The UBC Sustainability Hub's Sustainability Education Fellows program supports faculty from across disciplines who are working to integrate sustainability and climate change content in their teaching so their students can become agents of change in the world. New this year, and thanks to the contribution from UBC Wellbeing, one of the projects is focused on advancing sustainability and human wellbeing.
Keep reading to learn more about these exciting projects!
Sustainability across first-year core curriculum: The Land One experience
Project Leads
Dr. Lindsay Cuff (Land and Food Systems | Forestry)
Dr. Athena McKown (Forestry)
Dr. Karen Taylor (Land and Food Systems)
Dr. Fernanda Tomaselli (Forestry)
The objective of this project is to enhance four Land One courses to fully integrate sustainability topics into the program, benefiting all future student cohorts. Specifically, they aim to create the following content and pedagogical innovations to share among their courses:
- An open online textbook exploring real-world case studies related to sustainability.
- Joint lesson plans using interactive pedagogies to co-teach sustainability topics.
- Assignments and reading lists on sustainability.
- Writing prompts that stimulate interdisciplinary and holistic thinking.
- Redevelopment of an existing field trip to create a sustainability-focused experiential retreat.
The proposed developments may also impact introductory economics, biology and writing courses by providing interdisciplinary and open-access teaching materials on sustainability.
Campus Detours: Layered histories and institutional memory at UBC
Project Leads
Dr. Sara Jacobs (Applied Science)
Dr. Desirée Valadares (Arts)
The project aims to develop a new graduate course in Geography and Landscape Architecture focused on the contemporary landscape and planning history of the UBC Point Grey Campus and University Endowment Lands. Drawing on critical university and sustainability studies, the course will examine the university's dual role as an educator and a land developer and analyze UBC’s land use, permitting, and sustainability policy in the context of capitalist growth. Their goal is to bring together graduate students from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Applied Science and foster institutional memory of campus planning and the significant finished, proposed, lost and unbuilt developments and their maintenance.
Accounting for Climate Change: Expanding civil engineering, wood science and accounting courses for climate relevancy by adding case-based carbon/sustainability accounting course modules
Project Leads
Dr. Caren Lombard (Sauder School of Business)
Dr. Tamara Etmannski (Applied Science)
Dr. Qingshi Tu (Forestry)
This project aims to increase carbon/sustainability accounting literacy across commerce, engineering and wood science courses by adding modular content that expands beyond the traditional boundaries of financial accounting to include concepts of sustainability accounting. Case studies and interactive experiential learning exercises will cover climate reporting, embodied carbon calculations, life-cycle analysis and carbon/GHG accounting.
Engineering Critical Design Practice: Engaging Engineering Students for Radical Change
Project Leads
Dr. Paul Lusina (Applied Science)
Dr. Christoph Sielmann (Applied Science)
Dr. Angele Beausoleil (Sauder School of Business)
The project aims to confront engineering students with the environmental and social implications of their profession. Through the proposed modules, students will internalize their ethical responsibilities and be able to incorporate these into every aspect of their engineering design practice. Module themes include environmental and social ecosystems, ethical decision-making, critical engineering design and critical hope.
Building Community in Sustainability Education in the Faculty of Arts
Project Leads
Dr. Anne Stewart (Arts)
Dr. David Tindall (Arts)
Dr. Moberley Luger (Arts)
This initiative aims to connect the Coordinated Arts Program (CAP) with the Environment and Society (ENSO) minor in the Faculty of Arts, creating a new interdisciplinary pathway for students in their BA program. The project will produce a new course, ENSO 200, that will introduce students to interdisciplinary approaches to research in the climate humanities and social sciences, and more crucially, foster connections among the peers with whom they will develop new solutions and innovative approaches to addressing our shared climate futures. In CAP, a successful first-year student experience is based on an interdisciplinary, cohort-based learning model. ENSO 200 will bring this cohort model into 200-level curriculum design, and create a bridge into the Environment and Society Minor, allowing students to pursue a deep commitment to sustainability throughout their Arts degree.
The Sustainable Cities Certificate - A New Undergraduate Accreditation Program for Aspiring Pracademics and Urban Sustainability Professionals
Project Leads
Dr. Melissa McHale (Forestry)
Dr. James Connolly (Applied Science)
The project's goal is to create an undergraduate certificate that helps students from various majors such as engineering, planning, architecture, forestry, and geography to work across disciplines and prepare for careers in fields like urban planning, urban hydrology, city forestry, and transportation engineering. It will focus on core sustainability principles, creating pracademics who apply scientific knowledge to urban solutions.
Approaches to Stewarding Forested Foodlands in Líl̓wat First Nation (entering year 2 of the project)
PROJECT LEADS
Dr. Robert VanWynsberghe (Education)
Dr. Tonya Smith (Forestry)
This interdisciplinary summer course in Líl̓wat First Nation will feature collaboration on the themes of Indigenous land-based pedagogies, food security and sovereignty, forest stewardship and restoration, Indigenous land rights and ecology. The aim of this course is to provide experiential, place-based learning to prepare scholars for facing complex issues related to creating climate-just futures, as part of responding to the climate emergency.