Valuable experiential learning for students as they help protect vital part of military history
Fanshawe students working out of a hangar-type building in the college’s School of Transportation Technology and Apprenticeship. supplied
Hands-on education brings many advantages and skills to students. And when the subject is a WWII Sherman tank, the lessons can get pretty interesting.
Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, is currently playing host to Holy Roller, a tank involved in the D-Day campaign that is badly in need of a makeover. Students joining in the effort to restore and preserve it are getting a deep immersion in experiential learning, while ensuring that a vital part of local and Canadian history is protected for future generations.
“We are a community college and we’re here to serve the community. These things have happened very serendipitously at this moment in time for the college. ”
“They are helping bring a monument back to life,” says Stephen Patterson, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Trades and Technology at Fanshawe.
Holy Roller was given to the City of London following the war, and since 1956 it has stood as a memorial in Victoria Park, in the city core. One of just two such tanks remaining in Canada, it had fallen into disrepair and rusted out in places with exposure to the elements and the passage of time.
The First Hussars Association of London started a campaign two years ago to raise $250,000 to save and preserve Holy Roller. Mr. Patterson says when the volunteer group approached the college to see if it might help with the project, “we found a great opportunity to up the ante a little bit” by giving the First Hussars a place to house the project and getting students and faculty involved.
“We are a community college and we’re here to serve the community,” Mr. Patterson says, noting that the project is part of the college’s new Innovation Village, which encourages live interactions on global multidisciplinary projects. It also reinforces a growing partnership between Fanshawe and the Canadian Armed Forces. “These things have happened very serendipitously at this moment in time for the college.”
Holy Roller was moved last June to a large hangar-type building in Fanshawe’s School of Transportation Technology and Apprenticeship. There, a specialized preservation team is working on it in collaboration with Fanshawe students. Their efforts are mostly considered extracurricular or co-curricular, Mr. Patterson says, while some of it falls under coursework.
So far Holy Roller has been disassembled and its pieces are in the process of being refurbished or replaced. Once the entire body is sandblasted, repainted and reassembled, it will be returned to its original location in the park.
The project ties into two applied learning programs designed to differentiate Fanshawe graduates and give them advantages in future employment. Under the Signature Innovative Learning Experiences or SILEx program, students participate in at least one rich, experiential opportunity, which can involve applied research, entrepreneurship, multidisciplinary projects, global projects or client interactions. The Job Skills for the Future program emphasizes a minimum of three skills that are a priority for the success of its graduates, among them novel and adaptive thinking, resilience, social intelligence, global citizenship, self-directed learning, complex problem-solving and implementation skills.
Mr. Patterson says their teamwork on Holy Roller prepares students to tackle real-world projects that bring together different experts. The project combines disciplines from historical preservation to citizenry at Fanshawe, which has 26,000 full-time and 20,000 part-time students.
Students are engaged according to their specialty. For example, those studying auto-body techniques assist in the actual refurbishment work, while students in broadcasting, television and film production document the process. Last summer, two students with the School of Contemporary Media got inside the tank and used a special camera to create 3D models of the interior that will show the perspective of each crew member.
Mr. Patterson says the Holy Roller work is expected to be complete by the end of May. The college may also get involved in the plans to update the memorial in Victoria Park, which is to include a new concrete base for the tank as well as gardens, benches and a plaque identifying the towns and villages liberated by the First Hussars during the Second World War.
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