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VISION | PAST & PRESENT | SCHOOLS & DEPARTMENTS

CHALLENGES | 5 YEAR PLAN | CLOSING

Past & Present in the arts

We begin with the history of the College by honouring and recognizing the historical and current realities of this land and its Indigenous stewards.

With great respect, the College of Arts acknowledges that the University of Guelph resides on the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron people and the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. From the Anishinaabe to the Haudenosaunee and the Métis, these treaty lands are steeped in rich indigenous history and modern traditions. We uphold the significance of the Dish with One Spoon Covenant and the continuing relationship our Indigenous neighbours have with this land. We recognize that today, and in the future, and acknowledging them reminds us of our relationships to this land where we learn and work. Our plans for moving the College forward are informed by our commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples of Canada. We recognize that we have a long way to go, but our commitment to Aboriginal education issues is evident in initiatives across departments that will continue. These have included faculty hires, outreach to students, indigenous language courses, as well as core research and programs involving Indigenous peoples.

The College of Arts at the University of Guelph had its beginnings in the Ontario Agricultural College, which, in 1906, was the first institution in Canada to teach Canadian literature. The early part of the 20th century saw the development of theatre and fine art courses among others and in 1965, Wellington College offered Guelph’s first Bachelor of Arts program. In 1969, the College of Arts was formed; the official and definitive separation of the arts from the sciences was instituted and with it, a recognition that Arts and Humanities were valuable fields of study in their own right and did not function only to consider the social and ethical implications of scientific research. We operate on the certainty that an arts and humanities education fosters the exact skills that society needs to work through the major challenges facing us. As today’s students encounter a world of climate change, a shifting relationship with science and technology, volatile global dynamics, interconnectedness and diversity and other complexities, they will need the empathy, social connection, critical thinking, communications skills, community building and flexibility developed through arts and humanities.

Home to two research institutes including the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and the ThincLab, digital labs in fine art and music, a centre for Global Justice, privately-funded Chairs in History and in Scottish Studies, world-renowned writers, artists, thinkers, award-winning teachers and scholars, Royal Society and Killam Fellows, the College of Arts is a research-intensive space where faculty members conduct inquiries and produce articles, books, productions, installations, immersive experiences and all manner of thriving research programs of national and international stature. Research in the College is funded by Canada’s federal funding agencies (Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts council and other private sources.

The College of Arts brings together schools and departments offering a vibrant set of disciplines, with world-leading scholars in fine art, music, philosophy, history, language, literature, theatre studies. At the same time, the College is a leader in powerful interdisciplinary explorations, including improvisation, science and humanities, artificial intelligence, the Interdisciplinary Design Lab, cultural narratives and digital humanities.

Across all of its spheres, the College aims to:

• be a hub for research, creative activity and transformative education that fosters people’s ability to be human, to act with compassion and empathy.
• teach people to tell powerful stories that allow us to bring together different perspectives, make sense of ambiguity, and create new ways of knowing and being in the world
• build capacity to engage with the complex issues of our world as change agents with skills and optimism
• foster our students’ capacity for self-definition and cultivate their passions and unique strengths.
• prepare students to articulate their transferrable skills with confidence as they navigate their future lives.

Key Strategic Questions:

• As a College, what are we making together? What is our impact?
• What are we preparing students to be and to do in the world?
• How do we articulate and cultivate our shared value?
• What should we be focusing on over the next five years that will foster a community of engaged students, flourishing faculty and staff, and unfettered creativity and research?

Strategy Hives provoked colourful, engaged, enthusiastic conversation!

Strategy Hive #1: What’s the significance of the work we do in the College of Arts at Guelph? How does our knowledge and focus prepare people to tackle the big questions faced by the world?

The College of Arts encompasses a unique interconnection of creativity, applied knowledge, ways of thinking and acting, and approaching questions and ideas. We bring together a vibrant set of disciplines, with world-leading scholars in fine art, music, philosophy, history, language, literature, theatre studies. At the same time, the College is a leader in powerful interdisciplinary explorations, including improvisation, science and humanities, artificial intelligence, the Interdisciplinary Design Lab, cultural narratives and digital humanities. At the milestone of 50 years since its founding, the College spent several months in 2019 gathering to reflect on its impact, its strengths, and how to deepen the meaning of its work over the next five years.

