Together and Apart: Telepresence and the Maple League

The Maple League of Universities represents an alliance of four elite primarily undergraduate institutions in Canada: Acadia University, Bishop’s University, Mount Allison University, and St. Francis Xavier University. Every Maple League school relies on close-knit, community-centered, liberal arts-style pedagogy – an increasingly rare approach built on personal interaction among students and faculty members. The educational model works well in individual universities situated in small communities. This paper explores how well the model extends across multiple universities.  In 2017, the Maple League offer a pioneering suite of courses held in telepresence classrooms linking students from all four institutions in one virtual space. My course on Genocide & Justice was selected as one of the first such offerings. This paper reflects on firsthand experiences applying telepresence technology to build cross-institutional – but still intimate – student-faculty engagement.  Building on my own observations, and contributions from two St. Francis Xavier students who lived the class from the ‘other side’, I will use lessons learned to improve telepresence in the Maple League and beyond. Though imperfect, I remain cautiously enthusiastic about how such technologies can enhance – but never replace – the extraordinary way of learning embodied by the Maple League.

James Burnham Sedgwick teaches in the Department of History and Classics at Acadia University. An international historian of global governance, human rights, mass violence, and justice, his research explores how the inner-workings of international organisations affect their outcomes, how social networks, lived experiences, and emotions inform humanitarianism and advocacy, and how institutional solutions to transnational crimes shape international relations. He has published articles and reviews on memory, trauma, and justice in multiple fields including law, international relations, history, and Asian studies. In Winter 2017, he taught one of the first telepresence courses (Genocide and Justice) offered by the Maple League of Universities.