Susie Andrews, like many last week, was celebrating. She was celebrating her students during convocation, and the many exemplary recipients of the Grace Annie Lockhart Sesquicentennial Pin.
She was also celebrating two of her own interrelated accomplishments. This year marked 25 years since she graduated from Mount Allison University, and she was also the recipient of the Paul Paré Medal of Excellence, an annual award recognizing exceptional teaching, research, scholarship and service at Mount Allison.
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When asked what it means to receive both from the institution she says made her who she is today, Andrews paused for almost five seconds before answering.
“To have been honoured with the Paul Paré Medal this year—25 years after, astonishingly, I graduated from Mount Allison University—was moving in ways that I never would have imagined. I did not imagine being a professor when I arrived here. I never imagined I would be so fortunate as to be able to come back and build my career here and live my life in this place.”
Andrews graduated in 2001 and joined the faculty in the 2011-2012 academic year. She is currently a faculty member of the Visual and Material Culture Studies Program, where she is also a student advisor, helping students identify pathways forward in their major, minor or certificates. She also lives in Sackville, with her husband, children and two dogs.
A self-described scholar of stories, Andrews is interested in what storytelling has done and continues to do for us individually and as community members. Some of her earliest work looked at stories from a sacred Buddhist site in China, Mount Wutai, and the importance they held for folks living in the Buddhist world over the last 1,500 years.
That meant lots of travel and collaboration with people in East Asia. That was, until Covid. It was then she discovered that who she was as a researcher and who she was as a parent were more related than she had ever thought.
“At a time when exploring stories and how they mattered in contemporary China, Korea, and Japan was no longer possible in real time, when doing that history was incredibly challenging, I turned to the picture books all around me and started to wonder about how do stories that mattered so long ago continue to be important today. And that line of exploration, to be honest, broke my heart open.”
What came out of that was Together Time, a literacy program established in 2021 that Andrews co-directs with fellow Mount Allison professor Kira Galloway and Mount Allison-based Canada Research Chair Jill Rourke.
The program is meant to foster curiosity and a love of learning by bringing together Mount A undergrads and children at 12 preschools and elementary schools in southeastern New Brunswick and Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. The basic version is that Andrews and the team prepare story sacks—themed bags full of picture books, puzzles, games and toys all meant to reinforce one another. But, since its launch, it has developed into much more, she said.
“ It’s become about lunches. So much ice cream in our Jennings Meal Hall with the incredible humans here on our campus who welcome with us these children to be part of our Mount A community.”
Andrews’s current research explores an educator who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Etsuko Steinmetz. Steinmetz is someone whom Andrews finds inspiring and who influences how she approaches learning and teaching.
And, in the coming weeks, Andrews will also be travelling with a team—including educators from Dorchester Consolidated School and Sackville Playschool Inc.—to Japan and some of the other places that have been so important for her learning, to explore how stories of compassion matter in different times and places around the world.
There were also five faculty members recognized with Paul Paré Excellence Awards: Fiona Black, religious studies and community engaged learning; Nancy Garon, psychology; Mario Levesque, politics and international relations; Catherine Lovekin, physics; and Margaret-Ellen Messinger, mathematics and computer science.
