Taking learning to the streets
The cozy room on the third floor of Burritoville is packed. People are crammed into corners, and one latecomer is forced to sit in the doorway, half outside the room. The crowd of about 30 adults of all ages is gathered for a University of the Street’s Café conversation entitled Man Overboard: What do Men Need to Thrive in Today’s Society?
Concordia’s Institute for Community Development, part of the School of Extended Learning, has been organizing these conversations for eight years. The evening’s event is the 353rd public discussion held under the University of the Streets Café banner. Marc Nisbet is the moderator.
He briefly explains the format of the conversation: the guest speaker talks first for about 15 minutes, then the floor is open to anyone who wishes to speak. Those who raise their hands are added to the list, and when their turn comes, the moderator signals to them. Nisbet reassures the crowd that individuals will not be forgotten. “I’ll remember something about you, your hair, the colour of your shirt,” he says, smiling.
Nisbet passes off to the evening’s guest speaker: Ottawa native Curtis Murphy who is pursuing a master’s of Divinity at McGill University. Murphy begins to talk about his personal struggle to define what it means to be a man. His ideas come thick and fast, and at one point he loses his train of thought completely. Fortunately a waiter shows up bearing burritos, giving him a chance to figure out where he’s going. “The men’s movement is either seen as aggressive and patriarchal, or just a bunch of guys getting together and crying, which is ridiculous,” he says.
What do men need? What is a man, and how do I become one? Murphy says he wrestles constantly with issues surrounding what it means to be a man today. “But just because I have questions about masculinity doesn’t mean I’m messed up,” he adds.
Murphy tells some anecdotes, as well. He remembers once, as a child, laughing when his father tried to cook dinner for him. “But I imagine now how hard that must have been for him, learning to do something that he wasn’t taught when he was young, that he had to learn by himself when he was much older.” The guest speaker ends his part of the conversation with some broad questions, in the hopes of stimulating a healthy discussion, but when he surrenders control to the room, things are a bit slow to get going.
Finally, Alexandre, 39, speaks up. He argues that what society perceives as masculine qualities shouldn’t be exclusively praised in men, and vice-versa. Then a young woman asks, are we born with our gender predetermined, or is it nurtured into being?
Another older woman argues it is a social construct; it has nothing to do with nature. It seems the conversation is veering off topic. But someone reels it back in. A man named Kevin recalls a tender moment witnessed on the bike path: a woman crying, her face red. The public display of emotion touched him, Kevin says. “But one thing I realized, when you see this sort of thing it’s never a man!” Women are encouraged to take on masculine roles, he argues, but men are not encouraged to embrace their feminine traits.
An older man named Jerry pipes up. “Mr. Murphy,” he says, addressing the guest speaker directly. “Never in my life have I questioned my masculinity!” Men, Jerry states vehemently, are being rendered effeminate by a society increasingly controlled by women — women teachers, women bankers, women scientists, and too many of them, according to Jerry. We should be fighting back! There is some shaking of heads, some tittering, but nobody interrupts Jerry. They let him finish.
Another man follows up by arguing that boys need to be left to play as boys do, even if this means aggressive role-playing, violent war games, toy guns. They will grow out of it. They have to be allowed to grow out of it. The speakers are stacking up now. Nisbet is writing them down, and there are three or so in line. He reminds people to give their first names before speaking. Some don’t, some do. Some people want to speak for the second time, but they’ll have to wait.
“Masculinity and femininity are not polar opposites,” argues a young woman named Sen. “I do believe we are different, but you’re not either one or the other. You exist along a spectrum.”
Celine, a woman from Africa, confronts Jerry on his opinions about the moulds in which men and women should fit. “He doesn’t want to accept it, because he doesn’t understand how we got to this point,” she says in French. “In Africa, many men want to step out of the mould, but they are afraid of what will happen to them.” She recalls how her husband agreed to stay home with their two children when she accepted an opportunity to study in Spain. “It was a scandal!” she said. “But it’s only a question of time. They have to step out of the mould. They have to!”
The conversation flows on like this for another hour. Then, after a brief amusing anecdote from Nisbet about a hulking football player who took up needlepoint, it ends, and the crowd — enriched, enlivened — scatters.
Elizabeth Hunt has been running the University of the Streets Café public conversations program for the past four years. “Finding topics that are interesting, or a little bit off-the-wall or even very controversial, and looking at it from a different angle so we can have a conversation, that’s what University of the Streets Café is all about,” she says during an interview in her office on Concordia’s Loyola Campus.
Sometimes the conversations are a response to something that’s going on in the world, such as the financial crisis or an election. Sometimes, as in the case of Conversation No. 353, it is a regular attendee who proposes an idea for a conversation — in this case, Murphy.
Hunt says people go to the conversations for all sorts of different reasons. “Some go for the content, some go for the experience, some go for the methodology, and some people go simply to break isolation.”
People make new friends at the conversations, they find dates, volunteering opportunities, they get jobs, and the discussion is always lively and always interesting. It fills a void, Hunt insists.
“You’re sitting in a café, like last night, and there is a bunch of people who are talking about a topic, and it seems like a really simple, almost common place thing,” she says. “But then it’s not something that happens a lot in our society. There are not a lot of spaces for people to sit down face to face with people they’ve never met, and to try on opinions, to share perspectives, and have other people build on their ideas.”
Related links:
• University of the Streets Café
• Institute for Community Development