In Conversation With: Dann Downes

John Wong | Director Community & Fund Development | Brilliant Labs

IN CONVERSATION WITH DANN DOWNES

Dann Downes is the Chair, Department of Social Science & Education, and a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, NB. Prof. Downes is also an artist, musician and maker. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with him about his work where he shared his insights about the importance of teaching students how to learn 21st century skills through making and experiential learning, and creating opportunities for them to fail.

JW: I’d like to start by asking you for your thoughts regarding teaching university students 21st century skills?

DD: The whole notion of students needing to acquire 21st century skills came about as a collaboration between educators and tech companies, government agencies and nonprofits in the United States at the turn of this century.

There was a set of concepts providing a framework that recognized that the workforce in the 21st century was going to change dramatically over the life cycle of children growing up and going through the education system over a specific period.

So, in order to train students to be prepared for that kind of change, you had to educate

them in such a way… or, help them learn in ways that are going to prepare them to continue to learn. However, simply using phrases such as “life long learning” and such is not sufficient, in my opinion. You have to also instill a culture of that very thing within your students and develop their mindset towards that particular kind of thinking.

JW: As an educator, how have you fostered that particular kind of culture in your students?

DD: By realizing there had to be an impetus and recognition that students in my program needed a safe place to fail. I had been teaching up to that point since

Dr. Dann Downes, Professor of Information and Communication Studies and Chair of the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John.

Professor of Information and Communication Studies and Chair of the Department of Social Science at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John.

the 1990s… and it’s something I had to also learn. I became aware of this in 2013 when I was on Sabbatical and had a meeting with a student. It was one of our top students, who wasn’t feeling comfortable with my Sabbatical replacement, and wasn’t able to figure out how to do an assignment that was worth very few marks.

The student had failed the assignment because they weren’t able to meet the professor’s expectations. In fact, they hadn’t followed the instructions given. I commented to the student that from my perspective, this was pretty minor. A good lesson learned and a really good teaching moment for them. The student replied “No. You don’t understand. I’ve never failed anything!” I wrote in my notebook at the beginning of my Sabbatical that when I get back, I’m going to “give my students the opportunity to fail.”

JW: Where does giving your students opportunities to fail connect with popular culture and making?

DD: I started this approach in my classes when I got back from my Sabbatical. I gave students opportunities to do projects in my own five classes of communication courses. We then initiated this in the whole Communication Studies Program… and called the initiative COM-X – Com for communication and X for experiential learning.

Upon return from Sabbatical, I initiated this new program with my colleague June Madeley. We committed to using this framework of teaching 21st century skills in our courses. There always has to be a connection between what the students learn through their studies and the practical skills we also want them to acquire – theory and context. For us, the link is popular culture.

The way we use popular culture in our program is both the context in which we live and as a way for students to find examples. It also gives meaning to the concerns or interests they are addressing. Students bring passion projects to classes. You want to build something because you’re a maker, that’s okay. If you want to explore something that’s outside the class, that’s okay too… or, if you want to volunteer with an organization, you’ll get up to 20 percent of your grade for following through in the course. And, if you don’t follow through, it doesn’t affect your grade. If you fail, and you don’t want to be evaluated on that, that’s fine. If you want to be evaluated on that, you can be.

The best example of this for me has nothing to do with making with electronics or volunteering for a radio station. It was a student who decided they wanted to build a cajón: a portable drum – a plywood box with wires inside that you sit on and slap your hands on it. It sounds like a snare drum. The student was working with an International student learning how to make video.

So, you have a student learning how to build a cajón, and another student learning how to take videos of the student building it. They work together weekly on their projects. The timestamp on the video is early February. The student building the cajón holds it up and the instrument falls apart! Without skipping a beat, the student immediately says “Plan B: I will learn how to play guitar!”

The rest of the video consists of weekly snippets of the student learning how to play guitar, and getting better… and at the same time, the quality of the video clip is also getting better. At the very end of the video, for some unexplained reason, instead of playing guitar, both of the students are performing something they wrote in GarageBand!

You have two students spending a term getting together at least once a week working closely together on the project. One is an International student, and another is a local student, and they’ve developed a meaningful connection. You also have a student who abandons their original project and does something completely different because they realize they have to get on with a project… and all of this within a collaborative endeavour.

While this was a class on popular music, and the projects had a relationship with the subject matter, the learning experience in my mind for the students had as much to do with supporting their social and emotional development. The student who was learning how to play guitar didn’t go on to becoming a musician. However, they did go on to win an award for volunteerism at the university. So, this student became active in the community, in part because of the opportunity to engage with another classmate in an activity that was completely developed and driven by themselves.

JW: Given how you prepare your students to address the 21st century, it strikes me that your students would then also be positioned to navigate the growing complexities in society, in life and work. Interested in hearing your thoughts?

DD: One of the things we’ve done as a society over the last 25 years or so is assumed we’d become better and better in technically mediating our communications… and that we would eventually no longer need to navigate with one another as people. I think one of the things COVID has demonstrated is how we’re experiencing problems relating to isolation, anxieties... and alienation, perhaps.

The places where interpersonal communication works are places where we already have existing relationships and can leverage technologies like video calls. It’s much more difficult to form a relationship that is entirely technologically mediated. It’s equally difficult to have the kind of education that I’m describing – and the long-term impact as an institution, a professor or a student – if our communication is largely mediated through technology.

One of the things that we’ve specifically and deliberately done in the Communication Studies Program is that in looking at the number of students we have, we also look at the relationships we have with students, not just over a term, but over four, five or six years. Over time it’s about those relationships, and the attention and care we put into them in teaching our students.

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IN CONVERSATION WITH is a regularBrilliant Labs Magazine segmentauthored by John Wong, Director ofCommunity & Fund Development.John’s goal is to highlightpassionate community leaders whoare inspiring and informing change.If you know an educator or changemaker that is making a positiveimpact, email:John.Wong@brilliantlabs.ca |Subject: In Conversation With

Morticia created by Dann Downs. Visit hearboymedia.ca

While Professor Downes brings his academic knowledge and research to students, he also leads by example as an author, maker, musician and visual artist. To learn learn more about his efforts, work and art visit hearboymedia.ca.