How to support a teaching habit
Interviewing professors with professions
June 9, 2005
Linnea McNally with Sarah Weigum
Randy Radney
Professor of Linguistics
Dr. Radney teaches a number of philosophy and linguistics classes at TWU. However, his knowledge of languages and how they work extends beyond the classroom and into the Nemiah Valley of northern BC. In 1984, Radney and his wife Mary began living with a First Nations community, the Xeni Gwet’in. Their goal: train indigenous people in Biblical translation and curriculum development for a native educational system. They ended up staying for a decade, the first six years of which were spent simply learning the language and becoming a part of the community.
Radney said that when he and his wife made the choice to live in an indigenous community, they “wanted to counteract the feeling that the white man comes in and has an agenda.” He recalled, “My approach was being aware of that, and taking the opposite view that said we’re here to learn how to be real people. If we’re going to belong here, we want to help.”
Universities tend to encourage linguists to do their research during their sabbatical, which often leads to what Radney calls research “based on superficial levels of involvement in a community.” TWU, Radney observed, has a unique approach, and has “as a paradigm the idea that you live, sometimes for decades, within a community.” TWU is able to encourage this approach because part of the work Radney does – translating the Bible into indigenous languages – is supported by the broader Christian community. As Radney says, “the Church rejoices with the linguist in the completion of a Biblical translation.”
When asked about how his experience has affected the way he teaches, he said: “Had I not had the experience of actually going in and being a part of a community, I would have been very agenda-driven and task-oriented in my teaching.” He noted that our educational system tends to encourage “individual production and performance,” which can cause a student to become “disoriented when they move into a culture that is not focused on the individual.” He sees his job as teaching potential linguists to be like little children. As he put it, “We never stop being learners.”
Claudia Launhardt
Instructor in Anthropology
Two days a week Claudia Launhardt teaches Trinity Western University
students how to communicate across cultural and religious barriers. The rest of her week is spent in a culture that is foreign to many of her students—Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Along with her husband, Launhardt runs a low-budget hotel for people coming off the streets. About 90% of the residents are on welfare, and for many of them, the hotel is their home. Besides providing people with a roof over their heads, Launhardt coaches them on resumes, job interviews, and the social skills they will need away from the streets.
Launhardt connects the world of the Downtown Eastside with TWU by taking her students into Vancouver to volunteer. She hopes that by introducing students to “life on the other side of the coin,” they will realize that success is not based solely on marks and essays, but also on character, work ethic, prayer, and humility. In return, she wants TWU students to be role models for youth on the street.
Launhardt has taken her education beyond the walls of the university and she encourages students to do so as well. Three TWU grads currently work full-time for her and she has hired two students for this summer. “I want students to use their knowledge hands-on and in real life,” Launhardt said.
This year her Cross Cultural Communication class is rewriting the Alpha course to make it accessible to people on the Eastside. Launhardt has presented the Christian outreach program to the residents of the hotel, but found that drug addicts and prostitutes could not relate to a course designed for middle-class Britons. She wants students to see how their work in the classroom can change lives.
Launhardt says TWU has welcomed her pursuits outside of the classroom and credits this openness to an integrative Christian worldview. “In secular universities you have to be politically correct, you have to be neutral, but at TWU you can express your opinion,” she said.
Faith Richardson
Assistant Professor of Nursing
When Faith Richardson graduated from TWU, she went to Regent College, where she met Madeleine L’Engle. The best-selling author became her mentor and her friend. Since L’Engle “passed the mantle” on to Richardson, she has published five works, including her most recent piece, Tree Root and River Rat. Besides writing novels, she has also been hired by TWU to work in the School of Nursing.
Richardson is in the midst of restructuring course material for the Nursing program, and she considers her mission to be one of healing, whether with “written word, teaching, or with my hands.” This mindset, that she has more than one purpose, keeps her from becoming frustrated when one of the segments of her life isn’t functioning.
Her current struggle is to get back to writing, since she is in the middle of a novel that she hasn’t touched since coming to TWU. She says it is difficult to juggle her practice in Washington, her family, and her work at TWU, but she believes that God allows certain threads of life to take precedence at different times.
Richardson chose TWU because of its liberal arts foundation, its “holistic” approach, and the attempt made to reach out into interdisciplinary studies. She thought it would be simple to integrate different studies together, but she is realizing it is not as easy as she had expected. Richardson has first-hand experience, having graduated from TWU in 1988. She says that her approach was changed by the introduction of Deane Downey’s Interdisciplinary seminars in her fourth year (which have become IDIS classes). She was struggling to decide between arts and sciences, and his lectures allowed her to see that she could combine both.
Doug Hampson
Professor of Psychology
As an undergrad student at TWU, Doug Hampson volunteered at a centre for troubled youth. Two decades later he is still integrating academics and practical work as a part-time professor in TWU’s Psychology Department and a counselor for some of Canada’s most dangerous offenders.
“I’m not the typical kind of counselor,” said Hampson, who works for Corrections Services Canada. His main goal is to keep individuals out of the maximum security facilities and he follows prisoners as they move amongst different correction centers, sometimes over a period of several years.
At the University of British Columbia where Hampson pursued further education, he specialized in the topics of anger and violence. This factor, along with other opportunities and opened doors led to his work in the prison.
“I’m interested in academics, but I am also interested in how things work,” said Hampson. To this end, both his academic and practical ambitions benefit him as he travels between the two worlds. “I have one foot in the pragmatic and that informs my teaching,” he said. But he added that the academic side of psychology is necessary to be a competent counselor. “In the field if you cut your ties with theory and become too pragmatic, it may work for the short term, but not for the long term.”
This semester Hampson is teaching “Prison and the Person,” a psychology course that he designed. During the semester students are going to two prisons to assess the experience and enter into the world of inmates. Hampson said he enjoys taking students to the prisons, although there are challenges like getting security clearance.
“Students are getting a hands-on look at what the prison system is like,” he said. “Students are entering my world with me.”
Ivan de Silva
Instructor in Religious Studies
Ivan de Silva spends his nights teaching at TWU, but by day he is a detective for the Vancouver Police Department, specializing in sex crimes and child abuse cases. While the two occupations may not at first seem compatible, de Silva refers to both as his “callings,” and feels that his faith and his work with the police department are very interconnected. He always considers himself a “Christian first, who happens to be a police officer.”
De Silva sees his police work as a way to bring about justice and righteousness in society. He believes that creation began with God creating the Cosmos out of chaos through power and authority, and that his role is to mimic that process, bringing order from social chaos. He also points out that Jesus came in contact with death and disease, but rather than ecoming unclean himself, he transposed his “cleanness” onto others. De Silva says this is a “profound encouragement” and helps him to see his role as bringing “cleanness,” and “wholeness” to his society.
His work in law enforcement began when he realized that contemporary
Christianity is often too “me-centred” to see the outside world. He prayed for a means to have a very “raw, direct” way of encountering what he calls a “morally flawed universe,” and his prayer got answered.
When asked about the so-called “bubble” of Trinity, de Silva said he doesn’t believe TWU actively enforces this idea, but that students make what they want of it. He believes that it is entirely possible that TWU can equip one to “go and meet the world,” since that is what it has done for him.
De Silva’s personal motto summarizes the way he sees his two callings:
“Until our eyes are opened to the reality of our conflicted world order, we cannot reach spiritual maturity.”
Now you go...
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