VIEW to the U transcribed
Season 9: UTM in the Community; Episode #1
The value of community engagement in the academic community
Professor Andreas Bendlin – Department of Historical Studies
Vice-Dean, Academic Experience
University of Toronto Mississauga
[intro music fades in and out]
Andreas Bendlin (AB): We send people out into the community learn something that they may not get at the university.
My name is Andreas Bendlin. I'm an associate professor in historical studies and joined the Dean's office in 2022.
And what does that mean to our students? It feels that they will actually have this additional learning by doing experience in the field, and then they will come back enriched in a variety of ways.
[theme music fades in]
Carla DeMarco (CD): The value of community engagement and academia.
Hello and welcome to VIEW to the U: An eye on the UTM academic community.
I'm Carla DeMarco at U of T Mississauga. VIEW to the U is a monthly podcast that will feature UTM faculty members and students from a range of disciplines who will illuminate some of the inner workings of UTM’s science labs, enlighten the social sciences and humanities hubs on campus, and put a spotlight on our academic community at large.
On the new season called “UTM in the community,” I will introduce you to some of the people from our vibrant and ever-growing scholarly community, from some of our UTM faculty members and leadership team, to students who are making an impact with various communities, both at the local level and on a global scale.
On today’s episode of VIEW to the U, my guest is Andreas Bendlin, a faculty member in the Department of Historical Studies, and UTM’s current Vice-Dean, Academic Experience.
Over the course of this interview, Andreas touches on his own work in Classics & Roman History, with expertise in ancient religion and ancient civilizations, in many areas, but particularly in the Graeco-Roman world.
But where we really dig in for this interview, is with regards to the two portfolios that Andreas oversees within the Deans’ Office at UTM: in Academic Integrity, which has many interesting challenges arising right now, as well as Experiential Education, an area in which UTM has particularly thrived over the past few years, providing students with many unique opportunities to gain valuable and practical experience outside of the classroom to better prepare them for future career paths.
[theme music fades out]
Andreas Bendlin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at UofT Mississauga. He earned a master’s degree in Classical Languages with distinction from the University of Tübingen in Germany; a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom; and a habilitation in Religious Studies from the University of Erfurt in Germany. He has served as the Chair of Historical Studies at UTM and previously served as Acting Vice-Dean, Academic Experience. He is UTM’s Vice-Dean, Academic Experience until 2027.
Andreas joined the faculty at UTM in 2005.
AB: I'm actually a classicist. So, I teach Roman history, and I've studied the ancient world, Greek and Rome and way beyond the Mediterranean world for many, many years, and before my time in the Dean's office, I was Chair in historical studies. So that was until 2022, and maybe I can talk a little bit about the two portfolios that I'm working on in the Dean's office.
So, one is experiential learning, and I know we will be talking about experiential learning a lot, but the other one is academic integrity. It's a very important one, and we often underestimate how important it is. It's about ethical behavior at the university, both by faculty and students. And it's important that we understand what academic life is about and what academic integrity at the university. So, that's something that's actually very close to my heart, too.
So, I'll just, I mean, want to just advertise that for a few seconds. It's also becoming increasingly important to consider academic integrity when there's new technologies, absolutely so many challenges, so many challenges. And it's becoming a real ethical question for all of us. You know I'm very passionate about intellectual property and the right to your own intellectual property, and we need to protect that at the university, both as students and as faculty.
So, what we are doing is we are going after cheating at the level where we actually have these unfortunate cases where students are cheating. But that's not the only thing we are actually doing as a university. We are also very concerned about what is going on overall in the university landscape with intellectual property. So, it is, I feel, an ethical responsibility almost for all of us to be aware of what is going on, and yes, there is the elephant in the room, and it's called "artificial intelligence." But that's not the only concern we have. It's much bigger than that. And you know - don't get me wrong – artificial intelligence is a good thing, and we have all been living with artificial intelligence for many, many years, sometimes, without knowing it. It's just that we need to control how we are actually using it in our lives as academics.
