Preface: Tributes to Catherine Innes-Parker

Summary

Catherine Innes-Parker saw her students as dream-vision heroes on a quest through their own imaginary landscapes of learning. That central metaphor of her statement of teaching philosophy shows how organic her career was: she was able always to connect her course material, her scholarship and her role as a teacher together in inspiring and imaginative ways. Central to this metaphor is her awareness that the student – not the professor – is the real hero of the story of higher education. She envisioned herself as the guide on the side, who ‘sometimes tells’ but ‘more often questions the dreamer in order to encourage him or her to interpret the landscape for him or herself’. While most of the teaching philosophies we read are just that – philosophies that focus on the teacher – hers was much more a statement of what she profoundly believed about the central place of her much-loved students.

The last time I saw Catherine, just the week before she died, she invited me over for lunch on her backyard deck. It was a bright Prince Edward Island August afternoon and we ate salads and drank wine as her beloved dog jumped around looking for attention and scraps. She had just arrived back from her sabbatical in England and she was wearing a beautiful flowery frock she had picked up in London. She shared some of what she had done and read in Oxford, but what she really wanted to talk about was her courses. She knew, she said, where she wanted to direct even more of her work energy in the last years of her career: towards her classes, her teaching, her relationships with her undergraduate students.

That was saying something, since teaching was already something she loved and did well. Catherine had a real delight in the classroom experience and in her students, both those who excelled and those who struggled. When I took over one of her classes after her death, I saw how serious she was about that redirection: she left behind classroom management pages that were beautifully organized and meticulously detailed, even joyful. This was where her energy went in those last weeks. I dearly wish that she could have lived to harvest the fruits of that preparation and reflection.