August 4, 2009 – The following interview was conducted with Dr. Dennis Sumara earlier this month by telephone; he will take up his new position in September 2009.

Q:. Can you trace the origins of your interest in education?

DS: My parents were immigrants to Canada post-World War II and, like many of their situation, understood the importance of education. It was a story many of us heard as immigrant children: go to school, listen to your teachers, study hard and go to university. My parents were not teachers but they were certainly avid learners. As immigrants to Canada, they had to learn a new language and a wide variety of new skills. In my own research with texts and readers, I refer to this commitment as “effortful practice”— a fascination with what can happen when one engages in the difficult work of learning something outside of one’s already established repertoires of knowledge and/or skill.

To my parents’ dismay, I wasn’t convinced I would attend university. It was the ’70s, a time when young people weren’t so concerned about future employment. Many of us didn’t immediately attend college or university: we travelled or worked for a few years. But I was an only child who knew that university meant everything to my parents, so I enrolled at the University of Lethbridge the year after graduating from high school, believing that I’d attend for only one year.

To my surprise, I found the experience tremendously engaging. I was introduced to experts in fields of study I hadn’t even known existed — anthropology, psychology and sociology —none of which I’d studied in high school. It was fascinating to read books that helped me better understand my personal situation and experience through these theoretical and conceptual lenses.

There are two educational experiences during that first year of university that I now can see were very important to my own ongoing learning. One of my first courses was in the field of anthropology, given by a young, enthusiastic professor who challenged us to read and interpret Erving Goffman’s text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Reading and interpreting that text helped me begin to examine at my personal situation from what we would now call a cultural studies perspective. For our final paper, we were to conduct an ethnographic analysis of a “sub-culture” of which we were aware. I elected to write about the ways in which the gay men in rural small-urban southern Alberta created their own community and understanding of themselves as a social unit. It was at that time I realized the value of bringing historical, theoretical and methodological tools to questions we have about lived experience. The paper I wrote exceeded what I thought I knew and, in a small way, was a contribution to knowledge. That experience created for me an interest in anthropology and sociology — fields that continue to influence my academic career.

A second experience I remember from my first year of university was the course I took from an acclaimed Milton scholar who developed much of our first year English course around his book The First Line of Paradise Lost. I recall animated seminars he conducted with a lecture hall full of students, all of us engaged with him in discussing and debating the possible meanings of aspects of the text being studied. There wasn’t much discussion about our own situations — which I remember finding oddly satisfying.

Looking back, I realize that year was when I became fascinated by the practice of close reading — that is, the educational process that occurs when you study something very deeply, giving attention to the fine-grained details of the genre being studied. During my third year at the University of Lethbridge, I enrolled in a community-based course, working in a school for students with various learning challenges. I enjoyed that experience and, so, I decided to complete two degrees, a BA (English and Drama) and a B.Ed.

My first teaching position was in Taber, Alberta in 1980, where I taught junior-high English language arts for ten years. Early on, I realized I had to rely on what I knew about language and literature to get me through those first two or three years of teaching. It’s very difficult to have two effortful practices going on at one time — for example, learning to teach and learning your subject matter at the same time — so I was grateful I already had that strength in literary and dramatic studies. That disciplinary expertise helped me to develop a strong literary studies focus to my teaching of adolescent students, which I now know is what made them enjoy the classes enough to both attend regularly and behave reasonably well. When students find the work interesting, meaningful and challenging, there tend to be very few behavioural problems.

But there were other problems. I noticed there were some students in Grades 7, 8 and even 9 who were struggling readers and, as a result, were having many challenges with the school curriculum. Although I knew how to study literature, I was not so confident about how to teach reading, so I went back to university during the mid-’80s to take courses in reading instruction, with an emphasis on how to help students who were having difficulties with decoding and/or comprehending texts. This proved to be enormously helpful in my work with struggling readers. Mostly, I learned that teachers must become very knowledgeable about research in learning and, through their practice, discern how this research influences teaching.

After ten years of teaching in Taber, I completed my Master’s of Education degree with a focus on effective whole-language teaching. In the process, I realized that academic work helped me enormously to understand my own teaching — why some things worked and others didn’t. I became excited by the process of conducting research and creating new knowledge about learning and teaching, something that all teachers do to some degree throughout their practices, but seldom have time to fully explore or share with others.

I completed my PhD in curriculum studies at the University of Alberta. My dissertation focused on a study of the literary imagination and the curriculum. The book emerging from that study is entitled Private Readings in Public: Schooling the Literary Imagination.

Q: You seem to have a great love for literature and for keeping it in the classroom.

DS: I am fascinated by how engagement with literature — and not just print texts — can be very important places of learning, for individuals and for societies. We keep track of who we are through our literary texts. Some of these books are completely inscribed in our belief systems: consider Shakespeare’s works, for example. We know about these literary texts, even if we haven’t read them; there are so many metaphors and images from them that have become part of our everyday experience.

I also believe literary texts are created in such a way that they represent not just what happened, but how events are experienced. When people learn how to engage with these works, they can have very interesting learning experiences through identifications with characters and their situations. The experience is vicarious, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When I think back to my personal experience, I can recall that as a child in a working-class neighbourhood, I was able to access many books from the public library. Those weekly visits to exchange books became a portal into other worlds and experiences.

Of course, film, theatre, poetry and even reality TV work in a similar fashion. They offer readers/viewers opportunities to think about processes and practices of identification, and how these contribute their own sense of personal and cultural identity. Educators take those experiences and study them. We want to know how texts (print and non-print) work, and how readers/viewers work on those texts.

Q: Your spouse works in the area of mathematics education. How have the two of you been able to collaborate in your research activities?

