Guide: Integrating Teaching and Learning
From Common Energy UVic
Comprehensive Project - Integrating Teaching and Learning, part of the Guide.
[edit] Integrating Teaching and Learning
To develop a climate-neutral society we must re-think today and re-imagine tomorrow. Effective climate strategies for our local and global communities require collaboration between citizens, non-profits, businesses, and governments working with experts from many disciplines. Collaborative planning produces practical climate strategies that provide multiple benefits and generate the support they need to become reality. To meet this challenge we will all be both teachers and learners.  UVic's education and research strengths, particularly the new Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS), can facilitate this capacity-building and collaborative process in our community. UVic students and faculty, from Environmental Studies to Business, have been working with partners to create climate solutions. Common Energy proposes the creation of a Climate Solutions Network (Network) that will build on this strength.
The Network would be dedicated to providing the capacity and facilitating the collaboration necessary to develop a beyond climate-neutral society on Vancouver Island. The Network would include faculty, students, citizens, non-profits, businesses, and governments working on climate solutions in our community. The Network would focus on bringing these people together to create local solutions, educate our community, and provide the flexibility to solve problems as we work together over the long term.
A focus on serving our region would provide a foundation for organizing research and courses to solve problems and transcend disciplines. The challenges presented by climate change are an opportunity for UVic to develop sophisticated interdisciplinary, problem-based, and service-learning courses. These courses would enrich education, increase student engagement, and build local capacity.
[edit] Goal: To develop connections between students, staff, faculty members, businesses, non-profits, and governments in .our region to deliver climate solutions through collaborative research and problem-based learning.
Objective 1: To connect UVic's research and education strengths with community partners working on climate issues.
Objective 2: To facilitate and empower collaborative planning in our home community.
Objective 3: To support and reward faculty for local research and problem-based or service-learning courses.
Objective 4: To develop educational opportunities in climate change and sustainability, and give credit to students for taking them.
Objective 5: To connect the Climate Solutions Network to similar projects in other communities.
[edit] Objective 1: To connect UVic's research and education strengths with community partners working on climate issues.
Strategies:
- Establish the Network with a full-time co-ordinator, possibly in PICS, to connect faculty with regional partners working on climate and sustainability issues.
- Provide the Network with funding for student research assistants, and increase the hours for teaching assistants for the Network’s research projects and problem-based and service-learning courses.
[edit] Objective 2: To facilitate and empower collaborative planning in our home community.
Strategies:
- Use the Network to provide research and education for the Climate Solutions for the CRD project. This project will use future climate projections from the Pacific Climate Impact Consortium, and possible scenarios for a 2050 climate-neutral CRD, to backcast actions that should be taken today. The project is designed to facilitate collaborative planning in the region to create a broad consensus for climate change strategies. (See Civic Engagement and Governance)
- Invite community partners to become members of the Network to promote knowledge-exchange between the university and regional partners, and build capacity to create solutions.
- Create interdisciplinary research teams and problem-based service-learning classes to develop solutions with community partners for core challenges facing the region in focus areas including buildings, business, transportation, food, energy, and governance.
- After the conclusion of the first cycle of the Climate Solutions for the CRD project, develop long-term research, education, and awareness initiatives from the ideas and relationships developed by the project.
[edit] Objective 3: To support and reward faculty for local research and problem-based or service-learning courses.
Strategies:
- Host workshops and seminars on climate change and sustainability curricula development for the Climate Solutions for the CRD project. (See Civic Engagement and Governance)
- Review current educational and ethics requirements and ensure that they support and complement community-based research and problem-based learning.
- Use the Network as a pilot project to develop evaluation criteria that reward faculty for the quality and effect of their course projects. Reward contributions to local research projects, and reward problem-based and service-learning. The new evaluation criteria would not privilege this kind of teaching and learning, but would instead ensure that faculty do no slow their careers by investing time in this work.
[edit] Objective 4: To develop educational opportunities in climate change and sustainability, and give credit to students for taking them.
Strategies:
- Connect students and faculty to primary and secondary school classes to make presentations on climate change and sustainability. Host professional development workshops for teachers and students in the education program at UVic to learn about teaching climate change issues and sustainability.
- Initiate a Sustainability 101 course for first-year students to explore the comprehensive nature of sustainability, teach learning skills, and connect students to civic-engagement opportunities. Since sustainability, with its social, economic and environmental dimensions, is such a broad concept, this course can provide an introduction to the range of UVic’s academic offerings.
- Develop an intensive training course for co-op students about the steps that organisations can take to alleviate climate change and improve knowledge of sustainability. Make the course available before students go on work-terms.
- Establish distance-education programs on climate change and sustainability planning and action, co-taught by local practitioners, to build capacity throughout the region.
- Develop capstone courses using problem-based and service-learning projects for students in their final years. Encourage these courses to be established in many disciplines; use the Network to facilitate collaborative work.
- Create an interdisciplinary certificate in climate change and sustainability planning and action by assigning Sustainability #Credits to appropriate courses. These Sustainability Credits would not replace normal credits, but if students earned a certain number of them, they would earn a Sustainability Certificate that would be noted on their transcripts.
[edit] Objective 5: To connect the Climate Solutions Network to similar projects in other communities.
Strategies:
- Contribute to BC's sustainability education organisations, the BC Campus Climate Network and Walking-the-Talk, to share knowledge and build capacity across BC's post secondary education system.
- Support inter-campus conferences on climate change research and education.
[edit] Case Studies - Integrating Teaching and Learning - Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan
Students of a practical sustainability course in Kinsale in rural Cork, Ireland, produced the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. The plan outlined a vision and a series of practical steps for radically reducing their community’s dependence on fossil fuels. The make sure the communities diverse needs were met and to share a broad sense of ownership over the ideas the students actively sought out community input into the plan. As a result, the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan was adopted officially by the town council and is currently being implemented.
[edit] UVic Strategic Plan - Integrating Teaching and Learning
Objective 11: To ensure that our undergraduate and graduate programs are of the highest quality, responsive to disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments and student needs, organized around best practices in teaching and learning, and enriched by the intellectual and physical environment of the university.
Objective 12: To enhance the quality of our students’ classroom experience and ensure that the strong research culture at the University of Victoria is brought into the classroom.
Objective 14: To support further development of distributed learning as part of the UVic tradition and as a mechanism for increasing access to higher education.
Objective 17: To increase opportunities for experiential learning and community engagement at UVic.
Objective 19: To further promote a culture of research excellence across the academy and advance UVic’s position as a leading research university focusing on issues of national and global importance.
Objective 20: To expand UVic’s involvement in interdisciplinary research areas of high priority for society.
Objective 21: To promote and expand the mobilization of research knowledge for societal benefit.
Objective 22: To support lifelong learning by increasing continuing education opportunities.
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