Transcript: Discover Arts, Literature and Communication

CP: Welcome to the Discover Découvrir Dawson podcast, where we highlight the programs, people, and stories that make Dawson College such a dynamic place. If you’re thinking about university and hoping to come to Dawson, you’ll want to hear about the Arts, Literature, and Communication program or ALC for short.

Whether you’re still exploring your options, or you’re already passionate about arts and culture, this conversation with ALC coordinator, Robert Stephens, will help you imagine where ALC could take you. Welcome, Robert. To start us off, who’s ALC for?

RS: Like the other big pre-university programs – Science, Social Science, and even the smaller ones, Liberal Arts, Visual Arts – you don’t go to a pre-university program unless you are intending to go to university after. What makes ALC special of the pre-university programs is it gives you your ticket to university and pretty much anything except science. But on the way there, you get to explore your creativity. You get to work on various forms of art, you get to perform, if you’re into performing, and you just get to study the creative arts in as much depth as you want, with a lot of options.

CP: I think it would be helpful if you could tell us the kind of student who would thrive in ALC versus the kind of student who would thrive in Social Science. Like, how do I decide between the two if the roads kind of lead to the same place? I guess it’s a matter of how I want to spend my two years at CEGEP.

RS: So students need to know themselves a little while they make this decision, you know? So often at open house or other events, when we’re talking to prospective students, you kind of just force them into a, like a quick binary choice. Like, what do you like doing, right? So, you know, if you really do, like, doing data collection and studies and analyzing papers and this kind of thing, you’re going to do more of that in Social Science than you would in ALC.

If, on the other hand, you like to make art projects, you’re going to do far more of that in ALC and probably none of that in Social Science. So there’s a quick, sort of gut check. If the student is planning on going to university, they’re not totally sure what they’re going to do there. And technically, the roads from ALC and Social Science are the same, all the same university programs.

So yeah, why pick one over the other? Well, there’s a simple thing. Do you like making art? Yes or no? Do you want to make art? When you think back to your high school, was your favourite class history or art?

CP: Dawson is a big school, right? It’s a big campus. We have a lot of students here. But when you come to ALC to one of the profiles, you’re going to find a learning community. You’re going to find your little family at Dawson. You’re not gonna get lost. Tell us a little bit about that.

Depending on which profile you’re in, there there’ll be a certain number of students, but you will almost certainly be in, you’ll be in a class with just the students in your profile at the beginning of your program. And then again, at the end of the program for your capstone course, you’ll be with just your profile students, and then you’ll see them again and again, the same students in many of your options. So, there really is a chance to have a community and get to know people pretty well. You’re not, it’s not, it’s impossible in ALC that you’ll have different people in every one of your classes and always feel like, oh, my, my friends are never with me in my class. It’s just impossible. They will be because the size of the program necessitates it.

The other thing that’s really important is your teachers will know who you are in ALC. The class sizes in general are a little smaller, often because we’re using workshop spaces and production spaces that can’t take more than 25, 26 students. So the classes have to be smaller.

CP: Tell me about the kinds of students that come into ALC, and I know there are a lot of different profiles, and we can touch on that as well. But I would like to know, it’s for students who maybe even are already artists, like, they’re very creative. They’re making short films. They’re painters, musicians, and so on. But it’s not only for them, it’s also for explorers, right? Maybe cover that ground a little bit of the students.

The thing that’s great about ALC is you don’t actually need to prove in any way that you are capable in any art form to get in and just explore more. There’s no audition process, there’s no portfolio that needs to be presented when you’re applying, as opposed to professional arts programs, which are, you know, you already have to be quite good in that medium before they’ll let you into the program. ALC, that’s not the case. If you have your high school diploma, you have the appropriate grades, you will be allowed in. And if you want to study, take the theatre class and you’ve never done any theatre, there’s nothing stopping you from exploring. If you want to take the painting class and you’ve never put brush to canvas before, that’s fine. In ALC, you will be given the opportunity to do that if you want. Right? Which is nice.

It’s there, again, like, it’s really, you know, I say as somebody who’s passed the university stage and out in the adult world, you don’t get opportunities necessarily to explore and try painting or dancing or theatre or music.

CP: And, I mean, there’s just so many pathways that open up, and there’s students that come in that don’t know what they’re doing at all, when they start out, and the other ones, who have, like, a really set path in mind, because they’re already, you know, an accomplished artist of some sort, and they’re headed to a BFA, a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and others, you know, they discover what it is thanks to the exploration options.

RS: The most successful lawyer I know got a music degree, and then later went back to do a law degree, right? So the pathways are very open, and 17-year-olds should want to explore all sorts of things, including their creative talents. Before they get to university, so they really know what, you know, two things. What are you interested in, which, of course, is important? You want to like what you’re doing, but also, let the universe show you what you’re good at a little bit.