CD: Yes. Well, and I think to your point, I know that Rhonda McEwen, our former dean, had published an article a while back in the Toronto Star, and she talked about the value of artificial intelligence just in that her point was, people were all up in arms when the calculator came up as mathematicians. They thought, ‘this is going to replace jobs.’ But her point was maybe the AI helps you generate an initial draft of something, but then it still is up to the human component to go through that draft and maybe weed out, make it more their paper. But what do you think about that?
AB: We are actually in a real gray area, are we not? I know of people, both students and colleagues, who are actually saying, my first draft is coming from AI. Is that already transgressing that ethical boundary between what my intellectual property is, and what someone else is giving me, because I'm selling this to the instructor, or to a colleague, or to a journal, or to a publisher as my work. I must tell you, though, you know there are some standard tasks, some routine tasks like reference letters. They are getting a first draft from some machine is sometimes very helpful, and I know that a lot of colleagues are doing that.
So, artificial intelligence is here, and it will not go away, and I think that is a good thing for many of us, but we need to have these ethical discussions, these conversations about where we want to go with this. I can see many, many instances where we want to actually implement artificial intelligence even in our teaching, and that, too, will happen, and that will be exciting to see. But we need to control this, and we need to be very much aware of what we are actually doing and what we want to do with this. I think this is early days, and we need to have those conversations as soon as possible. Yes, and I know that many of us are already having those conversations.
CD: Yeah. And when you say “intellectual property,” do you extend that definition to everything that you produce? So that could be an article, or it could be an invention or an innovation?
AB: Absolutely. It could be my lecture slides. It could be something as small as notes that I'm giving to students. It's still my intellectual property, and vice versa. The students will give me something – an essay, a presentation. It's their intellectual property. They produced it. So, we need to be very careful about that if we want to share this with others, that's fine. But we need to get permission from people before we do that.
CD: Yeah. And I know you gave a brief description of your work. I just wondered if you could speak a little bit – I know that you're in historical studies and classics – I’m curious about what it is that you research, but also how you got into that area of research in the first place?
AB: Yeah, I mean? How many minutes do we have? You know I was very lucky. I had great high school teachers, who really inspired me to do this. I had parents who didn't say, ‘You shouldn't do this. You should study something that will get you a real job.’ So, they were very supportive of this, and I was just hooked by what I saw, what I learned, what I read.
So, the ancient world and history, in general, always fascinated me. I've often thought about why I ended up being an academic and doing history and being a historian, even an ancient historian would have that have been my dream job. You know, when you are 12 or 10 or 8, ‘what's your dream job?’ And at some point, I decided, you know, it's not always about actually following your dream job. As a matter of fact, if I had followed my dream, I may have become a pianist, but I soon realized I wasn't good enough for that, you know, but I also realized I'm pretty good at doing what I'm doing in history. I'm a good historian, and I'm pretty satisfied with that.
So, the ancient world always fascinated me. And then, when I decided to actually study the ancient world at university, I just had the luck to find very inspiring teachers, high school teachers first, and then university teachers, and I also got a lot of support from them. I received support from people. I got these RA jobs, and I'm a big proponent of actually providing our students, both undergraduate and graduate, with additional support, like RA opportunities, because this is how you make them, not only welcome in the field, you make them also do what they want to do, but can't do, because there are no resources for them to do these things, particularly nowadays, and so I was just very lucky. And then one thing leads to the next. And then I had one particular professor at university who was working on religion in the ancient world. And at some point, I thought, ‘this is what I really want to do.’
One of my specialties really is religion. So, I did my degree in classics. I did a PhD in ancient history, and then I added another degree in religious studies, so you can employ me both in the classics program and in a religious studies program, if you want to. And so that came together rather nicely.
