By Neil Armstrong
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| Prof. Davis is flanked by Chancellor Greg Sorbara, left, and Mamdouh Shoukri, President and Vice-Chancellor. Photo credit: York Univetsity |
“I take my teaching
very seriously. I tell my students that teaching for me, I understand it in
very simple terms. My teaching is my activism, so that it’s not just about coming
into a classroom and sharing knowledge,” says Andrea Davis, Chair of the
Department of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at
York University in Toronto.
She says if she were
wealthy and didn’t live in a capitalist society, she would teach for free. “I
love it that much, I wouldn't need to be paid.”
Professor Davis is
the 2017 recipient of the President's University-Wide Teaching Award in the
senior full-time category, which was presented to her at the spring convocation
on June 20.
She is pleased that
it was students from her first year course who nominated her for the award that
recognizes
the accomplishments of York's instructors.
“The awards demonstrate the value York
University attaches to teaching and recognizes those who, through innovation
and commitment, have significantly enhanced the quality of learning by York
students,” notes the university’s website.
The recipients
are selected by the Senate Committee on Awards and will have their names
engraved on the President's University-Wide Teaching Award plaques in Vari Hall.
Davis says
being the recipient is rewarding but “what gets missing a lot is the ways in
which racialized faculty -- and female racialized faculty, because there is
another layer that they face -- take on significantly more responsibilities in
teaching and mentoring and supporting students that other faculty don’t have to
do.”
In 2012, she
was the recipient of the Ian Greene Award for teaching excellence.
She said
many of her colleagues are great teachers but they can go into a classroom and
engage knowledge and knowledge production and that is all that they do.
“I believe
that I certainly do that and I do it very well, but I also have come to
understand my place and location in the classroom as more than that just that.
It’s really being involved in the making of confident, articulate, citizens.”
She gets
about 200 students each year and 80% of them are racialized, many are black,
and many are black women.
“Many of
them are coming into a classroom where it’s the first time they’ve had a black
female professor, or maybe, any black teacher at all. And so I have to help
them to grow intellectually, academically, equip them to do well in the
university. But I’m also playing another role of modeling for them a future
that they are imagining and projecting through me.”
She feels
that the president’s award validated what racialized and black faculty do in
the university which goes beyond just imparting knowledge.
“My students
often say that the course is about real life; that they feel as if they’re
being equipped to live, and to be, and to walk in the world in a way that they
weren’t equipped to do before.”
Speaking of her
contribution to innovation, the former interim director of the Centre for
Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) says she has tried very
self-consciously strategically to respond to what she believes are curricular
needs within her department.
Doing this in the
department of humanities and her own research and teaching on black culture in
Canada and in the wider Americas has led, for example, “to the creation of new
courses that address these issues within largely a black diasporic context that
takes into account the experiences of people of Caribbean descent, African
descent, and so on in the Canadian context.”
She created a number
of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Last year, she worked
very hard with the support of colleagues in her department to create a new
certificate program in Black Canadian Studies, which is going through the
process of approval now. The expectation is that it will be launched in the
fall-winter of 2018.
This is a unique
certificate program in that it examines questions of black people’s experiences
from a humanities perspective and not social science.
“A lot of existing
courses at York that seem to address these questions are really courses about
race and racism, which are really to me, questions about how other people perceive
and relate to black people, and kind of re-educated them.”
Davis says this
certificate makes an intervention into that position by insisting that the
study of black people, their histories and cultures, is valuable within and of
itself.”
It will focus
entirely on black people’s cultural production, literature, film, music; black
people’s voices, cultural expressions, and histories.
She said it's a
pretty narrow but focused curriculum, the idea is to keep students together as
a community so they’re likely to be in classes together at the same time and to
build wraparound support programs.
The certificate will
be working with the Jean Augustine Chair in Education and the Harriet Tubman
Institute.
The Jean Augustine
Chair in Education has committed to provide graduate students with workshops to
help support their writing.
