Every week in the summer The duty drags youon the crossroads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard during the summer season. New stopover: a conversationintimate relationship between the winner of the Merit Award — Young student, Charlotte Mouron, and her teacher, Mélanie Vachon, on knowledge, its transmission, emulation.
The arrival of summer has often instilled in me a coveted feeling of freedom, a quiet feeling of unchaining myself. The hot season coincides with the end of classes, and with it there is more space for spontaneity, encounters, culture, passions.
It’s because, even if my learning in psychology never ceases to fascinate me and if the relationships I form there transform me, there comes a threshold where the school desks confine my thinking and inhibit my creativity. When you gather a hundred students in an amphitheater in front of a teacher, the transmission of knowledge often only passes from one expert head to one hundred learning heads. I rarely find myself invited to explore, to innovate, to go beyond a lesson plan. Like these “by heart” exams which sometimes reduce learning to the simple assimilation of notions. Finally, do people think “for” me?
On these same school benches, however, I had the happy meeting of Professor Mélanie Vachon — she arrived like a buoyant summer breeze, which brought me this deep feeling of agency.
As a professor of psychology at the university, I believe that “thinking” is at the heart of the work that interests me. Moreover, “thinking” about the university takes on its full meaning in the unique opportunity of exchanges with students. For me, the pinnacle of teaching does not mean so much to impart a thought, or even to impart a capacity to think. On the contrary, it’s about thinking “with” the students, based on their concerns, letting myself be transformed by what they too will have to teach me. This is precisely the type of reciprocal dynamic that I try to establish with the students, with the deep conviction that through their unique contact, I have the possibility of growing as a teacher, as a person.
It was in this context that I met Charlotte Mouron, when she was attending my course in humanistic and existential psychology at UQAM, in the fall of 2020. The context was far from ideal. : more than 125 students are registered, and this is our first virtual teaching experience. However, the magic worked, and Charlotte responded with open arms to my invitation to “think together”.
I joined Mélanie’s research project, carried out with bereaved people in the context of a pandemic, with the aim of writing an honors thesis. At the heart of their resilient testimonies, the participants expressed a strong need for recognition of the tragedy experienced, especially during the first wave of COVID-19. They were making an urgent call for us to remember collectively, so that we never again happen to be cut off from each other at this final moment in life.
I immediately felt that Mélanie welcomed me into a horizontal relationship. It is true that she has scientific expertise and a remarkable professional background that make her a valuable mentor. But his mentoring is all the more fulfilling in what he advocates and what he embodies: authenticity, mutual curiosity as well as sincere confidence in our quality of being. It is on this relationship of equity with her students that she has installed a reassuring and supportive framework, which has allowed me to dare my path and follow my creative impulse.
Mélanie’s invitation to “think together” even goes beyond the academic framework. If she transmitted to me a fundamental value, it is to go to meet the other and to support each other according to the principles of “compassionate communities”.
Thus, Mélanie gave me the freedom to make a film that draws on our research knowledge, raises public awareness of the reality of pandemic bereavement and responds to the needs expressed by the community concerned. She supported me in this artistic mobilization which decompartmentalizes university knowledge and materializes the scientific articles written on the subject.
None of this would have been possible without Mélanie. But, surprisingly, she stood back and did not lead this project. It is by being available and confident, by listening sincerely and thinking along with us, that it nourishes our power to act and imagine things differently. Lao Tseu accurately captures the essence of this rewarding mentorship: ” A leader is best / When people barely know that he exists / Of a good leader, who talks little, / When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, / They will all say, / We did this ourselves “.
Mélanie’s invitation to “think together” even goes beyond the academic framework. If she transmitted to me a fundamental value, it is to go to meet the other and to support each other according to the principles of “compassionate communities”. It is to see ourselves as equal partners and to take collective responsibility for the well-being and quality of life of each member of the community. It is to feel sincerely concerned by otherness, to be an ally.
If the freedom of thought has too often been undermined in our university world in recent years, our work in connection reminds me that thinking about the university can also become a relational space in which beauty and creativity occur.
The pandemic bereavement we are working on together forces us to ask ourselves complex questions about day-to-day existence. By exchanging on an experience as fundamentally human as death and life, the relationship between professor and student necessarily leaves space for unveiling and questioning. Through her openness and her humanity, Mélanie reminded me that above all else, the university is first and foremost a relational space.
I myself inherited the trust of an exceptional mentor in my career. So, Charlotte, offering you my trust, my intuitions, my wonder and my reflections, so that you yourself can blossom, contributes to restoring a deep meaning not only to my role as a teacher, but also to my own life. If the freedom of thought has too often been undermined in our university world in recent years, our work in connection reminds me that thinking about the university can also become a relational space in which beauty and creativity occur. This is my wish for all these summer occasions to think.