‘I always try to make things meaningful’: meet 2 of Concordia’s inspired part-time teachers

A ‘hub-and-spoke’ view of education

For Francine Jones, a part-time instructor in the Department of Marketing since 1990, the key to a good course is making it relevant to students.

“You can’t love what you don’t know,” she says. “I always try to make things meaningful and attention-worthy by seeing how I can relate them to people’s interests.”

In “Introduction to Marketing,” Jones presents her students with a new product in need of a buyer: shoes that allow the wearer walk on water. While this footwear doesn’t exist, it’s easy to understand how it could become a major commodity.

“We have a ball with it,” Jones says. “The students go into a huddle to come up with names for the shoes, and then we vote on the best one.”

The water-shoes concept illustrates another keystone of Jones's teaching: highlighting the connections between different knowledge areas — what she calls the “hub-and-spoke” view of education.

A textbook Jones uses in the course includes 18 chapters on different aspects of marketing. The shoes are a great way to tie it all together and teach students about the full spectrum of the field.

“Each time we come to a chapter in the textbook, whether it’s a chapter on design, distribution, pricing, or promotion, we come back to the concept of the shoes that walk on water.”

Jones brings a wealth of industry experience to the classroom. Before becoming a teacher, she served as an advertising and public relations officer at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for Hilton Canada and marketing director for the Quebec Furniture Manufacturers Association. She also ran her own consulting firm.

An avid watercolour painter and jewellery maker who moonlights as a guide at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Jones is also a voracious consumer of culture.

As she tells her students, a broad knowledge base — one with an eye on the past, present and future — is what sets great business minds apart from good ones.

“The wider, the more undulated and the more eclectic the information someone collects in their lifetime, the more they'll be able to appreciate and see.”
 

Read about three part-time instructors from the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science.