Recently, UBC Nordic Studies sat down with Nordic Studies Instructor, Dr. Kyle Frackman, for UBC Nordic Studies Lærerlivet (Teacher Life), a series that allows you to get to know instructors from outside of the classroom. Read more below to learn about Dr. Frackman as he talks to us about approaching grad school, transferable skills between the Sciences and Arts, and his love for trees.
UBC Nordic Studies (UNS): Thank you for agreeing to meet with me Dr. Frackman! Could you just start by telling me a bit about yourself?
Kyle Frackman (KF): Yeah, of course. I’m an Associate Professor. I work in both German and Nordic studies subject areas in our department. So, I get a little bit of the best of both worlds. I’m lucky because in graduate school, I was in a program that allowed me to do both German and Scandinavian focused things. So, I studied old languages, like old Icelandic, and then also Scandinavian literature and art history and so on. Here at UBC, I teach a whole range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
UNS: How exactly did you come about your job here?
KF: So, often in academia, we don’t get to pick where we go for a job. We kind of apply for a lot of jobs, and you go where the jobs are. I was really lucky. One of the reasons I applied for this job was because it was actually described as both a German and Scandinavian job. That was really appealing to me because I was interested in doing both like I did in graduate school. I came to UBC in 2012 and started right off teaching both Scandinavian and German stuff.
UNS: You’re originally from the United States?
KF: Yeah, I was born in Anchorage, Alaska.
UNS: Oh, cool! How is Alaska?
KF: It’s far away, hah. It’s cold in the wintertime and a lot of time in the summer, actually. The weather and the scenery in a lot of ways is similar to BC.
UNS: At some point, the sun doesn’t set there right?
KF: Yeah, that usually happens in Northern Alaska. Where I was, the southern part, in the summertime the sun just dips down a little bit. So, there is night, but there’s also sunlight.
UNS: That’s neat. So, how did you decide on your career focus? Did you know you wanted to pursue German, Scandinavian, and Gender studies?
KF: My family history is both German and Norwegian, and I was interested in German and Scandinavian stuff for a long time. I started taking German in high school and at my high school it was actually the coolest language to take, because it had the most dynamic language teacher. So I took German. It came relatively easy to me and I enjoyed it and went through it pretty quickly. I ended up going to Germany and then I was kind of hooked and so I knew I wanted to study it at the undergraduate level.
UNS: And you did that at Hamline in Minnesota?
KF: Yeah. I did my undergrad in Minnesota and then made the fateful decision to continue to graduate school. At the time when I went to grad school, I didn’t know that I would be doing anything with Scandinavian stuff at the upper level. I knew I was going to a department that included all of those things [German and Scandinavian studies], but, yeah. I went to Massachusetts to graduate school and got a Master’s degree and a PhD.
UNS: You used the term ‘fateful decision’ just previously when referencing choosing to go to grad school, how much thought goes into pursuing grad school? I
KF: Right. So at the time, I graduated from undergrad in 2001. and went to Germany for a Fulbright fellowship and then came back and started graduate school in 2002. And at that time, it was still kind of niche, but I feel like it was less niche than it is now. Now, I would say for a lot of people, I would recommend thinking for a super long time about whether you’re going to go into graduate school in any field, but also, especially in the humanities. At that time, I just knew I wanted to study more. I was still interested in it a lot. I wanted to do that and I had all of these great role models in my undergraduate career and that influenced my decision to pursue graduate school.
UNS: How exactly did your grad program work?
KF: It was a tight knit, relatively small program, and I had been interested in feminist, gender, and queer studies in undergrad, so I continued that and did a feminist studies certificate in my graduate years at the University of Massachusetts. In that program, we were encouraged to combine a few different things so it was actually welcomed for me to do both German and Scandinavian and to include these feminist and gender oriented approaches. So I was sure to do that in my research. I was able to take a whole range of courses, some things that nowadays are kind of exotic, like, I took classes in dead languages, such as Middle High German and old Icelandic. So, taking those courses really opened my mind to the whole wide array of things going on in Northern Europe. Getting to work with some really great professors inspired me to do some of the teaching related stuff that I also do at UBC
UNS: German studies, Scandinavian studies… Do these topics have overlap? How do they help you with your engagement in queer, feminist, and gender studies? And vice-versa?
