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Profiles of Department Members and Activities

Robert Ryan


B.A., M.A. (Dalhousie), Doctorat 3e cycle (Aix-en-Provence)
ML 331, 519-888-4567, x33593
rwryan@uwaterloo.ca

"It's not just 'show time'."

The Margaret A. Ryan Prize comes into being as a result of the Distinguished Teaching Award that Professor Robert Ryan received at the 2003 Spring convocation. The prize is named in honour of Ryan's mother, a major early influence. "I saw her dedication, and passionate interest in the students she worked with. She also showed me the realities of marking and the time it takes. It's not just 'show time'."

Robert Ryan's affair with French began in his Halifax high school. He had begun studying French in grade seven in a traditional program, memorizing lists of verbs, nouns and adjectives and continued the program into the next few grades. What got him fired up was a very untraditional high school teacher, Richard Burns Adams, who showed him what was possible for a unilingual student to accomplish, not only in terms of language competence but in gaining an understanding of French culture, both European and Canadian. A culture, he learned, is made up of a variety of regional cultures. Burns Adams insisted that one look inside a culture and be sensitive to the differences within it, emerging with a respect for each part of the whole.

"Burns Adams was a linguist and a superlative role model, a man of immense integrity and respect for people," Ryan says. "He had a wonderful pedagogical imagination. He invented a whole bag of tricks, neat practical devices for language learning and remembering that really hit the imagination." Professor Ryan continues to use some of these device in his classes.

His growing passion for French continued into Dalhousie, where he met Harry Aitkens. "Aitkens was a phonetician who had an amazing grasp of the sound system," Ryan says. "He used a great program for teaching structure. The students really caught fire." Aitkens also had a passion for France and for French culture - 'Big C' and small. He would do walking tours - every summer he walked through France with his friend, Dalhousie historian Peter Waite, sketching cathedrals and castles to use later in his teaching.

This fuelled Ryan's interest in France. After his B.A. he spent a year in Marseilles as an "assistant", teaching English at a local high school, and living with a French family from North Africa for the year. "I lived in a very authentic sort of way," he remembers. It was during the time of the Algerian struggle, so he experienced certain aspects of it from inside that perspective. There were protest bombings, store fronts blown out in the night with minimal loss of life. Indeed he came a little too close one time. He went to visit a classmate at his residence. They had taken a stroll in the evening and returned to find one side of the building missing. Ideals and problems of regional culture and political identity began brewing in his young mind.

Professor Ryan went back to Dalhousie and completed the first year of his M.A. He began teaching English at a French Canadian girl's school in Québec while completing his thesis. The three years he taught there began a long, sustained contact with French Canadian culture. It was during the time of the Quiet Revolution when everything was being reoriented. It was a move on all levels - political, social, educational - away from authoritarianism and elitism, and toward the modern democratized world. These were times of tremendous social and cultural change.

During his year in Marseilles, Ryan's travels had taken him to Aix-en-Provence, where he fell in love with the city. It was to Aix that he returned and began work on his Ph.D. He was immersed in linguistic analysis and began his thesis work on the stylistic content of the Gide translations he had written about for his M.A. After three years, he returned to Canada to finish writing his thesis. He began teaching at the Nova Scotia Teachers College in Truro and was once again confronted with a specific cultural aspect of "French culture", the Acadians. Though most of the students were Anglophone, there were many Acadians among them, so there emerged two specific sets of language needs. He began developing courses to deal with specific Acadian dialectical needs, a program that respected their mother tongue but broadened their abilities in standard French, "grafted on to the Acadian dialect". This growing fascination with Acadian dialect and culture shifted the focus of his Ph.D. to the sound and verb systems of the dialect, a change that would set his thesis back a couple of years. "Life gets in the way," he laughs. "I was side-tracked by reality." He finished with a work that describes the Acadian dialect using a linguistic approach based on the structuralist/functionalist models of André Martinet.

By the time he became "Dr." Ryan, he already had over 13 years' teaching experience. His first reactions to winning the Distinguished Teaching Award were pleasure and surprise. Surprise? "If you are enthusiastic about it, you know your stuff and you really care about the people in front of you, well, it's not rocket science," he says. "You're a facilitator. I feel very honoured by my students." He credits a long line of fine teachers and role models, among them Burns Adams, the Grey Nuns at the girls' school, and of course, his Mum. "My mother was a wonderful teacher. She taught history, geography, math, science and English at the junior high and high school levels, and continually sought new ways to present material, like Burns Adams, with a lot of imagination and a passionate interest in the students. She also ran a house and kept a family together."

The Margaret A. Ryan Prize will be made up of the cash component of the DTA, with contributions from colleagues in French Studies, friends and others interested in contributing. It is planned as a yearly prize for the student who achieves the best result in the linguistic component of the undergraduate program.

Representative Publications:

Books
Analyse morphologique du groupe verbal du parler franco-acadien de la région de la Baie Sainte-Marie, Nouvelle-Écosse(Canada). Université Laval, 1982.
Une analyse phonologique d'un parler acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse (Canada). Université Laval, 1981.
Français: Guide pédagogique (Maternelle à 6e année) (Teaching guide for Acadian schools of Nova Scotia): 5 fascicules, Ministère de l'Éducation de la Nouvelle-Écosse, 1981.

Papers and Articles
"La place de la langue et de la culture acadiennes dans les programmes d'études des écoles francophones de la Nouvelle-Écosse" Canada). In Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies, 1998.
"Des manifestations d'économie formelle et sémantique observées au sein du système adverbial du parler franco-acadien de la Baie Sainte-Marie (Nouvelle-Écosse) Canada". In Français d'Amérique : Variation, créolisation, normalisation, Aix-en-Provence, 1998.
"I'parlont drôle": les adverbes à forme adjectivale dans le parler acadien de la Baie Sainte-Marie. In Hommages à Rostislav Kocourek, Halifax, 1997.
"La neutralisation de l'opposition /õ/ et /ã/ observée dans un parler acadien de l'Ile-du-Prince-Édouard (Canada)". In Le français des Amériques, Québec, 1995.
"Particularités phonologiques et phonétiques d'un parler acadien de l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard (Canada)". Paper accepted for publication in Actes du Congrès International d'Études Françaises : La Rioja, Logroño, Spain, 2003.

Selected Professional and Community Affiliations
L'Association française d'études canadiennes
The Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association
GROUP (Get Rid of Urban Pesticides)
Association for French Studies
Seven Generations Network

CMOC