These strategic conversations included faculty, leaders, administration, alumni, community partners, students and other collaborators explored the role and value of the College of Arts at Guelph specifically, as well as the global value of an arts and humanities education in today’s environment. Some of the context permeating the conversations included:

• increasing challenges to higher education to demonstrate its direct impact on job readiness;
• the need to prepare students for a changing and unpredictable world of life and work;
• pressure for fiscal accountability in public funding and a need to generate new sources of revenue;
• a global environment of “wicked questions” that cannot be reconciled through existing strategies or through singular disciplines or perspectives.

Through these discussions, the College affirmed the powerful theme that an arts and humanities education fosters the exact skills that society needs to work through the major challenges facing us. As today’s students encounter a world of climate change, a shifting relationship with science and technology, volatile global dynamics, interconnectedness and diversity and other complexities, they will need the empathy, social connection, critical thinking, communications skills, community building and flexibility developed through arts and humanities.

Throughout the strategy dialogue, the College community kept coming back to the central theme that the core role of all of the elements of the College is to ask and grapple with big questions. The College’s mission is to prepare students to engage with the big questions – while also preparing them to recognize, articulate and feel confident about how they will be able to use all of their skills and knowledge in the world. The focus for this strategy will be to make that sometimes-invisible knowledge vivid and clear, to develop students who are self-assured about their futures, and to engage more fully in public dialogue about the big questions.

For five decades, the College of Arts has produced powerful art, incisive scholarship, abundant collaborations and generations of alumni who have influenced the world in countless ways. Over the next five years, the College will amplify its voice, strengthen its community and support learners, so that the next generation of scholars, leaders and learners will be even stronger.

1. Integrate explicit skills and learning outcomes into programs

Goal: Students feel confident about the relationship between what they are learning and their readiness to engage in the world of work; students can clearly articulate their transferrable skills.

Undergraduate and graduate student teaching and training in the College of Arts has always emphasized creativity, engagement with the world, critical thinking, self-reflection, compassion, empathy. We will continue to build on these strengths in our undergraduate curriculum, in our Bachelor of Arts (BA), and Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (BAS) degrees.

To this end, we plan to:

• Review of curricula to adjustment course offerings with a view to building and focusing on our research and related teaching strengths
• design new courses and develop new interdisciplinary programs that are founded on our disciplinary strengths
• continue, in consultation with departments, schools, curriculum committees, faculty, students, the Academic Program and Recruitment Manager, Bachelor of Arts Counselling, and Bachelor of Arts and Sciences Counselling office, to enact revisions and developments based on fiscally responsible planning and strategic investment.
• capitalize on our current offerings, by including them in the new, innovative interdisciplinary programs we are developing including new programs that will, for example, leverage current offerings plus new courses are majors in Creative Writing (with a focus on the environment); Technology, Ethics, Culture and the Human (TECH); and Sexuality, Gender, and Social Change.
• revise minors (Arts, Culture and Heritage Management [ACHM]) and to develop new ones (e.g., Linguistics), which will allow students to complement their majors or add other qualifications to their degrees.
• Enact our enhanced career-ready strategy by expanding high impact and experiential learning (EL) opportunities in our courses and programs
• develop co-op options. With the support of Co-op and Career Services, we will continue offering front-line career counselling to students

Objectives and actions:

• Enhance visibility and transparency of skills and knowledge that match future career options so students can easily see how to translate learning into job readiness skills
• Build relationships with employers to recognize the skills that Arts students uniquely bring to work
• Develop a 3000-level elective to support students in job readiness

Graduate Studies:

The College of Arts offers a broad slate of graduate degrees: four doctoral programs, two nationally-ranked MFA programs, and a dozen research-focused MA programs. We are committed to on-going innovation in our graduate programs to make them even more impactful, to reach new groups of prospective graduate students, and to improve continuously the outcomes for our successful graduates.

We will build:

• new partnerships, such as with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with whom we plan to establish a trans-Atlantic joint degree in European Studies / Linguistics and Literary Studies;

• new interdisciplinary opportunities, such as a proposed MA program in the ethics and social implications of data science that will draw in a broadly interdisciplinary mix of students and give them experience in real-world settings;

• new engagement with community partners, such as a graduate diploma in arts management that will place students with partners in the creative industries for a semester as part of their program;

• and new graduate programming that draws on our unique and evolving research strengths in areas such as digital arts, culture and humanities; the study of gender, sexuality and bodies; and performance studies.

