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Making Connections SUSAN JACKEL Three years ago J.M. Bumsted voiced in the pages of this journal some sobering thoughts on the prospects of Canadian Studies programmes in the traditional disciplinary framework of our universities ("The Mouse That Must Roar," JCS, Summer 1977). His main concern then was strategic - how to keep these ventures going in the midst of increasingly ferocious competition for funding and power among regularly-constituted departments - but he did not hesitate to lambaste Canadian Studies programmes themselves for offering choice targets to enemy snipers. And the most tempting target of all, he thought, was the interdisciplinary Canadian Studies course for undergraduates which many programmes offer and which Bumsted, seasoned campaigner that he was, had found from experience to be ''at best a pious hope, at worst a liberal con trick." "Courses organized among specialists in various disciplines who share an interest in Canada have almost invariably been disasters,'' Bumsted wrote, their failure owing principally to the fact that ''the students were responsible for making the synthesis, thus asking them to do what their instructors could not.'' Food for thought indeed, especially for someone who, like myself, was just then mulling over a chance to teach in our own Canadian Studies programme at Edmonton. Canadian Studies at the University of Alberta runs strictly at the undergraduate level, and whether from conviction or mere caution the brochures describe it as a multidisciplinary programme, not an interdisciplinary one. Students building their individual degree programmes - twenty full-year courses or their equivalent over four years -must include at least five Canadian-content courses offered by seventeen participating departments (at last count there were over one hundred and fifty courses to choose from, in both official languages). But they must also reserve space in their programmes for three additional full-year courses constructed specifically for them by Canadian 34 Studies. These are our undergraduate seminars CAN ST 400 for students in their graduating year, and CAN ST 300 and 301 for second- and thirdyear students to take in whatever order they prefer. A word on the evolution of these seminars might help explain the varying approaches to interdisciplinarity they represent. The original Canadian Studies seminar here, created soon after the programme 's inception in 1973, was formed to let students in their final year try to focus their multifarious course work to that point. Carried forward under the title Interdisciplinary Studies 450, this seminar owed much to the after-hours commitment of a handful of people who organized, administered and taught the course under the sporadic supervision of a faculty committee. By all accounts there were pious hopes aplenty, and they were not always doomed to disappointment. For a few weeks or even months a particular mix of students and staff might achieve a genuine meeting of minds, and the successes seemed solid enough to warrant further efforts. But there were other, less happy experiences as well. The problems seemed to have something to do with the variability of teaching techniques among the staff, all of whom were volunteer; however, it became increasingly clear that they also stemmed at least in part from the students' unpreparedness for this sudden invitation to compare mythologies, after three years' indoctrination in the disciplinary monopoly on truth available through their respective departments , whether anthropology or political science or English or whatever. Having achieved with much difficulty some small mastery over the vocabulary and ruling concepts of one field of study, the students were understandably thrown off balance by the free-wheeling eclecticism of INT D 450. All too often it would take the better part of the year for the seminar to shake down, and feelings of frustration mounted. A little interdisciplinarity was thus proven by experience to be a dangerous thing. With rare hardihood, however, the members of the Canadian Studies Committee at Alberta decided in 1977 that perhaps the remedy lay in a hair of the dog: not less but more of the same, although with stricter attention paid to questions of course content and predictability in the teaching staff. As a Revue d'etudes canadiennes first step, INT D 450 was repatriated under the designation CAN ST 400, and a single co...

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