The Harriet Tubman
Institute will help them to organize and host undergraduate student conferences
where students can share their work, and opportunities to go out to community
groups and share the work they’re doing in the university.
They are also
developing a practicum course that would place certificate students in the
offices of local government to see how those offices function.
The hope is that this
will expand eventually to the graduate level and possibly that these students
from the certificate program will go into the graduate programs in black
studies, and come back eventually into the university as faculty.
“So that the diversity
at the undergraduate level extends all the way up and then begins to produce a
critical mass of new faculty in the university.”
Davis said there is
not a single Black Studies program in all of Canada.
She said there are
two – this one that will launch next year, Queen’s University is working on a
minor and Dalhousie University is working on a minor but she doesn't know when
they’ll launch.
Although Dalhousie
has the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, she says there isn’t an
actual program in Black Studies yet.
“I think York still
remains, it’s still believed it is the most diverse university in Canada, and I
think it’s important that it takes leadership in this area,” says Davis.
Davis holds a BA
(first class honours) from the University of the West Indies, and a MA and PhD
from York University.
She was a Top 30
nominee in TVOntario’s competition for Best Lecturer in 2007.
“It is my
responsibility not so much to tell students what to think but to help them
develop critical thought, to help them have an opinion about themselves and the
world and be able to defend that opinion, the ability to write well, the
confidence to articulate well, and then to use that knowledge to help walk in
the world with clarity -- their own clarity, whatever that means for them.”
Davis finished her
PhD in 2002 and got hired at the University of Ohio in their African American
Studies Program.
She had packed up her
stuff and was ready to leave, her son was eight then, but Rinaldo Walcott, who
was at York in the position she now occupies in humanities, took up an offer at
the University of Toronto.
The job went on the
market; she applied and ended up with two positions.
“I decided to stay at
York for a number of reasons. One, because I felt like I really understood the
politics of place and here, and my positionality in relationship to them, and
that I could do some good work here. And I was conflicted about whether or not
I really wanted to live and work in the United States, and so in the end I
decided to stay in Canada.”
She was a teaching
assistant and then got a contractual limited appointment, which is a full-time
position but not tenured track, before she finished her doctoral studies.
Davis is a tenured
associate professor and is hoping to go forward for full professor in a couple
of years.
 |
| Professor Davis receives her award from Chancellor Greg Sorbara with Mamdouh Shoukri, President and Vice-Chancellor looking on. Photo credit: York University |
In Jamaica, she
attended Wolmer’s Girls School where she did languages which seemed to only
have two main outcomes – “to get married and become a real cultured wife or go
on to the UN but that for me was a route for the upper middle class students;
poor girls don’t have access to those kinds of jobs. Then the other option was
possibly to teach.”
Davis didn’t see
herself immediately as a professor but thought she would go into high school
teaching.
“I think that’s where
I would have been if I had stayed in Jamaica but when I went to the University
of the West Indies I did really well as I had at Wolmer’s. I was a very good
student.”
One of her
professors, David Williams, in the department of literature wanted to know what
she was going to do with her life after she got first class honours for her BA.
“I couldn’t
articulate it very well and he was quite horrified so he just showed up one day
with these application forms for the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship and said
to me, ‘I’ve already sent in my letter of recommendation’ so he forced my hand
and I had to apply, and I got it.”
The scholarship took
her to York University and the “rest kind of dictated itself.”
Williams, and
Claudette Williams in Spanish were her mentors at the UWI, Mona Campus.
Davis’
research focuses on the literary productions of black women in the Americas.
She is
particularly interested in the intersections of the literatures of the
Caribbean, the United States and Canada and her work encourages an intertextual
cross-cultural dialogue about black women's experiences in diaspora.
Davis co-edited with
Carl James the anthology, “Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A
Multiculturalizing Presence,” that charts the political, economic, historical
and cultural connections between Canada and Jamaica.
She is also working
on a comparative study that theorizes the complex ways in which gender, place
and voice intersect in black women's discursive practices.
[An edited version of this story is in the North American Weekly Gleaner, June 29-July 5, 2017 issue.]
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