Marc Gervais Prize winner takes a digital-age approach to education
Earlier this fall, musician and communications studies student Ben Spencer took home the first-ever Marc Gervais Prize. He’s since been putting this $2,000 tribute to one of Concordia’s most beloved professors towards an album called Songs for Terrible Children.
Marc Gervais — an influential educator, film scholar and Jesuit priest — taught in the Department of Communication Studies for 30 years. The new prize supports the work of a graduating student in the BA program; it was established with an endowment from Gervais’s colleagues, students, family and friends after his death in 2012.
“He was a warm and generous teacher, and his enthusiasm for cinema was inspirational,” says Monika Kim Gagnon, chair of Communication Studies, who took Gervais’s classes on Hitchcock, Orson Welles and the French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.
In the spirit of the prize’s namesake, Spencer isn’t turning out your average tunes for toddlers.
With songs like “You and I are Different (And it Terrifies Me),” Spencer uses humour and irony to “cause kids to reject the messages in the music, and therefore think a bit about what else they can negotiate or reject in terms of meaning that comes to them.”
In an age when children are bombarded by mass media and advertising, Spencer says it’s especially important for them to be able to decide how they want to engage with what they see and hear.
“The saturation level is just so high, and kids are using very sophisticated technologies to engage with media all the time,” he says. “These sorts of literacy practices are a mode of empowerment in dealing with that world.”
Spencer completed his BA in Communications in the spring of 2012, and began a master’s thesis this September. With more than a decade of touring and recording under his belt, Spencer is a also veteran of the Canadian music scene.
The father of two decided to go back to school to study communications because he wanted to explore a new direction with his compositions.
“It was really about reformulating the ways that I spend my energies creatively — doing something that was not only more interested in community, but also more grounded in a theoretical context, and had a bigger attachment to the social realities of the world right now.”
For communications professor Kim Sawchuk, Spencer’s album project is a perfect fit for a prize named in Marc Gervais’s honour.
“It involves language, creativity and production,” Sawchuk wrote in her reference letter. “It encompasses all that we stand for as a department, bringing theory into conversation with practice.”