Frances Garrett, Author at Learn | Explore

April 8, 2020

The Circled Square podcast

The Circled Square: Buddhist Studies in Higher Education is a new podcast series produced and released from the University of Toronto’s team at the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies. This academic podcast explores practices of effective teaching and learning about Buddhism.

In this podcast we interview professors from various disciplines creating a platform to discuss the professional work and creativity of teaching. We are interested in cultivating deep conversations about teaching and Buddhist Studies, as well as discussing and learning about how topics related to Buddhism are taught in various fields.

You can listen here now: http://teachingbuddhism.net/circled-square-podcast/. It is also available for free download on Apple podcasts, Google play, Stitcher and Spotify.

This first season has six episodes:

Episode 1: Inhabiting the Stories: Buddhism from the Inside, with Vanessa Sasson
Episode 2: Engaging Students in the Big Picture, with Matt King
Episode 3: Anti-colonial Teaching and Buddhism, with Natalie Avalos
Episode 4: Negotiating the Layers: Material History in our Teaching, with Abhishek Amar
Episode 5: Teaching Buddhist Art Using Museum and Gallery Collections, with Wen-shing Chou
Episode 6: Buddhism and Contemplative Science, with Norman Farb

January 30, 2020

Encyclopedia Donation

We are pleased to announce this important book donation to the University of Toronto Mississauga Libraries. Below, Shelley Hawrychuk, Chief Librarian of UTM Libraries, receives a donation of the Encyclopedia of Buddhist Art, a publication from Buddha’s Light Publications USA, from Venerable Chueh Fan, Abbess of Fo Guang Shan Temple, at the Dharma Day celebrations at Fo Guang Shan temple Mississauga, on December 8th 2019. This illustrated 20 volume set of books was donated by the temple and will now be housed for use by students and researchers at the UTM libraries.

December 18, 2019

Engaging Education in Buddhist Studies

In the initiative “Engaging Education in Buddhist Studies” (EEBS), established in 2019 with support from Khyentse Foundation and the Ho Centre, our instructors are creating modules for Buddhist studies courses that combine creative and/or contemplative practices that are grounded in research on the benefits of experiential education, including increased engagement, self-confidence, and compassion among student-participants. The goals of this initiative are to make student participation in classroom work more accessible, to amplify diverse voices in the classroom, and to support overall wellness and mental health among students. This project is part of our growing priority on programming that supports experiential learning, equity, and student well-being, following principles of place-responsive and trauma-informed pedagogy.

This initiative aims to bring the teaching of Buddhist Studies into the company of newly developing, dynamic educational movements that are student-centered, place-responsive, contemplative, trauma-informed, and attentive to student well-being. Well-tested approaches to embodied or engaged pedagogy emphasize the value of engaging students’ senses and their bodies in the process of studying religion, and much of our work is inspired by these approaches. This project also strives to help students feel connected to the lives of real Buddhists, historically or today, by interacting with stories, religious and aesthetic objects, movement, food, and ritual, and by taking interest in the concerns of householder Buddhists as well as monastics.

In 2019-20, EEBS work was incorporated into five U of T courses:

RLG370 Interdependence
RLG 201 Introduction to Religion in the Visual, Literary and Performing Arts
RLG 373 Buddhist Institutions and Practices: Visuality and Materiality in Buddhism
FAH 394 Sand, Stone, Gold and Crystal: Materials and Materiality in Asian Art
RLG 370 Topics in Buddhism: Meditation and Mindfulness: From Buddhist Traditions to the Global Present

Experiential modules developed for those courses included activities where:

Students maintained regular contemplative and wellness practices in class and at home, and class time was devoted to learning movement and breathing practices with local meditation practitioners.
Students worked with traditional metal funnel tools (chakpur) to create sand mandalas in class and discussed how mandalas make meaning (impermanence and purposeful transience, difficulty of process and production).
Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to sculpt torma (offering cakes) out of clay and coloured clay. They learned about the form, why they are made, and how they create substitutes for other kinds of imagined offerings
Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to learn how to paint the Buddha’s head, studying the iconometric method used to measure a traditional Buddha head with its correct relative proportions according to the Tibetan art tradition

October 10, 2019

Reading Mandalay’s Newspapers

A research report by Siew Han Yeo, doctoral student in the Department of History

In June-July 2019, thanks to the generosity of the Robert H. N Ho Center for Buddhist Studies Student Travel award, I was fortunate to travel to Mandalay for a research trip, I left for Mandalay on July 11 and spent three weeks in Mandalay reading the collections at the Ludu Library. While there, I was able to consult many primary source materials, both in Burmese and English, including twentieth-century published books, colonial reports, journals, books, and newspapers published in Mandalay that I have not otherwise seen at the Yangon University Central Library or the National Archives Department in Yangon, my other two research sites in Myanmar.

Back in Yangon, I have began to translate select sections of these materials with the help of Su Htwe, my Burmese teacher. Su Htwe and I have translated numerous newspaper reports from the Burmah Herald, Thuriya Magazine (Mandalay edition), Burma Journal, and the Hanthawaddy Weekly Review – mostly on topics related to the Chinese community in Burma. My focus on newspaper reports have allowed me to familiarize myself with the Burmese literary scene of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century Burma. Burma/Myanmar has a particularly exciting literary history – but there is little English-language scholarship that discusses the vibrant history of colonial Burma’s literary scenes. I will be leaving Yangon to return to Canada in early October.

Scenes from downtown Yangon at Pansodan and Merchant St.

March 15, 2018

Visiting Taiwan

Buddhist Studies graduate Justin Stein is now in Japan on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. He is working on language study and writing. Justin recently went to Taiwan to visit his friend Erik Schicketanz, currently at Academica Sinica, and as they visited religious sites carried their HCBS bags. Here they are in Wulai, Taiwan.