Arts One is excited to welcome two new instructors to the teaching team for the 2024-25 academic year: Dr. Brianne Orr-Álvarez and Dr. Christine Evans. We spoke to both of them about what sparked their interest in the Arts One program, their pedagogical approaches, and what they hope to bring to the classroom.
Brianne Orr-Álvarez
Dr. Brianne Orr-Álvarez is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the UBC Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies. She has taught in the Arts One program before, in the theme “Authority and Resistance” (2017-19). Dr. Orr-Álvarez discusses her pedagogical approach, highlighting her interest in Latin American resistance literature, and the collaborative spirit that she hopes to bring to and facilitate in the program, and reflects on her past experience teaching in Arts One.
You’ve been teaching at UBC for many years. What attracted you to Arts One?
I was always interested in Arts One because it seemed like a great opportunity to explore works that I wouldn’t normally teach and to learn alongside a team of faculty members from across Arts disciplines. I also find the small class sizes appealing and I love the inclusion of weekly tutorials for peer-led discussions around writing! This gives me a chance to get to know the students better and to see their questions and concerns in context, and it builds confidence and friendships among peers!
What are you excited about teaching in Arts One in the 2024/25 academic year?
I am really excited to teach short stories from the Romance World that bring together different ways of conceiving of our theme “Border Crossings.” For instance, 19th century Spanish author Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “The Red Stockings” explores what happens when a woman attempts to escape her small village in search of a more dynamic future. On the other hand, Italo Svevo’s (Italy) “Abundant Wine,” uses food—through lack and abundance—as a metaphor for personal, social and political themes in 20th century Italy. These short narratives problematize the limitations of their time, and get us thinking creatively about the fluidity of real and metaphorical boundaries.
Your teaching spans the undergraduate Spanish curriculum, and you also focus on Latin American resistance literature in your classes. Could you tell us more about this topic, and how you will bring them into conversation with the themes discussed in the Arts One seminar/lecture?
Yes, I often teach RMST 280: Revolution! (formerly SPAN 280), which explores revolution as evolving concept and practice through the lens of Latin American literature. In Term 2 of Arts One this year, I will lecture on Nicaraguan revolutionary Gioconda Belli’s memoir, The Country Under My Skin (2002). Belli’s memoir brings into focus questions of identity (social class, gender), ideology, and nationhood in the context of armed revolution and change in Nicaragua. The work is also a gateway toward talking about politics today, particularly since some of the key players in the revolution of ’79 continue to influence the political sphere in Nicaragua.
Pedagogically speaking, what do you hope to bring to the Arts One program?
That is a great question! I have a background in language teaching (Spanish), and I think that experience has had a definite impact on how I teach, design courses, and interact (rather dynamically! ha!) with students and peers in the classroom. As an educator, I am deeply committed to fostering innovative, inclusive, and collaborative learning environments that conscientiously build in and on the voices of peers and students and offer various options for student engagement and assessment for diverse learning preferences. In my experience, this approach to teaching and learning leads with empathy and has been key to demonstrating awareness of interculturality and local and global issues and draws directly from the knowledge, interests, and experiences of 21st century university students and faculty.
I understand that you have taught in Arts One before. One of the features of the program is that you guide students through a text that you may never have encountered before, or at least haven’t engaged with in many years. Is there such a text that was especially rewarding to work on?
When I joined the “Authority and Resistance” team (2017-2019), it had been a good 10 years since I had touched Plato’s Republic, and it was the first text we were to teach for that stream!
“I remember preparing so meticulously for our seminar discussions on the work, but when I walked into the classroom and saw the students’ looks of concern and dread (it is a tough text!), I was just like, “ok, who threw the book at the wall at least once while reading it?”. That broke the ice! I ended up finding a number of memes and comic strips dedicated to deconstructing the work, so I used that as an entry point to the text for students.”
Then, they came up with their very own “Plato Strips,” wherein they summarized sections of the text for each other using drawings and brief sentences. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career to date. We found our way through the text together, and there wasn’t a seminar after that week where Plato wasn’t mentioned.
What would you tell a student considering the Arts One program, but who hasn’t yet decided?
