Jackman Scholars-in-Residence at U of T

Jackman Scholars program                

Working backwards through 2024-25, one of my most fulfilling experiences as an educator in a very long time was as a faculty supervisor for the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program at the Jackman Humanities Institute. This program, across the three University of Toronto campuses, has faculty apply with a research project for which they would like a team of undergraduate research assistants. Once the projects have all been accepted, students then apply for the projects that most interest them, and faculty choose their team from the appropriate matches. Students receive research training, room and board for a month on a U of T campus, extracurricular programming, and a living stipend; faculty get assistance on their projects, and some funds to support the students and ongoing work on the project. The students for this program are truly outstanding – the process is really competitive, and the students get to apply in their areas of interest. I got to work with five truly excellent students who blew me away with their insight, dedication, and care.

In Spring 2025, my project was entitled Paying for Parks: Public Space in the Urban Landscape. The original project brief read:

This project examines how changing revenue streams have affected the spaces and character of the urban public realm over the past four decades. By comparing the municipal budget shares of parks departments over time, across medium and large North American cities, and the adjacent public discourse surrounding these changes, we will better understand the discourse of privatization.

In the end, my team and I ended up focusing on parks budgets just in the largest Canadian cities, and then – due to data constraints – on Ontario’s largest cities. We continue to work on this project, and we hope to submit a paper based on the data by the end of this year.

However, here I would like to mention the elements that I think make this program so successful as a place of authentic learning:

1. There are no grades. This seems a bit obvious, but when the incentive moves away from external rewards and towards students’ interest in the topic area and in learning research methods, the whole attitude changes, for everyone. Concerns about cheating or plagiarism pretty much evaporate. I don’t have to take on the role of enforcer, and students get to ask real questions.
2. The students show up in a subject area they are interested in, and they bring their training. I have rarely encountered a group of students who come in so ready to tackle urban problems. While there were terms I needed to (and was happy to!) explain, the basic concepts of municipal government and governance had already been covered in their previous courses. Most of this group had not necessarily thought about public space in the ways I was describing, but they knew how to think about the state, about complex urban issues, and about the built environment. When we got together with other groups, it was clear that they also were incredibly invested in this process.
3. The research is real. Sometimes we got stuck, but the payoff of figuring out an actual problem – often having to do with a data set – was tremendous. On one really excellent day, we met with Dr. Enid Slack (of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the Munk school). When one student said it would have been helpful to have her knowledge at the start of the project, Dr. Slack told them that if we did that, they wouldn’t have shown up with such good questions. This was my first time working in big quantitative data sets, and there were times I was just as lost as the students, or times when we had to reconfigure the sample in order to handle the data we had. We built this project together, and depended on one another.
4. We all left wanting more. A great learning experience is one that ends on a high note. At the end of the program, when all of the groups across the three campuses got together to present their work, everyone sat in an auditorium on U of T’s downtown campus cheering for each other’s research project. Our group were incredibly proud of our poster, and we were all sad to say goodbye to one another.  I continue to work on the project with students in a paid RA capacity.

I think a lot about this program – could it be expanded, or would it lose its sparkle? How can this style of learning be translated to the undergraduate classroom? I definitely look forward to applying again in the future, and I will encourage my students to do the same.