Cohort July 2023: Faculty of Arts – Dasha (Dariya) Prykhodko, Nikolai Sundstrom, Alexandr Kim, Theresa Xu
Project background
This is an elective course in the Faculty of Arts, CENES Department, intended to acquaint new students with the study of Slavic cultures, history, and current issues. Many students in CENES are of various Slavic backgrounds; others are curious of the Slavic world. The aim of the course is to spark interest in Slavic Studies. This course was dormant for many years. We want to offer it again, in a redesigned format, focusing on content, accessibility and engagement with broader Slavic communities.
Project details
Content
Although the course is about Slavic cultures, traditionally it has been taught with an emphasis on the Russian culture as an “imperial” one, reinforcing Russia’s dominant place in the group of Slavic countries. This is the case for Slavic studies in many North American educational institutions: a survey of “Slavic” courses across North America shows this colonial tendency. The current war in Ukraine exposes a lack of knowledge of the countries of the region as separate entities. We aim to decolonise Russo-centric viewpoints of the Slavic world and create an understanding of the Slavic region as a mosaic, not a monolithic culture.
We want to redesign SLAV 105 to represent several Slavic cultures (the choice would potentially be alternated by year, depending on the changing world situation). This will include introducing issues and events of the discussed countries, providing a contextual study including literature, film, music and art. We will explore origin of the Slavs, their languages; myths; the rise of nationalism and Pan-Slavism; the historic Eastern/Western European divide; and the role of the writer in Slavic societies.
Accessibility
The expectations of the delivery of academic knowledge are undergoing a philosophical shift: to strive for fairness, emphasis is made on making courses accessible to varied learners. We aim at adhering the course delivery with the developing principles of UDL (Universal Design for Learning) at UBC: the redesigning of SLAV 105 aims to provide several different modes of learning activities (in-class, in-group, by oneself, online, in the wider community) to support different learners’ abilities and strengths. Our group is a partnership of faculty and students of different backgrounds ranging from International Relations to Engineering to Religious Studies disciplines in order to bring varying perspectives to enrich the course.
Engagement with broader communities
In concord with UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan (ISP), the redesign of SLAV 105 is part of the broader process of ISP engagement to enhance equality on campus. The CENES community strives for de-colonization of the curriculum by giving a voice to those who have been under-represented; to pay a renewed attention to long-established narratives, historical struggles and circumstances forming those narratives and perpetuation of cultural memory.
We will engage our students by creating projects where course attendees would learn from local Slavic communities in the Greater Vancouver region directly, and—moreover—through participation in their key initiatives. We believe that implementation of community engaged learning (CCEL) will facilitate students’ interest, sense of belonging, and meaningful engagement.