Arts One has a reputation of being reading and writing intensive (which it is!), but it also positions students to build on other key university-level skills—active listening, critical thinking, respectful discussion and debate, analysis, reflection—and engage meaningfully in interdisciplinarity and perspective taking in a safe, fun, and dynamic collaborative learning environment from year 1. Most importantly, though, because of the small class sizes and opportunity to engage deeply with other peers in tutorials, the friendships and academic bonds formed in Arts One have the potential to last a lifetime! This alone is a good reason to join the program.
Christine Evans
Dr. Christine Evans is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the UBC Department of Theatre and Film. Dr. Evans is new to teaching in the Arts One program, though she highlights the personal connections she has with Arts One. She looks forward to bringing her work in Cinema Studies into conversation with the program, highlighting broader questions of medium specificity, and the uniqueness of cinema as a medium.
You’ve been teaching at UBC for many years. What attracted you to Arts One?
I’ve always wanted to teach with Arts One! When I first started teaching Cinema Studies at UBC in 2012, a mentor of mine – Brian McIlroy – had just finished a stint with Arts One. All my other Cinema Studies colleagues were jealous of him and he often lamented how much he missed it. Since then, many of my strongest Cinema Studies students have been Arts One alums, as are several of my friends. However, the single thing that most interested me in Arts One is my wife, Chelsea Birks, who took Arts One in 2006. Chelsea is precisely the kind of scholar I want to be when I grow up: pithy, incisive, intellectually brutal, yet unfailingly generous in her approach to films and artworks. Even though she has a Ph.D. and has published extensively on film-philosophy, she still attributes many of her most admirable scholarly qualities to Arts One. That sounds like a hyperbolic lie but I 100% swear it’s not. It’s amazing how often you’ll hear her say, “Oh, I learned that from Arts One” or “I first heard about that idea in Arts One.” The fact that something she did in her first year of undergrad affected her so profoundly and shaped her outlook and love of scholarly pursuits so deeply, is an incredible testament to the program’s excellence, enduring appeal, and inspiring qualities.
What are you excited about teaching in Arts One in the 2024/25 academic year?
I’m super excited to bring some Cinema Studies scholarship to Arts One. Most people are accustomed to interpreting films in terms of their stories, themes, characters, and politics, and, while that’s certainly fun, cinema – like any artform – has so much more to say than just its content. Most of what makes cinema really exciting to study is its form, the ‘how’ of the ‘what.’ If a film makes us laugh, cry, or terrified, we don’t feel those things just because. When we watch a film, the things we know and infer, the meanings that we make, and the feelings we feel are all the result of very skillful formal manipulations. And while many disciplines in the Arts and humanities use films as alternative texts (in the sense of “we don’t have time to read the book, so let’s watch the movie”), cinema is so much more than that. By bringing cinema into the Arts One curriculum, we can learn to ask larger questions about its medium specificity (that is, the things that make cinema different from other art forms) and how this specificity grants cinema a unique perspective on the world it depicts. Cinema is so cool and so different, and I hope to be able to impart this to our students this year.
Your teaching focuses on bringing film theoretical, psychoanalytic, and ideological approaches into conversation with evidence-based scholarly teaching in film and media studies. Could you tell us more about these topics, and how you will connect them to the themes discussed in the Arts One seminar/lecture?
If you ask any of my students what I care about in this world, they will say “film theory” and then they will stop talking. They are correct to do so. Literally the only thing I care about in the universe is film theory. Film theory is essentially a metaphysics of cinema, meaning that it’s not interested in individual film texts, genres, or film artists so much as it’s interested in cinema itself. “Metaphysics” is a philosophical term for “the big questions” – being, knowing, time, space – so film theory is made up of cinema’s “big questions.” If you think this sounds complicated, you’re right! If you think it sounds boring, you’re wrong! And one of the most important lessons that film theory teaches its students is that wanting to know more about something, wanting to understanding something more completely, means admitting to yourself that you will never understand anything totally. As scholars, we pick away at knowledge and truth, but we get into very dangerous territory if we start believing that anything can be absolutely, totally known and understood – even if we really believe those things to be true, even if we can’t imagine a righter, truer, more natural or ‘just’ way of looking at a text, idea, political position, or cultural belief. There’s always more we can uncover, and much of it will clash, conflict, and blend together in confusing ways that demand our close attention. This is a surprisingly challenging lesson to learn. It’s built into film theory’s metaphysical project and it’s a lodestar of my teaching philosophy.