And so, I'm really interested in what drives people to be religious, what drives people to actually worship gods or a god? Many gods doesn't matter really. That very notion of religious pluralism out there, and that's something that we find not just nowadays. We find it also in the ancient world. So, I'm also very interested in comparing. So, comparison between ancient religious practices, beliefs, thoughts, conceptions, and what we're doing nowadays is something that really also drives my research. And just to conclude that, more recently, what I've been doing is actually, I got really interested in the religion of migrants in the ancient world, you know, funnily enough, I'm not so interested in migration per se. Because migration is in a way to the historian. Don't get me wrong, but it's a pretty trivial fact of life, because there's always been migration, and there will always be migration. But what I'm interested in is what these migrants are doing when they arrive in a new place. What happens to their beliefs? What happens to their gods? What happens to their religion? What happens to them? Trying to be the people they were in their homeland? Can they still live their religious lives in their new environment. So, that is something I'm really interested in. And again, there, the comparison is fantastic, because we have so much evidence about migrants, religious lives in Toronto, for instance, in the 21st century. And there's a lot of evidence also for migrants. Religious lives in the ancient world, how they live their religious lives in a new foreign, and sometimes hostile, environment.
CD: I find this so fascinating. But you're also making me think of one of our researchers in visual studies, Kajri Jain. I'm sure you must have come across her at some point, but she studies those huge Buddhist statues and things like that in India, and how people will make pilgrimages to them. But it's just another way that people are observing and paying their respects to the gods, which I find fascinating, because obviously we don't necessarily have the same kind of rituals here.
AB: Absolutely, you know. Funnily enough, when I did my PhD, I had one university advisor, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I was doing my PhD in Oxford. So, he said, ‘What are you doing in Oxford? You should travel to India and China, and study religion on the ground, because that will teach you a lot about ancient religion.’ And he was so right.
CD: I don't know if this is a fair question. But did you grow up in a religious household?
AB: Not really. No, and I don't think I am a religious person. Really, I respect the religion of other people, and I think you need that respect towards what people are doing, both in the present and in the past. So, you need to respect the religious choices of people in, let's say, 200 CE, who are worshipping a multitude of gods. You need to respect as an attitude. I don't think I'm religious myself.
I've been having these conversations with many colleagues. I have some colleagues who work on religion are extremely religious, and others who say that they are atheists, and having conversations about these things with these people is very fascinating. When I could see some of the atheists, maybe being drawn to it because it's kind of foreign to them, and they just want to understand the history of it. But it becomes a problem when you don't just want to understand, but want to criticize. So, both the atheist perspective. And let's say, the monotheistic faith perspective can be very detrimental. When you're studying historical traditions, it may get into your way, and it sometimes happens I can see that.
CD: And so, if we can change tracks a little bit here, and you touched on it already, about the concept of community-engaged research and learning. And so, I was just wondering if you could tell me how you define it. I know it's a very complex topic, but how would you define it?
AB: It's a complex topic, and it's a difficult question. So I give you maybe a broad idea of where it actually fits into experiential learning, because, on the one hand, it's very much experiential learning, because it is learning by doing. We send people out into the community to achieve something and to learn something that they may not get at the university, and then they come back with that knowledge, and that will actually enhance their being academics, their being students that actually excel at the university.
AB: At the same time, community-engaged learning is slightly different, I think, from work-integrated learning. Where we send a student say, to a pharmaceutical company in the Peel region. So, where exactly is the difference? And I don't have a clear definition, but the university does provide one. So, students do participate in a structured learning experience in partnership with communities or grassroots, non-profit or public organizations, which is probably one of the differences to work integrated learning. We are actually working with IBM or some big pharmaceutical company. So, that's not necessarily what I would expect from someone I send into the community on a community engagement-burning experience.
AB: I think what's also important about this particular field is that these partnerships are driven by the community partners and their priorities, and they do provide benefits both to the community, but also to the students that are going out into the field. And I think this is very important. There is a lot of respect that needs to happen when we go out into the field to forge these community partnerships, to nurture these community partnerships, and to engage in these community partnerships, which may be slightly different, again, in emphasis from what we are seeing when we do work-integrated learning, and send out our students to go to companies, spend some time with companies, and come back either profit or nonprofit.
