Welcome to F is for Faculty. In each episode, we’ll introduce you to what a UBC faculty member is doing to advance sustainability and climate action through research and teaching, and they’ll tell you what they want you to DO with all this new knowledge.
This week, we met Dr. Tara Ivanochko, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, and Academic Director at the Sustainability Hub.
Whether you enjoy your podcasts on a lunchtime walk, pushing reps at the gym, lining up for the 99, early morning gardening or late-night listening, we’ve got you covered with new sustainability and climate action learning from UBC’s amazing faculty. We hope you enjoy.
Feedback, comments, questions, suggestions? Fire away! Get in touch at usi.communications@ubc.ca
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Interview transcript (for those who love to read)
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Hello, and welcome to the podcast series, F is for Faculty. My name is Oliver Lane, and I'm part of the team at the University of British Columbia's Sustainability Hub. The Sustainability Hub's mission is to inspire people to act upon the planet's most urgent challenges through UBC's academic and operational sustainability leadership. This podcast is a new idea we've just started to develop with the goal of sharing with the UBC community and beyond the amazing and important work that UBC faculty members are carrying out in their teaching and research in the fields of sustainability and climate change.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Tara Ivanochko, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Academic Director at the University's Sustainability Hub. Welcome, Tara, to the program. It's a pleasure to have you with us today.
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Thank you, Oliver. It's lovely to be here.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
So it's always very interesting to me when I speak with a faculty member to learn about their teaching and research journey and how they got to where they are now. And, Tara, I've had the opportunity to work with you here at the Sustainability Hub, but also while I was working in the non-profit sector in Vancouver. I partnered with some of your students for the ENVR400 class that you teach. And it's very clear to me that you are a very keen teacher and very committed to a meaningful and I would say action-focused learning journey for your students. Has this approach to teaching always been part of your vision for your career, or is this something that you discovered along the way?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
I think I discovered it along the way. I didn't ever really anticipate having a significant teaching career. That wasn't my focus as I was thinking about how I would be projecting into the future. I was always interested in politics, I was always interested in people, and I've always been interested in the new environment. And studying oceanography, which is what I was doing, and doing research in oceanography was an opportunity to engage in some of that, the environment, the research, the engagement, the interesting scientific questions, less so around the politics and the activism. And over time, as I had a chance to transition to a faculty member at UBC in an educational leadership role, it did give me the chance to bring in those other elements that I find really interesting and expose them in my classroom. So, it wasn't really a plan, but it came naturally out of the opportunity of environmental science and my interests that had up until then been hobbies.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Okay, but you did choose to be an oceanographer right from the start. How did that come about?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Oceanography? Well, that was maybe adventure. That was excitement, travelling the world, doing something different. I grew up both in Saskatchewan and later in Newfoundland, and both of those had different appeals. My father, maybe bizarrely, went from Saskatchewan into the navy. And there's always sort of this talk that people from Saskatchewan with the wide-open vista do well on the ocean. And then living in Newfoundland, of course, the ocean is right there. So, both of those, the story of Saskatchewan and the practical experience in Newfoundland, made me really enjoy the ocean. And coming to UBC and studying oceanography was sort of an exciting step, an adventure.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
And I might be jumping ahead here, but are there any teachings from the ocean that connected you to sustainability and climate change?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Well, through that time when I was studying oceanography and engaging, I was going out to sea quite a bit. And just the power of nature, the magnificence of nature. So being on a ship in the middle of the North Pacific and seeing squid swarming around the lights, cruising up the coast of BC, being followed by dolphins who are jumping through the bow waves and phosphorescence and bioluminescence following the boat, just magnificent. Being farther south and seeing sea snakes coming around the boat and whales spouting out in the distance was just magnificent. The night sky, the darkness of the sky, and the majesty of the stars that you could see from the ocean were spectacular. So, in that sense, just getting a feel for what is around us was really part of studying oceanography.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Well, that sounds very exciting and very inspirational. I wish a lot of students had the opportunity to get out there. And I know a lot of students do get the opportunity to get out there in nature to have that connection. So in terms of your focus on sustainability and climate change and how you teach, was there a specific moment? You describe a whole set of things that you engaged with in your career through oceanography. Is there anything specific that happened that made that click for you?