His first name is Lyle, but don’t call him that.
“I’ve been called Steamer since I was a young lad,” he says.
Nobody remembers how Steamer Hamm got his nickname, but it has followed him throughout his life.
And what a life it has been.
Born and raised in Flin Flon, Hamm is a true Renaissance man. He has worked as a journalist, a high school teacher and a hockey coach.
He is now a graduate studies advisor and associate professor with the University of New Brunswick, and works with several students through online courses.
Hamm holds a Ph. D in education, but don’t call him Doctor, either – he gets a tad self-conscious when you do.
“Even now, with names being so important to identity, Steamer is how I get my graduate students to refer to me as I’m teaching them,” he says. “Some struggle with that, many want to call you Doctor – I’m very uncomfortable with that.”
Reporter
Hamm worked as a newspaper reporter from 1988 to 1991, writing for the St. Paul Journal while attending Edmonton’s University
of Alberta.
“At that point I was taking three courses toward my education degree and was a full-time reporter,” he says.
As if that workload wasn’t enough, Hamm decided to up the stakes.
While attending a hockey game in Edmonton one night, he noticed only one coach was standing behind the bench for the visiting Camrose Lutheran College Vikings of the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference.
“I wanted to be a hockey coach, so I went down and asked the head coach, ‘Do you need an assistant hockey coach?’ He said yes. So then I had three things going on,” Hamm says.
Hamm cut back on his reporting job, but the journalism bug was still biting. After coming home to Flin Flon for Christmas break, he began writing for the now-defunct Goldbelt Gazette newspaper. He would at one point also write for The Reminder.
After a couple of weeks, he was offered a job to continue writing for the summer. Hamm delayed a teaching practicum for his degree so he could take the position.
“It was an enormous opportunity. At that time, I couldn’t see how valuable it would be,” he recalls.
When Hamm graduated with his education degree, he needed to choose between the three paths he was on. He chose teaching as his primary focus and began work at a high school in Cessford, Alberta.
Methods
As a teacher, Hamm employed some unorthodox methods, using games and activities to teach students dense subjects such as Shakespearean literature.
He drew on his experience as a reporter to engage his English class, having students create their own newspaper. To teach them about reporting, he even manufactured some true front-page news for them.
The ruse involved Hamm, a phys-ed teacher and the school principal.
The phys-ed teacher casually knocked on Hamm’s door during class one day. Earlier, the two men had rehearsed how they would feign a heated argument over school sports equipment and almost come to blows.
To Hamm’s delight, his students went from half-asleep to wide awake in a second.
“He was six-foot-six and we’re going nose to nose,” says Hamm.
Right before things could escalate further, the principal ran in to break up the faux fight.
“He came pounding down the hallway and yelled out, ‘You two! This is unprofessional! Stop this!’” says Hamm.
The teachers were taken out of the room. The students were left unsupervised.
When Hamm reappeared in the classroom, he instructed his students to write down everything they saw and heard as accurately as possible.
“The kids were yelling, ‘What? This was a set-up? Holy cow!’” recalls Hamm.
Students wrote articles, took photos and sold advertisements for the class newspaper. Once the content was finished, Hamm would drive to Flin Flon with his wife to lay out the paper in his old office.
By the time Hamm left southern Alberta, he and his students had produced more than 20 editions of the newspaper. Once, a nearby paper got wind of the class project and printed 11,000 copies of the student paper as an insert in the actual newspaper.
To this day, Hamm credits the newspaper project as an innovation that helped him improve as an educator.
“I was always a calculated risk taker. You have to be as an educator,” he says.
“Any time I’ve ever gone for a job, I was sure that this was the reason I got hired: ‘This fellow can teach English and he’s a coach, but look at what he and his friends are able to do, creating a newspaper.’”
Learning
If you stuck a pin in a map of Canada for every place Steamer Hamm has taught or studied, you’d be in danger of running out of room.
After becoming a school vice-principal, Hamm headed back to the classroom as a student at Alberta’s University of Lethbridge to learn more about the craft and theory of education.
“It wasn’t as if I wanted to keep going to school,” he says. “I felt like I needed to know more in the classroom, I need to know more as an education leader, I need to know how to connect to communities differently than how I did when I first started.”
After earning a master’s in education in 2004, Hamm enrolled at the University of Calgary, graduating with his PhD in 2010.
All along, Hamm had hoped he would be able to work with teachers. In 2016, he landed a job doing just that as a graduate supervisor at University of New Brunswick. He now specializes in cultural diversity and social justice in education.
“I’m working with excellent teachers and researchers,” he says. “These people are high-octane people. Every day I go to work, I work with teachers who are either teaching pre-service programs or teachers in graduate programs, teachers who believe in the same causes, social justice, equity, working against marginalization in communities and schools.”
Reflecting
Hamm has the rare ability to look back positively at every stop on his journey to the present day.
“Every time I’ve got a new job, it’s been my best job ever,” he says. “I was never looking to get a better job, but everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve been able to meet such great people and such great leaders, going all the way back to The Reminder.”
Hamm still visits the Flin Flon area whenever he can. He has family in the area and stays in a cabin on the shore of Amisk Lake.
He keeps tabs on the community by speaking with family and friends, or by reading The Reminder occasionally.
Hamm has observed many changes in Flin Flon since his childhood, mostly for the better.
“I know that Flin Flon is becoming increasingly diverse, which to my mind is a good thing,” he says. “I’m hopeful that communities are able to get together and work through many of the challenges that come with that.”
Hamm remembers advice he received from a school superintendent when he was working in Brooks, Alberta.
“Sometimes, I felt like I was pushed along a path that I had no control over,” he says.
“She said, ‘Steamer, you will be where you are supposed to be.’”
When asked if he feels like he’s there now, he offers a soft smile.
“Right now, I really do,” he says.