That, I think, would be a basic, broad definition. So maybe a starting definition of what actually community engagement means to the university and to the students and the university, and I think there's all forms like, to your point, about for the student and for their working with a company. But there's that sort of industry component that could be part of community engagement. But there's also lots of students doing work in labs and working with faculty members on their archival research or things like that, that, I think, falls into that absolutely, up to a point. We need to be careful. We need to be sure about what we mean when we say “community” and “engagement with the community.” And there are so many different ways, we can actually engage with the community.
So, just to give you a few examples at the University of Toronto and at UTM, we do have academic courses where people are actually researching an issue that affects the community, they may not necessarily go out into the community, although many do, but this still, I would say, counts as community engage research and pedagogy. We do have placements in the community with community partners. We go out on internships with our students.
So, there's a variety of things we are actually doing. But you've mentioned at some point, I think, the ROPs – the research opportunity programs – which are extremely popular with our students. And I'm so happy to see that they are popular, not just with students working in labs, but also working in the humanities. What we need to find at the University of Toronto is this healthy balance between the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. And we want to provide these opportunities to all our students, and my colleagues in the sciences have been doing a fantastic job with these opportunities. But I'm seeing a lot of interest among faculty and among students in the social sciences and the humanities as well. And so, this is something we have been nurturing for a while now, and we are now seeing the rewards of that. More and more people are coming on board and helping us, actually providing this experience to our students.
CD: Yeah. And I can think of a couple examples – Shafique Virani [in Historical Studies], I know, was very, very active with ROPs, but also Liza Blake in English and drama. She's always run a very robust ROP with her students, and it's great because they help her with the archival research that she's doing.
AB: Absolutely. And what I see, what is also so encouraging, is that we have a certain generation of people who have been doing this for a long while, and have been investing a lot of their time, their effort, their energy, their enthusiasm into this. And the students, so many students, thousands of students, have benefited from that. But what I find so encouraging is that we have junior faculty who just do the same. They come to this university. They are thrilled to see that there are these opportunities, and they come on board. So that's the next generation of scholars who actually in interaction with their students provide these opportunities.
CD: Even just to extend the definition, I know there's areas of research that are crowd-sourcing data. And so, this could be for anything, again across the disciplines, where you're reaching out to the community to help you identify someone from an archive. Or I think there was a researcher here who was having an Indigenous community who was using this one body of water. They were just noting differences, and so she was using that community to help inform her research. And so, I'm just wondering, do you also take that into account?
AB: Absolutely. I mean, you know, community engagement is something we need to be doing, and I think we need to be doing much more of that. But we also need to keep in perspective that at the end of the day, we need to create a kind of integrated learning experience for our students. They go out to the community, they learn they may provide some skills to the community. I mean just the example you just mentioned – that's a beautiful one. But they also learn from the community, and that informs their research. So, in terms of disciplinary outcomes. It makes them stronger academics when they come back.
And then there's also another piece that we actually have implemented across the board by the way, in experiential learning. So, not just community engagement, also with work-integrated learning, with all kinds of experiential learning experiences. When people come back they need to reflect on what they've been doing. We want them also to become not just better academics, but also better citizens. And that is something that community engagement can achieve. But we need them to reflect on this. And that's why we are asking people to reflect on what they've been doing, what they've been learning, the challenges, the opportunities, the outcome, and how that has changed their lives.
CD: And I think, to your point, I spoke with Kathy Wilson about this topic a long time ago, and I'm hoping to have her on the podcast to talk about some of her community-engaged learning. But I remember her saying that being involved with the community – she's very much about health research – but she said it was so interesting, speaking with the community and for them informing her research, because what she was finding with some of the local-level people that she was speaking with: her findings through them didn't necessarily reflect her findings from literature. And I think again, as a researcher, this is only going to help make your research richer because you get this broader perspective from the community that you're working with.
AB: Absolutely. And you know we are constantly learning, both as actually professors and as students. So, life is a learning curve, let's face it. And we go out into the field as academics and the students to not verify, but to potentially falsify what we've learned and to actually improve our method, our results, our data, and then come back with better data and better results and better methods. So that's the idea of this constant learning process. So, what we don't want to do is go out into the field and tell people what to do, and how to think, and what to believe, because we are the academics - that's totally wrong! And I think our experiential learning approach is really one of constant learning through engagement with others.