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Yeah, actually. So I had been doing research in climate, actually paleo oceanography. So, the past history of oceans, using the mud from the bottom of the ocean to go back in time and do chemical analysis. There was a lot of time spent in the lab in that, which is not my favourite thing to be doing. But when I transitioned to a faculty position, it was actually a change in role. I am now, as you introduced me, thank you for that lovely introduction, Associate professor of Teaching at UBC. That role has this emphasis on the leadership and development of teaching and engagement and teaching activities, and less so on the typical research that people think a faculty member does. And so that oceanography and paleoclimate studies component of what I was doing really took a backseat, in fact, went away. And I was thinking more about how would I develop a world-class educational program in environmental science here at UBC. And at that time, it was new. It had only existed in our department for a couple of years. Environmental science. And I was brought in to really develop it. And I was given an opportunity by the Faculty of Science. They came in and said, what do you think about bringing community projects into the program? So, they left it up to me. But it was a great idea that I had never really seen happen. It was not an experience that I had had throughout my education but allowed me to, as I said earlier, connect some more of those points that had really drawn me into environmental science. So, thinking that I could partner the students with community members and have them experience what it's like to work on the ground in some aspect of environmental science. So, in fact, it was the opportunity. The Faculty of Science gave me resources to do that. And it was support from the Center for Community Engaged Learning here at UBC that helped me understand how to bring community work into the classroom in a really effective way.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
That's very interesting. So, were your expectations of what that work would look like, working with community members and bringing your students outside of campus? Did that pan out as you expected? Were there any learnings or any surprises?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
It has developed over time and developed through conversation with the community to see how we can work with them really well. So, in the beginning, when I was starting this class, which is the capstone final experience for students in environmental science, I was thinking up the projects. So, before I had the community engaged, I was reading the news, thinking about what was going on out there, and working with the students to imagine something that the community would like, something that would connect to what people wanted to see happening. And when we transitioned to asking the community, then that process was just far easier because we didn't have to pretend and think it up and imagine what it was, we could just ask. So at that point, the creative part comes into me trying to find enough variety in the projects to meet the interests of the students. Environmental science is extremely broad. There are students interested in climate change, of course, but also in waste management and plastics and that sort of element of environmental science. There are people interested in pollution and human health. There are people interested in energy and energy transitioning, and there are people interested in ecology. How are plants or animals or organisms in the environment faring under certain conditions? I'm always looking out to the community to find organizations that have a variety of interests so that we can have different projects that meet the whole suite of possible interests of the students in the class.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
And in terms of themes, because you've been doing this course for a number of years now, has there been a trend towards more interest in climate issues or not necessarily or any other issues that have come up?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Not so much. Although climate is always a very big part of it, it just might be more or less centred. We're always doing projects that relate to engagement. We have a suite of groups that we work with. Lately, it's been SPEC the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, SPES, the Stanley Park Ecological Society, I don't know if I will name them all, Little Mountain Neighborhood House and more. We also work with the City of Vancouver and Metro Vancouver. Sometimes we work with Village Vancouver and the False Creek Neighborhood Association the False Creek South, I believe, Neighborhood Association. And so they all have their particular interests and sometimes it has to do with helping them share the work that they're doing. We've done a supported clean energy demonstration project at Riley Park where the students have thought through how to present alternative energy options. And now there's a shed there that has a little solar panel and a little windmill on the top and demonstrating the energy that's coming from these things. We also have worked with permaculture walks through the city, helping with signage and engaging with the public in different ways than you might think about for urban agriculture or even agriculture in the bigger picture. With the demonstration of smaller projects, we've been working at UBC Farm to think about bat populations at the farm or we've been working with the stream keepers and the city of Vancouver both to think about how we can enhance herring spawning in the False Creek area. So they might all have different ways of associating with climate change. The herring, is that a climate change issue? Possibly water temperatures… But there are other things that are impacting herring's loss of habitat. So, there are elements that will all have some climate feature to them but sometimes there are other components of environmental science that come in as well.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
