faculty and staff
A major part of the quality of what Canadian Classroom On Rails offers is going out to see/experience what we’re learning/talking about. This is true of the places and sites we’ll visit, both natural and historic.
It’s equally true of the people who’ll help us interpret the sites/experiences.
Our core group of program staff—historian, assistant, musician, movement and operation staff aboard—will keep us alert, healthy, attentive and attuned to what’s going on around us on the journey, prepared for those we’ll meet on the ground and helping us join the dots in our discussion/journals afterwards.
Our larger lineup of field faculty is those who live in and near, and bring life long experiences to the regions and sites we’ll be visiting. They’ll ride with us for a portion of the journey, draw our attention to what we’re passing through, prepare us for what lies ahead around the next bend, and fill us in on what’s happened here in the past. Often they’ll accompany us to off-sites we’ll visit by bike, bus, canoe or on foot. They may stay with us aboard the train for a time after these visits to help us make sense of what we’ve seen.
Our regional program staff lineup will not be complete until spring. Starting at midwinter as we receive confirmations, we’ll post the names on this site. Here’s a list of types of persons—background, profession—we’re seeking:
* academics/teachers incl. geographers, historians, architects, librarians
* artists, craftspersons, athletes and photographers
* business persons
* elders and other mentors
* clergy (pastors, imams, priests, rabbis) who can share their values with those of other * traditions and relate their perspective of Canada
* writers, journalists and other reporters of events
* people who live on the land: farmers, fishers, foresters, surveyors
* other workers in major and secondary industry
* recent immigrants who can tell us why they came/what they found
Some of the resource persons in our lineup will be recognizable names. Most will not be as well known outside their locale or area of special focus, but all will be knowing and experienced of the things they share with us.
In keeping with our multi-stream approach to learning (audio/visual/tactile), some of our resource people will not be expert talkers or speakers in the language most of us speak day to day. But they’ll be skilled communicators by induction or osmosis of what they’ve learned and keen observers of life around them.
This is what good artistic/dramatic interpreters do for a work of art. They do not write the symphony, song, score or script. But they bring it to life so it can move us emotionally, physically, intellectually and spiritually, so we can not only appreciate the work but internalize and participate in it.
A group of Shinto priests was asked what their creed was. “We don’t have one,” they replied. “We dance.”
David Suzuki, The Nature of Things
“If I were able to say it, I wouldn’t dance it.”
Isadora Duncan
Our program staff and faculty, on board and in the field, are investors in Canadian Classroom / Salle de Classe Ferroviare and in our country too.
They invest their time, their life experience and the quality of their intention with a select group of individuals on a voyage of discovery.
Early investors in kanata—Henry Tudor and the Bristolians who backed Giovanni Cabotto, François I and the Malouins who funded Jacques Cartier, the Rochellais behind Samuel de Champlain, Jeanne Mance and her fellow “Pilgrim Mothers” who turned a trading venture into a homeland, Alexander Mackenzie and others of the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies and George Stephen, Donald Smith, Ed Baring (Revelstoke) and countless other shareholders in Canadian Pacific each received a return. Some found a cod fishery, some a fur industry. Some founded a global transportation company. All founded a country.
If you’re interested in serving in our field faculty, know or know of someone you’d like to suggest in one of these capacities, click here or see Governance and Contacts.