In faded jeans, a t-shirt and hoodie, Marc Fournier doesn’t look much like a professor. But three days a week the 34-year-old holds the attention of UTSC’s largest lecture theatre, and in a few weeks he’ll be addressing a much larger audience in TVO’s Best Lecturer Competition. This is Fournier’s second time in the top 10, and he’s not alone— fellow UTSC psych prof Gerald Cupchik has also made the finals.
Over the past few months, judges for the competition have cut nominated professors down to semi-finalists and finalists. The last 10 competitors will present their lectures on TVO beginning in March, and viewers can vote for their favourite. The winning lecturer receives a $10,000 scholarship for their institution.
UTSC’s psych department has consistently ranked well—both this year and last, three profs made the semi-finals, and theirs is the only department in the province to place two lecturers in the top 10. So what’s so special about UTSC psychology?
The answer may have its roots in the double cohort. As Ontario phased out grade 13 and the demand for postsecondary education skyrocketed, U of T planned to expand on its suburban campuses, and the department hit a turning point.
“Enrolment in the intro course was 600-700 students,” said John Bassili, department chair. “The year of the double cohort we had about 1250 students, and we now have nearly 1600.”
New buildings weren’t ready on time, so classes were taught in “the pavilion”—essentially a large tent.
“Our enrolment increased so dramatically over the span of a few years that we couldn’t afford to not solve the problems,” said Fournier. The first solution, dreamed up by Bassili, was web optioning. In large courses, students signed up for either a normal section, or a web section. Lectures were taped and put online for all students to view. Online lectures are now so popular that there is room for web students to attend lectures in person, if they feel so inclined. Web optioning has been adopted by other departments, and is now widely practiced at UTSC.
Web optioning is a clever way around expensive bricks and mortar. But it’s also a different model of the university community.
“Let’s not delude ourselves. Classrooms of 500 or, in the case of Convocation Hall, 1,500 are not really communities where there is any kind of meaningful interaction,” said Bassili. “We’re not beginning with a splendid situation.” Online teaching, he argues, can facilitate other sorts of community.
“One student said that when the lecture was given the whole family gathered around the monitor, listening together, and that would give them topics of conversation during dinner. Now is that community or what?”
Fournier uses web optioning, and it’s reflected in his teaching style.
“I prioritize preparing for those three hours that I’m in the room,” he said. “I know other faculty emphasize availability after class—I do relatively less of that. I have only one office hour a week and that’s all, I tend to dissuade students from emailing me.”
That doesn’t mean that the lecture is cold and detached—Fournier makes a point of using self-deprecating personal examples in his lectures.
“The more I seem to suffer as part of the story, the more audience engagement there is,” he said. “What legitimizes me in the classroom is not how I’m different from the students but how I’m similar to them. The more fallible and quirky I seem, the more I have some kind of street cred.”
While Fournier is fallible, Cupchik is confrontational. (“I never have scummy students because I kill scummy students. I hate selfishness.”) In his small classes, students get to know him and each other. Next to Fournier’s high tech lectures, it’s positively old-fashioned. Maybe that’s because Cupchik has been teaching since before Fournier was born.
“They write 50-100 page papers,” he said. “I scare the living crap out of them, and let me tell you, they write the most beautiful papers you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Cupchik’s teaching is about one-onone relationships, and as far as he’s concerned, his department’s teaching success is also about relationships between senior and junior faculty. At other institutions, he says, junior faculty are scared that if they spend too much time teaching, they won’t publish enough to get tenure.
“How much effort are you going to put into your teaching if you’re terrified?” said Cupchik. “We don’t have that atmosphere.”
