Trent a model for Vietnam delegation

A Vietnamese delegation visited Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, on Tuesday to hear about Trent's ground-breaking experiences with its cultural studies BA and PhD programs.

Nguyen Chi Ben, the Vietnam Institute of Cultural and Arts Studies director general, spoke with The Examiner following a more than two-hour presentation and question-and-answer period with Trent faculty members.

The Vietnam Institute of Cultural and Arts Studies is developing a PhD in cultural studies program and the delegation is visiting several Ontario universities to learn about their experiences, Nguyen said.

"I have learned that the PhD program in cultural studies here (at Trent) is very unique and is unusual," he said.

"I am so impressed with the information that the faculty members here have provided to me, especially about the way they teach their students, the way they have the seminars with the students and their concepts about the culture."

The delegation with six people from Vietnam met with Trent faculty members from the cultural studies department at Catharine Parr Traill College.

Nguyen's daughter, who is an undergraduate student at Trent enrolled in a cultural studies course, joined the group following the meeting.

Trent faculty told the delegation about the development of the university's PhD program and the excellent students, said Prof. John Fekete, the Trent cultural studies PhD program director.

"We have been at this work for 30 years. We established the first BA in cultural studies in North America in 1979, we established the first PhD in Canada in 2007," he said.

"We highlighted for them the unusual nature of our PhD program. It's a short four-year program, so students don't have to go into infinite debt.... It's not a course-based program, but a thesis-based program. We discussed the inter-disciplinary character of our program and highlighted for them the three different concepts of culture that we work with and our particular interest in studying the nature of modern society."

The cultural studies program deals with the production of imaginative works such as art, the production of meanings and values, and the culture of communication, Fekete said.

Trent's cultural studies PhD program is an experimental project of knowledge, he added.

"This is a new discipline," Fekete said. "We are working together with our PhD students to really develop this new approach to knowledge and to consolidate it. It's always experimental. The world is too complex to settle on a single solution and they learn together with us about what it takes to approach the understanding of culture."

The delegation from Vietnam will also visit the University of Toronto, York University, the University of Waterloo and the University of Ottawa.