So all these projects are super exciting and the breadth is pretty incredible. They all sound solution-focused and very positive but I imagine sort of in the back end for you as a teacher and for the community members who are working with the students, and for the students, you will be feeling the impact of addressing an emergency, an environmental emergency, whether it's a climate crisis or whether it's pollution in the ocean. Do you encounter very often that students need some support in terms of feeling distressed or anxious or even yourself or community members? Does that come up?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Yes, it does come up. And I teach the students over their entire time at UBC. So I meet them in first and second year and then again in third year. And then this project class happens in fourth year. So in the second year course when students are idealistic and excited… they've always wanted to study environmental science or want to make a change in the world and they come into that introductory course and of course and they're exposed to just the breadth and depth of the challenge that we face. It can be overwhelming, and it's sometimes overwhelming for me as well to see them work through those challenges. And this is actually something that we are doing more and more concertedly in environmental science in the classrooms because the students need it, is talking about emotions and the challenge of working in a field where it can be overwhelming and distressing and painful over time. So we do bring in lots of people to talk about it, we have conversations about it and we do think about this balance between what is the individual opportunity to engage, what is the community opportunity to engage, and what is the broader, say, societal opportunity to engage. And so, as we were discussing a minute ago in the fourth year, really, that class is showing the students that they can connect to the community, that there are places where you can make a difference in the community. And they can see that they can make those differences because they are doing the work, they are seeing the results of their own efforts earlier on. We prepare them for that, and have a lot of conversations about anxiety and how working with climate is overwhelming. And mainly that the individual actions that you can take, changing your habits, using non-disposable items, reducing your waste, reducing your water, reducing your energy consumption, those kinds of things are all good, but they are not the solution to the big picture problem. So, we then connect them into the community and see the community engagement and hopefully, we get them to understand that there is actually a whole societal change that needs to happen with commitment from governments to really address the big picture. And talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the reports that are coming together at the international level to guide how countries and nations need to change their behaviour to address reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. All of that is part of environmental science and it comes in the different stages of the students' experience over time in the degree.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
That's super. And I'm glad to hear that you're getting together with other teachers, professors and that there's time, because that time seems to be crucial, a couple of years to interact with students.
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
It is. It really is. What I usually find is the third-year class. So the first-year class is like this exposure to environmental science. It's quite an exciting class in some senses, although, as I said, it can be challenging because of the huge nature of the problem. The second class, is how does science contribute to the environmental challenges? That's actually the place where I think the students struggle the most because when we teach science, we have this tendency to think that science is objective and that we're working with the data. What are these results telling us? And that's maybe the place where the students really start to get a little bit frustrated because the science does not feel like it's including those values that come into it. And that's a very interesting thing that I have been challenged by. How do we teach science and how do we think about the processes where we are trying to understand something? And what is this data showing? Have we been clear about the process so that we can understand where we can apply the data that we have? What are the caveats? What can't we say about it because of the way it was collected? Say, for example, and that is a difficult place, but environmental science, which is what I teach, is training students to bring the scientific perspective. The bigger challenges will never be solved, if that's the word we're going to use, by science only. So it has to involve that interdisciplinary engagement. But the students that Environmental Science at UBC is training would be the scientific component of that broader interdisciplinary conversation. So that's the place where we are still thinking about how do we find balance for the students, that's a frustrating place. And then we get to ENVR 400, these projects, and then they see how those interdisciplinary teams come together and how science contributes. But they've had to gain that scientific skill in advance. There are ups and downs in the degree, but that's why we had them for four years.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
It's exciting. I'm trying to imagine and envision those conversations with the students when the science and the facts encounter the values aspect. What has been the toughest question that you've had to answer from students? I imagine it could be in that area of values and science.