KF: I can’t really do one really without the other. So I’m really glad that I did get the kind of training that I did in graduate school and undergrad because now, in both my teaching and my research, all of it is bound up with German, some Nordic stuff, and then those theoretical bases like feminist, gender, and queer studies. These topics together, they’re kind of like my little toolkit and I take those both to class and to my research and writing
UNS: You mentioned you got some mentorship in grad school and undergrad, how important was that to you?
KF: It was super important. I am really grateful for it. Almost every day that I’m doing stuff in my current job, I think about what I did in graduate school because I think about these models that I had in ways of teaching, especially from my supervisor, who I learned a lot about teaching from and also by working with students. Having those professors really willing to put in time to work with me, developing relationships, that was a huge aspect of my success in grad school. Working with my supervisor, I was a TA for her in large lecture classes, and that influenced me into doing what I do here at UBC, which is to teach a large class on witches. That kind of teaching mentorship really helped me and it definitely influences me when I work with students here at UBC
UNS: So you won the Killam Teaching Prize in 2023, which is awarded annually to faculty nominated by students, colleagues and alumni in recognition of excellence in teaching. Congratulations on that.
KF: Thank you very much.
UNS: So CENES – We’re a bit of a smaller department and we get a lot of people from different academic and cultural backgrounds taking our classes. Many students have limited knowledge of Nordic and Germanic topics before taking classes. How do you go about teaching with such a wide variety of students from different backgrounds?
KF: Yeah, most of my students that I teach in a given year are coming from different fields. Because again, what we do in this department is some kind of exotic. At the very least, it’s a smaller department and program. I love getting students in my classes from super far away disciplines because they often come to my classes or to me during or outside of class time and say, “I don’t know how to do this stuff that we’re doing in this class…I’m afraid of doing it the wrong way.” And working with those students and talking in class about going through the steps of actually approaching these things for the first time is part of the fun for me. I try to make sure that the classes I’m teaching and the stuff that I do in class are connected somehow to what the students are experiencing on a daily basis, whether that’s in their fields of study or what they’re doing outside of school.
UNS: Do you find that students in different faculties have transferable skills that work in Arts or CENES classes?
KF: Yeah. A lot of the time the students come, for example, from, I don’t know, Applied Science or something like that. Those students in their fields, they’re having to develop a certain set of skills like, experiments or writing lab reports or something, these various things. What I try to get the students to think about is how they can bring those skills to what we’re doing in my class.
UNS: Right.
KF: You know, in a lab report, you’re presenting evidence for an argument, or evidence for the result of an experiment or something, and in a paper or exam for one of my classes, you’re presenting evidence to prove how you’re interpreting something. So they may not additionally see how talking about a novel or a film is the same or relates to what they might do in a lab, but I try to draw those connections.
UNS: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I could see how students could hopefully make that connection, too. Now, I noticed you’re affiliated with UBC Cinema and Media Studies, and you’ve taught classes on Scandinavian Drama and Film, how is it to teach media classes? What draws you to media?
KF: When I was in grad school, at UMass, there was another kind of exotic thing there which was a centre for studying East German film. And so that got me interested in East German things, which has come into my research. That started me in critical studies of film and other media. I love teaching a class where we’re working with both drama and film because they’re practicing similar things. We’re working through things like, ‘What’s going on in this theatre play? How is it being presented by the playwright? What are the stage directions?’ Then we’ll look at clips from a film and talk about what’s going on on screen. How is that being constructed? What’s the lighting doing? What is the camera doing? How is the acting playing out? And so in each of those things we’re taking them apart, thinking critically about them, and then we’re also practicing that thing, like I mentioned before, which is to use those as evidence for an interpretation of what we’re seeing.
UNS: Are students receptive and enthusiastic to what you teach in terms of film and drama?
KF: I think so. A lot of my students, they’ve never done anything like this before or have done a little bit like in high school or something. In terms of interpreting films, one of the things I like about that is we’re watching and consuming media all the time. We’re often watching things on our screens. We’re streaming Netflix, YouTube videos or whatever. And even though they might not leave my class and sit around watching Ingmar Bergman films or something, it’s great if they do, but, while they’re watching a film on Netflix, they can take some of the things that we practiced on those older films, even silent films that we watch in that class, to look at what’s going on. It’s a success for me even if I don’t always know that this is happening.