CD: And so, I'm curious if you've had your own experience in this particular area of community-engaged research, either having others work with you on your projects, or if you yourself and you did mention some of your academic work when you were doing your PhD. But I was curious about your own experience in this area.
AB: I've been going out into the field myself. Migration, a topic that really interests me, to just, I mean, collect data in the communities and talk to people in the community, which is easy for me, because I'm not a threat to people. I'm working on a past society, but just in terms of comparisons I can make.
So, I've been going out into the field. But something else I've been doing. Or, I should say, my colleagues and I in the program in classical civilization, have been doing is community outreach. That's another thing I'm feeling really strongly about is the role of the humanities in the 21st century, as you may know, there's a lot of despair, a lot of frustration, and I'm not entirely sure whether that is actually justified. I should say the age of artificial intelligence potentially means that the humanities will be stronger than ever before, because we need them. We need people to teach and learn critical thinking skills. We need people to analyze, to provide second or third opinions, to be critical of what's happening in the field. And I'm not saying that only people in the humanities can do that. But I think what I'm saying is that the humanities can be instrumentalized to achieve exactly that.
AB: So, what my colleagues and I, in classical civilization have been doing over the last years, was we were actually organizing a “classics in the world today” event an outreach event with undergraduate students, graduate students, people on campus. So, we did invite staff and faculty, but also high school students and high school teachers. So, we went out into the Peel community, invited them to come to campus and discuss issues with us. Why does classical civilization matter? Why do the humanities matter nowadays? And we pick topics like migration. Think about the US a few years back and now: civil strife and civic war – it had that as a topic. And you can actually then see how people begin to understand that current events, current structures are not that fundamentally different from the problems and the challenges people had 2000 years ago. And think about the civil strife that we see both in the US and in Canada and across the world nowadays, and the rhetoric that's being used, and some of that can be found in past societies. It's just a, in a way, repetition of what has already played out in history. And just I mean drawing those parallels and showing people that this is nothing new, and people hundreds of years ago had the same challenges. And then, looking at how they dealt with those challenges, where they failed and where they succeeded, that can be very interesting and potentially helpful for us.
AB: But I should say, I mean, we are also doing a lot of other outreach into the community. For instance, in the Dean's Office, what we are also organizing through the experiential education unit is Lecture Me!, where we actually ask professors to give talks, and we do that in collaboration with the Mississauga Library system. So, we do have people from the community, from Mississauga, from the Peel region. It was great to see that happening actually online during the pandemic, because you had people who would not come to the library, who would join us online to listen to some professor give a talk about their research. But again, questions and concerns that would actually be of importance, of relevance to people outside the university, so no simple academic exercise, but something much more than that.
CD: And I love that event. I know there's one happening tonight.
AB: Tonight. Absolutely.
CD: By the time people hear this they'll miss it. But there's always the next one. It's usually the first Tuesday of the month.
AB: Something like that.
CD: And I just want to say to your point the humanities, I did my undergrad in cinema studies and English. I have such a special place in my heart for the humanities, but I'll never forget one of the faculty members I interviewed here who he's in social sciences: he said ‘I took a lot of humanities courses when I was doing my undergrad. It made me a better writer. It made me a better critical thinker.’ He just talked about all the value that those humanities courses brought to his way of thinking. I always want to put in a plug for the human.
AB: I fully agree. Yes, you know I am a big fan of a liberal arts education, and I think this is something that we should preserve, and that we should nurture. And I do think that a lot of people in the University of Toronto think the same. I think we are in a great position to just expand on what we already have.
CD: Absolutely. And so, you did mention a couple of the upcoming initiatives. But I just am curious about your overall aims in your portfolio, of things that you see coming up on the horizon for your unit and some of your priorities, although you have touched on this. But if there's anything else that you wanted to mention or add?