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
No, and sometimes it is. It's in that middle class. And it's the toughest one because it makes me question my own understanding of how science contributes, what is really the strength of science, and how do I present that to the students? In the third-year class, which is Introduction to Research Methods in Environmental Science, the students, like I said, will get frustrated because it feels divorced from the importance, just the magnitude of the problem. And in that class, we spend a lot of time breaking down the big problem. Okay, climate change. Here's a big problem, but we can't tackle climate change. What does that mean? So we have to start parsing it into the bits. When you talk about climate change, are you talking about temperature? Are you talking about precipitation? Are you talking about other components that might be part of that? And then where is it? on land? Is it in the ocean? And then what part, what is the impact that you're thinking about? And we get more focused and focused because then when they're presenting this work, they have to be presenting something that you could practically get done in, say, two years. So that process of scoping down, down into something that you could imagine doing…, if I said, now go ahead and do that, they would be able to execute it. But if we just said, Okay, it's all climate change, how are they going to do that? So in that process of scoping down it is important to think about the scientific process and how we're engaging, but it is really hard to keep that relevancy. How do we think about this in terms of that really overwhelming challenge? And so that's something that I'm still continually trying to imagine the different ways of teaching. That's the challenge for me.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
And so you're working, yourself, and you mentioned a group of other professors as well. But what can an institution like UBC, a large higher education institution, with thousands of students, do to support that kind of work, to create that container where we can address this?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
They can do more. But that's a fascinating question. So as you've discussed, right, UBC has some opportunities and they're doing lots. We have the Sustainability Hub, and now I'm the Academic Director of the Sustainability Hub. And through the Sustainability Hub, we're looking for ways to support faculty and teaching and bringing together this network so that they can learn from others and take steps to engage their fields with these global challenges and understand how others are doing that as well. But I guess one of the things that the students bring up to me all the time is how do we solve this and how do we do it faster? And the big question is, what is the role of the university to ensure that we can engage globally in these challenges and transition faster? I would imagine that could be the ultimate goal of the university. The university's intention is to educate global citizens for a sustainable world. I don't know what the vision statement is, but it's something like that. And I can't imagine how you could do that without ensuring ecological literacy of all graduates of the university. How can we proceed and send somebody out thinking they're educated when they don't understand some of the constraints of the planet that we're living on? I think that that really does have to be a role that universities take.
Oliver Lane – Sustainability Hub
And I think that ties into the new program that you've been developing with Dr. Jessica Dempsey and Dr. Nina Hewitt from the Department of Geography. It's called the Climate Studies and Action Certificate, is that right? I know you've been working on that for a couple of years, and that's about to launch in the fall.