UNS: Do you have any favourite Nordic plays?
KF: Oh God. So in terms of drama, Henrik Ibsen is probably my favourite playwright. A Doll’s House is one of the typical ones that a lot of people have read. it’s used a lot and so it might even be kind of stereotypical. But one of the reasons that I like it is that there’s so much in it. It illustrates that Ibsen, who’s writing this stuff in the 19th century, is still really relevant. We look at different adaptations of the play and these other plays and it really illustrates how you can take something from a different era and still think about how themes are relevant, and practice some of those skills. I’m really interested in the 19th century, so it also gives me a personal kick, too. I mean, Ibsen and in general, I’ve constantly been surprised when I teach that class how into Ibsen the students get. A Doll’s House is a perfect kind of encapsulation of that.
UNS: So, discussions in your classes with your students, do you ever find that your students are teaching you at the same time you’re teaching them?
KF: Yeah, always. I’m always learning from my students how uncool I am, hah. I like engaging with the students and helping them to figure out what the language is doing, then helps me figure out more about how they’re using language and how they’re living their daily lives. In my Ibsen unit, we talk about gender roles and how men’s and women’s lives were different in 19th century Europe and 19th century Norway. In doing that, I have them also think about their own gendered lives, like how gender comes into play, how the shape of bodies comes into play when they’re reading and living their daily lives. That’s an example of how we can kind of bridge those times. And I’m also learning about what it is that they do on a daily basis. That’s a lot of fun for me.
UNS: I notice a lot of the research you do is on queer topics. How important is researching and writing about queerness to you and the broader academic community?
KF: It’s very important and it’s part of that tool kit that I mentioned before that I take with me into my teaching and research. It’s important for me, for one reason because I identify as gay. So I identify and see myself in a lot of these films and examples of films and literature. When I include these themes in my research and teaching, it’s kind of like showing a mirror to some of the students that I have in class. In addition to being this other kind of pedagogical concept, which is a window for other students to see things that they may not identify with, and in research, a lot of these things still have not been discussed or examples of history and literature and other media and so on haven’t had these aspects explored. Like, trans identity or queer expression or how those things intersect with book history or things like that. So for me, it’s exploring that, bringing that to light. It’s a kind of knowledge production. It’s also something that I feel where I can kind of make a positive contribution in terms of, again, bringing some of these things to more illumination, and allowing people to learn about a lot of these things. And also selfishly also learning about them myself.
UNS: Do you have any favourite spots in the city? Like, hidden gems or cool places?
KF: Stanley Park is one of the best places in Vancouver and in this area. I love anywhere that there’s trees, so trees are really special to me. trees and birds. In my spare time, I like to learn which birds are which, and I try to identify the bird song of different birds. Since I was in high school, I’ve tried to identify trees from their leaves and bark and so on. Looking at nature, things like trees and birds that we’re lucky to have so much of in the city and surrounding areas, they remind me that we’re really small. We’re bigger than birds, but we’re small in the whole scope of things. Especially trees that are often there for a really long time. They represent this kind of depth and connection to what’s going on in the world.
UNS: Do you ever find any similarities between Vancouver and Alaska, where you grew up?
KF: The mountains definitely remind me of Alaska. In Alaska, the skies are grey a lot. A lot of the time that leads to snow, but here in Vancouver there is a lot that leads to rain. Here in Vancouver, I’ve renewed my appreciation or understanding of the grey skies and being in Vancouver has allowed me to see the different shades of grey. That also sounds really hokey, but being able to appreciate things like the darker shades of grey or the lighter shades, which might mean rain or something, because a lot of our days are like that. And so it’s encouraged me to appreciate a lot of the other stuff around me because I’m in this place that’s so super different. Before I got good rain boots and raincoats, I used to view every rainy day as like a personal attack.
UNS: Hah, I get that.
KF: Yeah. There’s a saying in a bunch of different languages, but I originally learned it in Swedish, it goes something like, “There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes.” I’ve appreciated that saying more since I’ve moved to Vancouver.
UNS: Motions to window. Do you ever get distracted by the view from your office?
KF: Hahah oh gosh, yes all the time.
UNS: Alright, last one. If you could describe your classes in 3 words, what would they be?
KF: Hmm. I’d say goofy, unusual, and useful.
UNS: Perfect. Thank you for your time today.
KF: Thanks for having me!