2. Build flourishing College of Arts community

Goal: The College of Arts hosts a multitude of significant gatherings, talks, conversations, and performances that nurture provocative and inspiring ideas, a sense of the power of shared voice, ultimately, joy. Everyone connected to the College has relationships with and identifies with both their discipline and the College at large, and the world recognizes the College of Arts as a source for creative connection.

Objectives and actions:

• Nurture a creative, joyful College community through opportunities to share food, inspiring events, and a lively exchange of ideas within our space.
• Identify one annual topic or theme for College research, public engagement, community activities
• Build warm relationships with alumni as mentors, presenters, connectors

3. Seek and foster apprenticeships and work experience

Goal: The College will develop partnerships and relationships with employers and philanthropists who will support work experience, job readiness, and augment our student’s confidence in their ability to translate their undergraduate degrees into careers.

Objectives and actions:

• Launch the Guelph Arts Apprenticeship Program, supported by funding from Alan Rottenberg
• Continue to build relationships with employers and other partners to support work experience and apprenticeships and work to help employers understand the value of an arts and humanities degree

4. Cultivate interdisciplinary research & strengthen our research enterprise

Goal: Deepen our capacity to explore complex and intractable questions and to understand emerging ideas through focused and intentional interdisciplinary research.

• Launch an interdisciplinary research working group for research and creative activity on critical issues like AI, equity and climate change.
• Identify model for student engagement in the institute to build concrete and reflective transferrable skills.
• Amplify our presence through successful nominations of our faculty for prestigious national and international recognition.

College of Arts faculty are active researchers and creative practitioners. With research funding from SSHRC, CFI, the Canada Council, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and several other granting agencies, our complement includes fellows and prize winners from the Royal Society of Canada, SSHRC Impact Awards, Fulbright Awards, the Canada Research Chair program, holders of named professorships, and others. We produce scores of books, chapters, peer-reviewed papers, works of art, and other diverse forms of scholarship every year.

In line with University strategic priorities, and after extensive consultation, we have developed a College strategy to further intensify our participation in SSHRC funding. Our success rates are already high for SSHRC applicants (recently around 50%—ranging from 43% to 60%—for both Insight Grant and Insight Development Grant applications).

Going forward we will:

• align incentives and support for faculty to apply for SSHRC funding
• develop metrics to track the proportion of eligible COA faculty holding SSHRC funding, and to gauge our performance against that of comparator faculties at other similar institutions
• offer grant development administrative support
• offer an enhanced web portal with resources and templates for SSHRC applicants
• provide incentive funds
• offer an enhanced Bridge fund for unsuccessful IG/IDG applicants to encourage reapplication
• provide Faculty Seed Fund to help faculty develop projects
• intensify communications about grant/award successes

5. Support community-engaged and student-involved research and creativity

Goal: The College of Arts will have a thriving environment for boundary-expanding research and creative activities, supported and funded through both traditional and innovative sources.

Objectives and actions:

• Support faculty and students in seeking alternative forms of funding and support for the research and creative output
• Seek opportunities to amplify public College voice on critical questions

In Closing

We conclude by expressing our thanks to all who participated in planning discussions and who offered such insight, good humour, enthusiasm, depth to our conversation.

Thanks, too, to Cate Creede and her team at the Potential Group who shepherded and inspired the interplay of thoughts, critique, and possibilities in the most encouraging and steadfast manner throughout.

This strategy moves forward the deepest aspirations about our work expressed in the strategy process:

Collectively, the College embodies and fosters the kind of wisdom the world needs at this point in history:

“The skills our students develop are the very skills we need as a society to work our way through the major challenges facing us: empathy, social connection, open curiosity and critical thinking, community building, flexibility. The values, likewise, that our students develop are in keeping with the intensely interconnected world in which we all now function. Instead of competition, collaboration…”

- (A faculty member’s response to a consultation question)

The College of Arts Mission:

Unleashing compassion, creativity, and critical engagement with the world through transformative education.