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Hopefully. Yes. We're just waiting for the final board ratification of that certificate. But the expectation is that it will be available for registration in the summer and we start in September. So that is a response to the climate emergency and the declaration that UBC made saying, we are taking this seriously. We recognize that there is a climate emergency and UBC has made a declaration to that effect. And so that sort of allowed action to happen. And I was at the time, of course, I've always been interested in climate. My background, as I said before, is in Paleo Climate and I have been teaching in addition to environmental science, I've taught climate change courses, sort of the more scientific components of climate change. And I also knew that geography, in response to the declaration of the Climate Emergency, had developed a committee, a departmental committee, the Climate Emergency Committee. So I imagined that they were likely going to be thinking about curriculum. And I also at that point saw the call for funding that the Sustainability Hub, which at that point I was not Academic Director of. I had seen that there was a funding opportunity for interdisciplinary educational advancement in sustainability-related fields. So, I reached out to Geography, to Jessica, and asked if she would be interested in seeing if we could collaborate on something. And at that point, we really didn't know what it was and she was thrilled to join. And we came in as Sustainability Fellows at the Hub and were supported over those two years to consult and scope and hone and then go through the practical stages of curriculum, committees and approvals. And we got to where we are now. We're excited. It's an 18-credit certificate for undergraduate students at UBC and it's open to all students on campus. We've devised it, hopefully, so that it is accessible. It has very few prerequisite courses that you have to take one before the next. And it has allowed us to develop some new targeted courses on campus to focus on some of these big challenges, the big challenge of decarbonizing, how do we back out of our addiction to fossil fuels and why is that so hard to do? And then some issues around climate justice, recognizing that there are places in the world that have been burning and using and producing fossil fuels and carbon emissions far more than others and yet the impacts tend to be in those in the Global South, in places that we're not contributing as much to the problem or even locally. The challenges of what does it mean for climate impacts, those who don't have the resources to protect themselves or be resilient in the face of climate change. And then we have the Climate Action Labs, which I am teaching and those ones in some senses follow in the same vein as the projects that we were just talking about before. But these ones will all have a focus on climate and the students will be working in this case in really interdisciplinary teams because hopefully they'll be coming from all across campus, from forestry and science and applied science and arts and fine arts and dentistry and anywhere so that they can all be seeing how their fields interact and all contribute to solutions and action towards client solutions.
Oliver Lane – Sustainability Hub
Fantastic. I love it that it's open to all students or most students.
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
That's the intention. I really hope so. Our challenge now is advertising and making sure that people know that this is available to them.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Will students be able to sign up for, let's say, one course and test it and see how they feel about it?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Yeah, sure. The courses that we've made are generally open to all students and there's not a restriction that you have to have signed up for the certificate in advance of that, except for the capstone courses at the end, which do require that, we want the students to have the common experience of the other courses in preparation, in order to be able to do those projects well.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
This, I think, took you about two years or maybe even more to design. A lot of work, I imagine. Do you have any tips and tricks for faculty members who might be thinking of designing something similar, maybe on another topic, but still wanting to develop a certificate?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Certificates are starting to be a new thing, so just letting people know that that exists out there, that it's not a minor, it's a little bit smaller than a minor, and therefore a little bit easier for students to fit into their degree structure. That's maybe one thing that people could know then. Anything that size is challenging. But there are resources available at UBC to support you through that. In fact, the Sustainability Hub is one of those places, and the Sustainability Fellows Program is one of the programs that would really support, well, people who are thinking about developing that. I would encourage people to get in touch with the Sustainability Hub and the Fellows program. But if they're not doing that, I would also say that embedded within the faculties are supports, administrative supports, to help guide you through these curriculum changes. And the faculties will all have a curriculum committee that can help you understand what needs to happen. There are all sorts of things. There are lots of documents and budgets and how are we addressing certain things. But maybe the biggest thing that I would say is early consultation with groups that are like-minded, even if they might not be directly involved. Climate change really impacts all fields on campus. And we benefited a lot from consultation with students, from consultation with other faculties, actually, even from consultation with employers. That's a very important one off-campus. What would they want to see people graduating with? In our case, a Climate Studies and Action certificate. What would you imagine those students would have if they were coming into your workplace and being effective in whatever role they would be given? So all of that early consultation is really important to understand how to scope the project.