This year’s Arts One theme is border crossings and I think it fits perfectly with this kind of approach that views knowledge as a necessarily unsolvable puzzle box with weird permeable boundaries. The word ‘border’ immediately conjures up geographical (land, sea) or political (state, nation) boundaries that mark where one territory ends and another begins. The act of ‘border crossing’ has many varied associations: trespass or transcendence, legality or illegality, politicized or touristic. But our understanding of physical, national, and imaginary borders are informed by more abstract concepts such as boundaries, absolutes, and transgression. So, for me, this theme conjures up questions like: What does it mean to divide one thing from another? Once divided, can those things only relate to one another on the basis of their separation? How permeable or impermeable are boundaries between self and other, reality and fantasy, human and nonhuman, art and trash, socially acceptable and transgressive behaviour? Once crossed, can a boundary ever be regained? By exploring these related questions, we can enrich our understanding of the many borders that make up our lives, and learn to question what it means to cross the line.
Pedagogically speaking, what do you hope to bring to the Arts One program?
In addition to adding cinema to the curriculum, I’m very intrigued by Arts One’s practice of throwing students into the deep end but then reminding them that they are perfectly capable of swimming. Over the course of the year, though, the students evolve from being capable swimmers to being Olympic swimmers. The texts we study are very challenging – welcome to school, read The Odyssey in a week! – but I think this is a wonderful way to remind students that intellectual curiosity breeds resilience and bravery. You can’t know everything – see my reply to the question above – but scholarly study at a higher level means learning to be okay with that while also continually challenging oneself. Arts One’s intense but exciting curriculum is a great way to embody this lesson and impart it right away. Many students don’t really learn this until their final years of undergraduate study or graduate school, and it’s an especially difficult lesson for high-achieving students to learn, so why not start now?
Pedagogically-speaking, I get really, really excited about difficult and abstract texts and ideas. I enjoy unpacking these ideas slowly, and teaching students how to communicate these things clearly. It’s pretty easy to take a difficult, densely-phrased idea and explain it by way of equally difficult and dense language, but it’s also essentially pointless. The unclear version is already out there, so let’s try to make it clearer and more comprehensible! This involves a lot of behind-the-scenes intellectual legwork. You have to trace ideas back, get to the root of their arguments, find evidence from other scholars, work with examples. But once you develop an appetite for this kind of work – which Arts One strives to instill in students – there are fewer things more intellectually satisfying then carefully unpacking and communicating what initially seemed like a totally opaque idea.
What would you tell a student considering the Arts One program, but who hasn’t yet decided?
I guess firstly, if you’re indecisive about taking Arts One, then perhaps Arts One is a great program for you because it lessens the pressure of making high stakes choices. It decides for you! I like to think of the difference between Arts One and a ‘regular’ course schedule as the difference between ordering the set menu at a restaurant versus ordering a la carte. Both have their advantages, but personally, if I’m at a restaurant that offers a set menu, that’s what I’m getting. There’s something about a curated experience – a sampler of some of the chef’s best dishes that pair together uniquely well, that bounce off one another to create strange and amazing flavour combinations – that I find irresistible. What do I know about food, beyond the fact that I like to eat it? Nothing. And it’s highly unlikely that I’ll walk into a restaurant and just intuitively know the best or most interesting things to order, even if I’ve visited that restaurant many times before. So I feel very lucky when a chef curates my experience, creates a structure for me, and teaches me things that I didn’t know were possible. Similarly, if you know that you’re interested in the arts and humanities but aren’t quite sure whether you like cinema studies or literature or philosophy or history, how they are different and how they are similar, this is an unparalleled opportunity to dive headfirst into those subjects. There’s no expectation that you’re an expert in any of them, only the assumption that you’ve got a hardworking and audacious mind.
“In short, I like to think of Arts One as a program for the intellectually adventurous, the same way that a set menu has a kind of “Jesus, take the wheel!” spirit to it. True, you may end up with the scholarly equivalent of a bowl of foraged nettles covered in ash, but it may end up being surprisingly sublime. Or, equally usefully, you may learn that you want to avoid ash-nettles in the future.”
