Manufacturing Mennonites: public lectures and reviews

Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba has received its first review! Historian James Naylor (Brandon University) reviewed the book for Oral History Forum d’histoire orale, the journal of the Canadian Oral History Association. You can read his review here.

Mfg Mennos

I’ll be discussing the book at public lectures in Winnipeg on the following dates:

4 December 2013, 12:30 PM, Fred Douglas Place (333 Vaughan St.)
10 December 2013, 2:00 PM, The Wellington (3161 Grant Ave.)
7 April 2014, 2:00 PM, The Portsmouth (125 Portsmouth Blvd.)

Manufacturing Mennonites will also be discussed by registrants in Canadian Mennonite University’s theology book discussion group “Take and Read” on 9 April 2014.

UPDATE:
Reviews of the book have been published in Oral History ReviewMennonite Quarterly Review (see pages 131-33), the Journal of Mennonite Studies, The Canadian Historical Review, Great Plains Research, Labour/Le Travail, Canadian Ethnic Studies, and University of Toronto Quarterly.

Canadian Food History Symposium, 26 October 2013

UPDATE: Audio recordings of the three presentations at this event are available online.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

presents the second annual

CANADIAN FOOD HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

featuring

Dr. Ian Mosby

Department of History, University of Guelph

A nurse takes a blood sample from a boy at the Indian School, Port Alberni BC, in 1948, during the time when nutritional experiments were being conducted on students there and five other residential schools. (SOURCE: Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 4111770)
A nurse takes a blood sample from a boy at the Indian School, Port Alberni BC, in 1948, during the time when nutritional experiments were being conducted on students there and five other residential schools. (SOURCE: Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 4111770)

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Canadian Food History Symposium, 4 April 2013

In what I hope to make a regular event at the University of Winnipeg Department of History, honours and graduate students enrolled in my Advanced Studies in Canadian Social History class recently presented brief summaries of their original research in Canadian food history.

Tony's Canteen at University of Winnipeg. (SOURCE: University of Winnipeg Archives, SC 2 4 A0626-19416)
Tony’s Canteen at University of Winnipeg. (SOURCE: University of Winnipeg Archives, SC 2 4 A0626-19416)

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Share your snack food stories!

UPDATE: This research is now completed, and I am no longer conducting interviews. Thanks to all for sharing your stories! My book, Snacks: A Canadian Food History, is available from University of Manitoba Press.

Nutty Club. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.
Nutty Club. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.

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Book launch

Celebrating the publication of my first book!

Mfg Mennos

The book launch will take place at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson on Saturday, 27 April 2013 at 2 pm.

The book is a history of 3 workplaces – Friesens, Palliser, and Loewen – and discusses the transformation of Mennonite identity in the second half of the 20th century.

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Why I don’t give exams

I taught high school students for a decade and a half before my current university career. I obtained my education degree in the early 1990s, at the height of the interest in “alternative assessment.” The phrase “alternative assessment” was replaced eventually by “authentic assessment” and finally the term became simply “assessment.” The change in terminology reflected a change in understanding: alternatives to traditional paper-and-pencil testing should not be considered “alternatives” but as central methods of assessing students. Those methods should be “authentic” in that they reflect actual real-world (meaning, outside of school) tasks, and should require demonstration or performance of student skills. As these ideas became the norm among secondary school teachers, the adjectives “alternative” and “authentic” fell away.

Authentic
From University of Tasmania, “Authentic Assessment,” http://www.teaching-learning.utas.edu.au/assessment/authentic-assessment.

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Old Dutch “Kids’ Bids”: searching for past contestants

UPDATE: This research is now completed, and I am no longer conducting interviews. Thanks to all for sharing your stories! My book, Snacks: A Canadian Food History, is now available from University of Manitoba Press.

Old Dutch delivery truck in Minneapolis. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.
Old Dutch delivery truck in Minneapolis. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.

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Class discussions

Earlier this year, I led a workshop for the University of Winnipeg History Department on leading class discussions. Below is a summary of that workshop.

Preliminaries:

In my first scheduled class with undergraduates, I take some time to explain how to read journal articles in preparation for class discussions. (See the suggestions provided in Patrick Rael, Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students (Bowdoin College, 2004)). I like to centre the first discussion around a non-threatening text – usually a poem, such as Tom Wayman’s “Paper, Scissors, Stone” or Bertolt Brecht’s “A Worker Reads History.”

rock paper scissors. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.
rock paper scissors. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.

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