Teaching fuels hope, and Arlette Zinck believes in being hopeful. As a result, she creates forums and venues for sharing learning both in her literature classrooms and in the world beyond.
Early in her career, learners at her home institution were invited via a campus conference into a divisive news story about a Canadian youth held in Guantanamo Bay. Rather than leave the learning in the classroom and learners in despair, she equipped students to move toward hope by becoming teachers themselves. Through public events, media interviews and speaking engagements, she and her students took their learning to new heights[...]
Teaching fuels hope, and Arlette Zinck believes in being hopeful. As a result, she creates forums and venues for sharing learning both in her literature classrooms and in the world beyond.
Early in her career, learners at her home institution were invited via a campus conference into a divisive news story about a Canadian youth held in Guantanamo Bay. Rather than leave the learning in the classroom and learners in despair, she equipped students to move toward hope by becoming teachers themselves. Through public events, media interviews and speaking engagements, she and her students took their learning to new heights and then to the streets as they helped a nation see old news from new angles. During the years that followed, she and her colleagues also devised a multi-disciplinary, integrated curriculum centred in Canadian novels to address the needs of the young prisoner at the heart of the initial news story. Zinck soon found herself leading a correspondence learning program at the invitation of the US military and teaching in-person poetry classes in an interrogation hut at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Today, Zinck is the founder and Executive Director of The Ephesus Project, a collaborative effort between local universities and Correctional Services of Canada. The project offers liberal arts post-secondary courses to incarcerated students at Edmonton’s maximum-security institution, and then across the country via correspondence as those learners move to medium-security placements. Creativity, positivity, and flexibility are the teaching strategies that make learning possible in an often-impossible carceral setting.
Ephesus is, of course, the ancient site of the great library in the once glorious outpost of learning on the edge of the Roman Empire. Bringing learning and hope to the outposts of our culture, whether in a conventional or not-so-conventional classroom, is the hallmark of Zinck’s teaching. In 2012 Zinck was awarded The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of her work in Guantanamo Bay, and in 2018 she became a 3M teaching fellow.