AB: We are always trying to expand opportunities. Our goal, and it may be a very ambitious one, but our goal is really to provide an experiential learning opportunity. And you know, it can come in different forms. It can come as a academic course, a service course, something that goes out into the community, an internship, a placement – so many opportunities, actually, on the experiential learning side – Research Opportunity Program opportunities, for instance. We want to expand that, and our goal is to make this available to all students, so that every student at UTM, if they choose to, can have an experiential learning opportunity of some kind while they are at the University of Toronto Mississauga. So, that is the big goal.
So, we need to expand our opportunities. We are working very, very hard on expanding those in the research opportunity field. I can also share with you that we are working on adding a co-op internship program. We’ve been listening to people – our students want that, our faculty want that, people on the other campuses already have it. So, we are starting a pilot, and ever so slowly, we will add this to our portfolio, so this will be another opportunity for students in the field of experiential learning. We are not replacing any of the other options. We'll keep those, but this is just an additional option, because some people may prefer that over other options we have actually been providing them with.
CD: Co-op usually means someone going and working in a particular place. So, you must have been building connections with local...?
AB: That is correct. The idea really is to place our students with local companies for 12 to 16 months, and then they come back after that and complete their degree.
CD: That sounds really great. And I know you said it's a pilot. So is that starting up this year or can you say?
AB: It will start soon, hopefully. But we're still in the working phase. But it's looking good.
CD: Yeah, okay, good. Because I know these things take a long time.
AB: They always do. I mean, this has been said by the President. It's in our Academic Plan. It will be in the new Academic Plan, I'm pretty sure. We had a Provostial review a little while ago, and our external referees, they were very impressed by what we are doing in terms of community outreach. We have fostered this strong relationship with the city of Mississauga, for instance, and that is something to expand, to work on. And I think it's our responsibility as a university, as a public institution that is funded by the taxpayer, to do what we've been doing, and to do even more of that.
AB: So, to go out, connect with the community, provide them with the expertise that we can provide, and then again learn from them. And what does that mean to our students? It means that they will actually have this additional learning-by-doing experience in the field, and then they will come back enriched in a variety of ways, not just because they have learned some practical skills. They come back, not just as better scholars: I think they come back as better citizens, and that is another service we need to provide to society, and we can do that partly through what we are doing, through experiential learning.
CD: And I see this as a win-win-win situation, because the students are benefiting, the university's benefiting, but also the community benefits, because sometimes people don't know what goes on at University of Toronto Mississauga. There's a lot of people that live in the area and they don't necessarily know. But I feel like if you're engaging with that community, there's a newfound appreciation for what's happening here.
AB: Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, and there's also some mystery sometimes surrounding the university. But once you establish contacts with people in a variety of fields at a variety of levels, they find that there is very little about that mystery that they need to be afraid of, and there is a lot of opportunity for the community to engage with us. And again, vice versa. As you say, it's a win-win-win situation. I'm pretty excited about being at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and being in the Dean's office at this particular point in time, because this is such an exciting period for the University of Toronto Mississauga, with all the initiatives that are happening and all these expansions that are happening. And I'm really looking forward to the next years.
CD: Same! I just want to thank you so much for your time, Andreas.
AB: Thank you.
CD: I feel like I'm going to be going on to speak to other people about what community engagement means for them, or how they're incorporating it into their work, and you've given me a good foundation to think these things through, as I'm speaking, with other faculty members and students here on campus. So, thank you.
AB: It was a pleasure. Thanks for coming and talking to me today.
[theme music fades in]
CD: I would like to thank everyone for listening to today’s show.
I would especially like to thank my guest, Professor Andreas Bendlin, UTM’s Vice-Dean, Academic Experience, for being so generous with his time and chatting about his research, as well as his aims for his important administrative portfolio at UTM, overseeing the academic integrity and experiential education units.
If you are a faculty member or student at UTM, please get in touch with me! I would love to meet as many people from our campus’s scholarly community as possible and think through other people to highlight here.
I’m back for my seventh year of podcasting at UTM, continuing on with Season 9 and “UTM in the community” theme.
Also, if you can take the time to rate the podcast in iTunes, it helps others find the show and hear more from our great UTM academic community.
Lastly, and as always, thank you to Timmy-Tuna for his tracks, tunes, support!
Thank you!
[theme music fades out]