For now, you clear yourself a nesting-space amongst your papers, and close your eyes. The world goes dark. You are not sure you will wake up again. Your last thought is of a desperate hope: that there will indeed be a tomorrow, in a recognizable universe, with a recognizable you inside it.

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