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Excellent, and thanks for sharing those resources. When we publish this episode, we'll make sure to have links to those resources that you mentioned that are easily available for faculty who are considering taking this journey. We’re coming close to time now. So I'd like to wrap up with a couple of questions about the future, what's coming up? I know you'll be focused a lot on this climate certificate, but is there anything else on the horizon that you'd like to share with us?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Well, I suppose I'm focusing a little bit more on environmental science again right now and thinking about how we can refresh and renew and maybe expand environmental science at UBC. So that's one thing that's on my mind. There's a lot of excitement in there, a lot of possibility for a really deep connection across the campus and really enhancing the interdisciplinary component that adds to science at UBC. So that's exciting and again, allows me to meet a lot of my colleagues and talk to people across campus, which is one of the aspects of environmental science that I really enjoy very much, is that it is a community effort and it's a human project, so you have to talk to people to do it effectively. So that's exciting to me. The other thing I suppose that's kind of interesting that I've been thinking about a little bit, is outer space, which is very different, but I've been a fellow of the Outer Space Institute for the last couple of years. Over COVID there hasn't been very much going on but recently fellows convened together and really started to talk about the deep challenges of sustainably developing space. So that's an interest of mine. And I'm not really closely involved, actually quite peripherally involved, because I'm not in astronomy or physics or law, which are the biggest areas that are engaged in this, thinking about how do we engage space. Well, but from the environmental and sustainability perspective, I can hopefully contribute something to the group and I've been really enjoying the conversations that I've been having with them.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Very exciting topic, and I know we've done an interview with one of the professors who's also engaged in this topic and so we'll hear soon about that story. Tara, thank you very much for spending your time with us and sharing your passion for the work that you do. Maybe as a final wrap-up question, now that you have your listeners here who have heard about your work and know you a bit better, is there any call to action that you would like to put forward, thinking that students and faculty and staff are listening and maybe community members from the UBC community or beyond?
Dr. Tara Ivanochko
Yeah, well, for the students, the call to action is to get engaged. But really the students are, so the call to action is not really to the students because they know the magnitude of this problem and they're getting engaged really. So the next call to action is to faculty to say it's probably time to rethink how your field is engaging with environmental and climate issues. There's likely to be a connection. And I think the students will want to see how the broad fields around campus, all of them, can contribute to the solutions that we are so desperately in need of. And then a call to action at the university level is to really step up, step up, move faster, put resources into this space. And if we think we're going to be global leaders, we really have to demonstrate that. We have to demonstrate that, and we're not there yet. So, I would say at the university level, we have more to do and we can take it out and force those conversations with other institutions and with governments and policy leaders and decision-makers. And then for the broader community, I would say push, right? We had a conversation last year, I believe, in advance of the Cop 26 meeting, which is the Council of the Parties that get together to negotiate the climate policy at the UN level, the International Engagement level, and passionately, Elizabeth May at that time when asked the same question, what did she say? She said we need to do everything, all at once, all the time, to engage in climate. I would just second that statement that we can't let up at this point. We will start to feel it, we will start to see the devastation, and we need the community to push on that. And one of the ways that you can push is to get involved in partnerships and projects. If you're an organization out there, reach out. Get in touch with the Sustainability Hub, with the center for Community Engaged Learning, here at UBC, or Environmental Science. And I'm sure that universities and post-secondary institutions across the country have somewhat similar opportunities.
Oliver Lane – Sustainability Hub
Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing your time with us and for the work that you do. Okay, that's all for now. We'll see you next time. And if you have any questions for Tara that you'd like to share, please send an email to us or connect with us via our newsletter or social media. See you next time.
Oliver Lane, Sustainability Hub
Well, I hope you felt inspired, as I did, in listening to Tara's journey of teaching about climate change and her invitation and encouragement to take on this huge challenge that we all have ahead of us. For more podcasts like this one, don't forget to like and subscribe or send us an email if you have an idea of a UBC faculty member we should interview. And don't forget to check out our website at sustain.ubc.ca for more information on teaching, learning and research on sustainability and climate change.
See more resources related to the conversation at UBC:
- Sustainability Fellows Program
- Climate Education Grants
- Sustainability Education Grants
- Climate Teaching Connector
- Centre for Community Engaged Learning
- UBC Environmental Science Program
- UBC Wellbeing
For more episodes, you can do the like subscribe and share thing. And don't forget to check out our website at sustain.ubc.ca for more information about teaching, learning and research on sustainability at UBC.