You know, I often tell my students, I did a freshman year at university. I didn’t come from the CEGEP system myself. And the only course I got an A in the first year was philosophy, which I had never taken before and didn’t really know anything about. And to me, that was just, well, this is obviously what you’re good at, so I guess this is what you should major in. And ALC is great for that because you take such a wide array of choices, of courses, both artistic creative making courses, but also sort of more traditional, sort of what we call chalk and talk, academic kind of courses. And you’ll figure out what you’re actually well suited to, and hopefully you’ll also like that thing. And then you’ll really be clear of what you want to do at the next step, and all the doors will be open to you at that point. So why not?

CP: So, it sounds like a great choice if you, if you’re not sure, what you would like to do at CEGEP. You’re not sure what program might be for you, but you know that you would like to go to university. You’d like to get a full education, and you’d like to avail yourself of the opportunity of CEGEP. And if you’d like to come to Dawson, ALC is, like, the door is wide open for you to come to ALC at Dawson.

If you check the following two boxes, you want to go to university in a non-science program, and you really want to go to Dawson, then ALC is going to be easier to get into.

So that’s something to take into consideration if your marks aren’t as stellar as they could be from high school. And a lot of students, you know, maybe they weren’t doing so well in sec 3 and into sec 4. And they’ve turned it around and they realize, you know, I want to go to university, but I’m stuck with my record the way it is at this point. ALC is still probably a live option for you. So it’s something to consider.

CP: The other thing I wanted to talk about was, it is a pre-university program. It’s not meant to lead to a job. And sometimes people might think, especially some parents might think, oh, why are you going to study arts or explore your creative side? But I want you to talk about how that actually prepares you for any kind of profession that you’ll go into afterwards after university, but also, I believe there are real, tangible skills that you could acquire through the ALC program, skills and communication skills, even building your own confidence. These are all translatable skills to anything. Tell me a little bit about that.

So, we talk a lot, sometimes we use the term soft skills, to refer to the things you learn in CEGEP and in university too, in BA programs, for example, that aren’t particular marketable skills that you put on your business card, for example. And yet, they are things that all employers are really looking for, right? So creativity seems like a no-brainer. If you had two applicants for any job, even, you know, a desk job, whatever it is, the more creative applicant clearly would be preferable, somebody who can kind of think outside the box, somebody who’s, on top of that, at ALC, you are creative, but you’re often working in groups, on projects, long-term projects that involve careful planning and scaffolded steps of leading up to the final thing. And often with a public exhibition of the thing that you’ve created, a show of some kind. The ability to manage all that is a very bankable skill. Again, you don’t get a degree in that. You don’t get a degree in expressing yourself. But in ALC, you kind of are. It’s really cool.

CP: And whether there’s a job with a salary attached to music, let’s say, at the end, these things, they give us joy. And they give us a community, like fellow people who are interested in whatever discipline or art practice it is that you like.

RS: It’s another selling point, too, is, like, who do you want to be surrounded by? Who do you want in your class every day? And this is not to say that non-artistic program students are boring, or something, that’s not what I’m saying, but, but, you know, there’s a certain type of person who, if you like to be surrounded by fellow explorers in that sense, right? I mean, I would say if you had to ask me to describe in one word, like the kind of students who are in ALC, like, the first word that comes to mind is cool. Like, they’re often very cool, interesting people, very diverse, diverse set of interests.

CP: So, I’m getting really excited about ALC personally, hearing more and more about it. Like it just sounds like a wonderful option to spend your two years here in the most creative way possible, acquire some concrete skills that are gonna serve me in a number of ways in the future, be with a small community of fellow creatives and artists, and people who are interested in those things, who might be more, like, observers and appreciators. There’s space for them too.

RS: Yeah, you don’t have to be great at making art. If you just like art and like to be around it, that’s a huge part of ALC too, is appreciating our understanding it, being able to, you know, it’s a it’s a nice feeling when you go to the museum and you, you’re like, I know this artist and I know what movement they’re from. You know, when you watch a film and you’re like, I see the I see the technique used here. I see why this is a well-made or not well-made thing. Even though you don’t, maybe you don’t make movies to yourself or you don’t paint yourself. It’s actually really, that kind of knowledge, again, and when you’re out in the world, that’s the kind of knowledge that people want friends who know that kind of stuff. People have no interest in being my friend, because I can write a philosophy essay. They might want to be my friend, though, because I share interests with them, you know, movies, music, literature, this type of thing, right? That’s the well roundedness of the appreciation of art, not just the making of it. It’s a good point.

CP: So, if one wants to apply to ALC, I don’t think they can just apply to arts, literature, and communication. There’s about half a dozen profiles. Exactly. So you have to choose your flavour of ALC or the buffet.

RS: We have a Literature profile, which, as the name implies, you’ll be studying literature and writing, both creative writing and journalistic style of writing. We have the Languages profile, which is where you study up to, we have, we offer five languages at Dawson, the students coming into the Languages profile will become fluent in more than two and they get to choose which ones that they want to study. So that’s an amazing opportunity.

