Features
‘My Country No Longer Exists’
Haitian earthquake reaches Guelph students in SEDRD studies of media
and global development
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s tears. Canada’s rapid relief mission. Ottawa’s plan to match Canadian donations to an earthquake-devastated Haiti.
These are powerful images and messages, says Prof. Helen Hambly, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD). And they’re the very stuff of her third-year “International Communication” course on the role of the media in global development.
Small wonder that, only days after the 7.0-magnitude quake struck Haiti, she was already amending that week’s course module on images of nations and international public relations.
Earlier, she had assigned students to write an essay about media and public policy focused on either the Vancouver Olympics or Canada’s Afghanistan mission. Now, less than two weeks into the course, she had added a third option: write about the interplay of media and policy decisions in Canada’s response to the disaster in Haiti.
“I just changed the assignment because of world events,” says Hambly — itself a telling sign of the post-McLuhanesque world she and her students are living in.
If the Haitian earthquake had happened a few years ago, she says, classroom discussion might have been limited to asking her students what they thought of the news from Port-au-Prince. Now, writing to her students online through the course website, she was asking them to reflect on how images and messages arriving through various media were helping to drive policy responses, all more or less in real time.
For Hambly, the course experience underlines a key purpose of communication studies offered through SEDRD’s capacity development and extension stream. Back at Guelph full-time after a one-year research leave, she is seeing several examples of how communication education and technology are changing the world and altering our response to a shrinking globe.
Take this semester’s third-year course in “Educational Communication.” For the first time, she’s teaching the course entirely through distance education along with a colleague from Sweden’s Malmö University.
She works with all 144 students — mostly would-be teachers and instructors — online from her office in the Landscape Architecture Building. Working with specialists in Guelph’s Office of Open Learning, she has arranged for her co-instructor to provide two guest lectures during the semester.
The partnership was developed through a 2008 memorandum of understanding between U of G — particularly its Centre for International Programs — and Malmö, located near Sweden’s southernmost tip.
Hambly says the distance education course meets Guelph’s strategic mission of internationalism and, combined with webcasting, is a great way to involve international guest instructors in U of G classes.
An international project of another kind occupied the Guelph professor during her recent research leave. She completed revisions to a Canadian edition of a six-year-old American textbook used in “Interpersonal Communication,” a second-year course that is also offered through distance education.
The 400-page book, called Interpersonal Communication: A Guided Tour for Canadians, was published this year by Oxford University Press. Hambly says the homegrown edition includes Canadian angles on such topics as race and ethnicity, conflict management and family relations. The text even draws on Guelph research on social networks and trust building, as well as father involvement in parenting.
In the fall, Hambly and SEDRD professor John FitzSimons took part in a conference in Belgium on the role of media and communications in food, agriculture and the environment. The gathering brought together U of G with the European Union and ambassadors from Africa and Caribbean and Pacific nations.
In Belgium, she met Haiti’s only agricultural journalist, Bertrand Talot. This month, he sent her a text message to say the earthquake had destroyed his office and his family’s home. “Mon pays n’existe plus (my country no longer exists),” he wrote.
Last week, SEDRD hosted guest speakers from World Vision discussing Haitian relief and emergency efforts.
Other campus fundraising initiatives have been held by the Department of Athletics and Student Life. On Feb. 7, the Central Student Association is supporting a benefit concert with city partners at 7 p.m. at the River Run Centre.