DS: My spouse and research partner Brent Davis is interested in the historical and conceptual emergence of mathematics as a symbol system, with a particular interest in how the teachers of mathematics (at all levels) work with their students to use and create mathematics and mathematical knowledge. All of us live in a world that’s organized by different sorts of mathematical images, procedures and practices — but because these have become part of our cultural commonsense, we seldom notice their influences or effects.

It’s been fascinating for me to observe how Brent and his colleagues work with experienced teachers to make explicit the specific images, metaphors and assumptions that orient conceptual knowledge about mathematics. Through fine-grained explorations of responses to simple questions like “What’s multiplication?”, researchers and teachers become aware that certain ideas are embedded in our cultural mindset about multiplication. These ideas are culturally specific and they vary across cultures. My point here is that all these ideas are present in the school curriculum, but because they’re so ubiquitous, we’re often unaware of how they function to organize our perception and thinking.

My colleagues and I who work in literary studies do exactly the same thing with a literary text. We study texts, readers and contexts of reader, the tensions among the conflicting images and metaphors in the school curriculum, why they create one mindset and not another. Research in education has created a body of knowledge that reveals how people in different disciplines and practices interpret these tensions, and how better learning conditions may be created by teachers. What can we do in a classroom context, in the workplace, in a leadership context, in adult learning, to create conditions for robust learning?

Until recently, we’ve pursued this question by studying individual learners with particular attention to their different histories and experiences of learning. Along with many other colleagues in the field of education, Brent and I have conducted research that focuses on how groups, collectives and institutions learn. Of course, we do that all the time, since we’re part of social collectives in the first place. In fact, our individual identities are made possible because we engage with other people. We’re also seeing that a school itself can be a learner, the university a learner and a learning community, but much depends on how well institutions communicate internally and how well they adapt and respond to new learning challenges.

Q: How does a Faculty of Education best prepare its graduating students for increasingly diverse classrooms?

DS: Whether in K-12 or other contexts, classrooms have always been diverse and complex. We seem to think that yesterday’s classrooms were less so, but the fact is that all students arrive to the classroom with very different experiences.

That said, we still must understand the relationship between a few different types of diversity that are present in any learning environment. Experiential diversity and disciplinary diversity are related, but in education we think about them in different ways. Experiential diversity is created in Canada through our many languages, cultures, beliefs and traditions. In educational settings, we support a number of disciplines that inform our understanding of experiential diversity — sciences, languages, literacies, fine arts, social science and so on. As well, we have other areas of scholarship such as women’s and gender studies and cultural studies that have been very influential in showing us the links between those other disciplines.

Today’s teachers must have a strong initial teacher education to understand both experiential and disciplinary diversity. My own experience of 30 years of teaching within public schools and university contexts is that this vast knowledge that teachers seem to need can seem overwhelming. I believe that the best way to help students become confident beginning teachers is to help them to develop a deep pedagogical understanding of one or two areas of study. One can learn a tremendous amount that way because it will allow you to see the connections between and among other disciplines and other people. That knowledge can help us to start noticing similarities and differences.

Interdisciplinary scholarship depends on these deep specializations — theoretical, methodological and disciplinary — which we then take forward into shared projects. Groups with deep specialization will always come up with more innovative responses to questions, problems and challenges than will more homogenous groups.

Q: What do you see as your most exciting challenge(s) as you come into your new role as UofC Faculty of Education Dean?

DS: The Faculty of Education is one of University of Calgary’s founding faculties, occupying a very important place in the community and within the University. Our students and faculty members are connected to all sites and forms of education — locally, nationally and internationally. Our faculty is an important educational and research node in the University and the community.

Because of Education’s inherent interdisciplinarity, we are connected to a diversity of ideas and people through our interests in professional education and applied psychology. These connections are not always obvious or well enough supported, and that’s what one of our biggest challenges/opportunities will be as we move forward. We must focus on our strengths in professional and applied learning in education and psychology, acknowledge our assets of core disciplinary knowledge in education, and show how that knowledge both supports and is supported by research and teaching in other faculties.

I’m also very excited to be back in Alberta — which, in terms of education, is one of the most connected places in Canada and the world. The University of Calgary’s Faculty of Education is meaningfully linked with schools, the Alberta Teachers’ Association and with the Ministry of Education, which is one of the reasons that Alberta’s public school students are considered to be some of the highest achieving in the world, particularly in mathematics, science and reading. There is so much connectivity here, which means we can get things done and move decisively on opportunities. I am certain that the University of Calgary will achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s leading universities, and I see the Faculty of Education as participating actively and vigorously in this project.

I was also very pleased to see how well the academic plan for the University of Calgary aligns with the work of the Faculty of Education. We focus on educational research and scholarship that offer a number of different returns to the community: in areas of school, adult and workplace teaching; in school and counselling psychology; in administration and leadership education. I would like our Faculty to consider developing courses for students enrolled in programs in other faculties. It’s been my experience that courses in areas such as curriculum theory and development, program design and assessment, research and theory in pedagogy, counselling psychology, and many others are of great interest to students in other fields of study.

Mostly, I’m looking forward to the challenges of thinking with members of our Faculty about how we will use advances in digital technology and social networking to transform how we conduct our research, archive our established and emerging knowledge, offer our undergraduate and graduate programs, and engage more productively with community. At the present time, we are trying to impose practices associated with earlier technologies on new and emerging ways of learning, using and creating knowledge. We need to understand that the new commonplaces of learning include but are not exclusive to the physical geography of the university. With our already-established research and teaching expertise, I believe the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary will become a world leader in creating and using digital media learning environments, particularly as these apply to our strengths in professional education and applied psychology.

On a more personal note: as someone who took up downhill skiing as a new “effortful practice” several years ago, I am looking forward to the challenges of skiing the Alberta Rocky Mountains!