We have the Studio Arts profile, which is a sort of more, is the traditional arts, what you have in mind when you think of going to the art museum, so painting, sculpture, drawing, print making, some photography.

Then we have another arts program called Interactive Media Arts, which is similar in the sense that students are making art, but in this case, Interactive Media Arts, the works that they create are interactive with the audience, the audience member, the observer, is part of the arts. So less behind the velvet rope in the museum kind of art and more, you’re immersed in it. And often involving technology. So, students who are into robotics or coding might end up doing a little bit of that in the Interactive Media Arts program.

And, of course, we have Cin Comm, which is our biggest profile, which is Cinema and Communications, so students will learn all about movies, how they’re made, the history of film, but also making film and video and doing sound, doing the kind of thing we’re doing right now, they might learn how to make a podcast in Cin Comm and so on.

Oh, I think I’ve named the five that have a flavour, and so I was leaving for last Arts and Culture, which is our sort of general studies profile in ALC. It’s the buffet profile. So an Arts and Culture student can pick from the required courses of all the other profiles. And there’s a lot of overlap between profiles of ALC.

So at the end of the day, the profile you pick doesn’t make a gigantic difference in the experience that an ALC student has because they’re with each other in so many option classes. The difference it makes is sort of every term, there will be a required class for your profile. And whereas in the cinema profile, the required class will be a film class. And in the literature profile, the required class will be a literature class. And after that, they get options, which they all share and they mix together.

So I think the other thing in ALC that’s really interesting is we’ve got some minors. The minor is something you get an attestation that you’ve earned it, and we have three in ALC, so we have one in music, we have one in journalism, which is actually really interesting. Many students are interested in that. And we have one in theatre. which is different than professional theatre, obviously, but it just says that you took up to, you took four or more courses in that discipline when you had option courses available to you. Those are the ones that you took. And the idea is, if you’ve taken four music or four journalism or four theatre, then you have a level of expertise that is worthy of being documented. So you get a document that says, you know, you unlocked the minor.

CP: And there’s an element of future proofing by studying the creative arts and developing yourself as an artist.

RS: We’ve kind of accepted at this point that the generation coming is going to have to deal with the fact that they will have multiple careers throughout their lives, that things are constantly gonna be shifting on them, and what they thought was a good bet, 10 years later, won’t even exist as a job, and they’ll have to move laterally or find something new. What’s the key word that they’re gonna have to be, their whole life: creative They’re going to have to be creative. And they’re going to have to have the confidence to think like, I can take on a new thing, a new challenge. I can explore. I can explore the new opportunities that are created from the constantly changing world, especially with technology. And again, if you’ve spent two years in a program that is literally predicated on exploring and being creative, it feels like that is a bonus going into this uncertain labour market of the future.

So, yes, I know I can totally understand as a parent, you know, I can totally understand, like, why, if you’re going to go and study arts, what are you going to be? You’re going to be on the corner, playing music, or are you going to write poetry books? Really? What are you going to do? But no, that’s not what our students do. They do that while they’re here. They explore these things, which is great because they get to explore themselves, and they get to make art, which many young people want to do, but you don’t get much of a chance to do when you’re older.

The students we have don’t end up being musicians and poets and filmmakers necessarily. Some of them do. Many of them go on a much more kind of what parents would think of as a traditional university track. We have students who are in pre-law at McGill, we have students, I have a students who I, just off the top of my head, who’s getting a master’s degree in sustainability, who probably got interested in that because their project, which was a sort of artistically based project in Arts and Culture, involving sustainability, won a prize. It was very impressive, and, you know, it sets a person on a path, and here we are in a master’s program eventually, right?

You know, a student a few years ago won the prize at the end of the term for some poetry that he’d written. He’s studying literature at the master’s level.

CP: If a student wanted to know more, like, they’re deeply interested, they’re hemming and hawing between one program and another, really ALC is a contender, one of the profiles. What would you recommend they do?

RS: If you can, I would totally recommend coming as a student for a day.

CP: I think that we’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else you would like to tell people thinking about Arts, Literature, and Communication at Dawson?

RS: Really just to stress, again, it’s super important to remember that the pathway leading out of ALC is almost exactly the same as the pathway leading out of Social Science, for example. All the same doors are open, all the same opportunities are available. You’re not closing any doors by studying in a two-year arts-based pre-university program. Arguably, there are doors you’re opening, like the ability to work on your learning, how to express yourself and be creative, to build up a portfolio of the impressive things that you’ve done, project-based work that you’ve done.

Yeah, don’t sleep on ALC. That would be my message. It’s a really great opportunity that I think a lot of people don’t take simply because they just didn’t know much about it, or they thought it was something other than what it is.

CP: Thanks, Rob.

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CP: Interviewer

RS: Robert Stephens, Program Coordinator of Arts, Literature and Communication (ALC)