 Okay, so welcome everyone to this session on integrating sustainability and climate change content in your course or program. My name is Oliver Lane. I'm the manager for teaching and learning at the UBC sustainability hub, which used to be called the sustainability initiative. So before we get started, I wanted to let you know that we'll be recording this session so that it can be shared with others on and off campus. This is what CTLT usually does with its programming. If you prefer not to be recorded, we invite you to turn off your camera, your video. If you're okay with being recorded, feel free to turn your video on. It's always nice to see some some faces, but only if you're comfortable to do so. And if you're having lunch, it's totally fine if you want to be eating while you're enjoying the session. I think we prefer to see faces than no faces. So the goal of this session today is to leave you inspired and encouraged to incorporate and enhance sustainability and climate change teaching and content. Maybe you're thinking about this for the first time, or maybe you've already been doing some of this work. In either case, we hope you can offer some ideas and some insights and some connections to support the work that you're doing or wanting to do. So we'll be hearing from some faculty members that work with us at the Sustainability Hub about their experience in engaging with sustainability and climate change education and about specifically some of the projects that they've taken on in the last year or two. And we'll be having a space as well for discussion with you and take your questions and your experience and your comments as well. I'm curious to know. So from all of you here, maybe I'd like to know who has already teaching climate change or sustainability in any way in their in their practice, and who is totally new to this. So maybe maybe you can choose any emoji except the one that raises your hand just any emoji to say if you have been teaching in any way climate change have engaged on climate change and sustainability. Just choose an emoji and let us know just to get a sense. So good, good mix, good mix of new to this fields and people who have already been teaching or at least experimenting with this. So I'm joining this call today from muskim unseated traditional and ancestral lands, and I invite you to share in the in the chat, whose lands you're joining us from. There are a number of resources available online to learn more about this native land dot CA is one of them that I recommend native dash land dot CA, you can find whose lands you're on and feel free to share in the chat. I was at my wife's UBC graduation ceremony last Thursday celebrating a very important achievement for her and for the family as a whole. And we were reminded in one of the speeches there at the event about the privilege that we have of having access to higher education, and above all the privilege of having access to education in this place in this space on this beautiful land. And we were invited to reflect on the responsibility that comes with that privilege. My wife and I arrived here in what was called Vancouver 14 years ago, as master students at UBC, and we're now raising a family and building our lives here. And over this time we've tried in very imperfectly to better understand the history of the people who have been here in this region for millennia, stewards and knowledge keepers of this land. So if you are like me an uninvited guest that's arrived here at some point in your life. I encourage you if you're not doing that yet to take that you take on that journey of learning and listening and understanding the history and take on the responsibility to support justice for indigenous peoples and ultimately for all future generations. And this concept is very much connected to the work that we want to discuss today about sustainability and climate change education, which ultimately has the goal of making sure that all the students that graduate from this institution and go out into society are equipped and empowered to the agents of change for a better and more just world for everyone. So I hope you can join that journey. So, before I introduce you to the panelists, and we start with that conversation I very quickly wanted to provide some context of where this work is coming from, and the sustainability hub where where I'm who I'm part of. So, and we'll also go through an agenda for talk briefly run through the agenda so that you know what how the how the session is divided and then I'll talk about the sustainability hub very briefly. So we'll have a panel discussion where we have for faculty members and a student will be sharing their thoughts on why this work is important, and what they think the role of universities is in supporting climate change and sustainability education. Then we'll hear from the faculty members who are working on specific projects, developing curriculum, and we'll hear from them their story of how they engage with this and how it's going and what worked on what didn't work, and how they're solving any issues that might come up. There'll be time for a few questions from you, if you're interested in asking a question through the chat on any about any of those projects. And then we'll break out into small groups, and that will be an opportunity for they will be facilitated by our faculty members and that will be an opportunity for you to share. Why you think this is important. What is the journey that you were on. What are the challenges that you might be encountering or how do you get started answering all those types of questions through through a conversation. And we'll end the session with some reflections from the different groups and hopefully send you off inspired into the world to do more of this good work. So I was going to say about the sustainability hub that was formerly called the sustainability initiative, which is a unit that I'm part of our mission is to inspire people to act upon the planet's most urgent challenges through UBC's academic and operational sustainability leadership. And so to do that we there are a number of things that we engage with and one of the main things is that we connect faculty, students, staff departments and teams to each other, we create those spaces for conversations and for learning. We curate and facilitate events conversations. We do a lot of our work in partnership with other groups on and off campus as well to integrate sustainability themes into teaching learning research and international engagement. And specifically and this might be of most interest to you when we when it comes to working with faculty we provide support through curriculum development grants teaching resources we create spaces for meaningful connections to happen. And one of those programs actually is the sustainability. Sorry, sustainability fellows program, and our four faculty members who will be on the panel today and presenting today are sustainability fellows. And that's a program that basically has a group of between 10 and 15 faculty members meeting every month to discuss their projects to engage with guests, guest speakers on certain certain that have certain expertise, and basically learn from each other to change ideas. So that's roughly what the sustainability fellows program is, and that is and I'll mention this towards the end this is open to to faculty across campus. So I think with that I'll pass it over to our panelists I want to very briefly introduce you to Delaney Austin, who is a student at UBC is in her fifth year, doing a dual program. And the integrated sciences and also in First Nations and indigenous studies. She'll be on the panel with us. We also have now our sustainability fellows, Dr Kerry Renwick from Department of Curriculum and pedagogy. Dr Sylvia Bartolic from the Department of Sociology, Dr Maggie Low from the School of Community and Regional Planning, and Dr Rob Kozak Dean of the Faculty of Forestry. So I'm going to pass it over to you. I'm going to get started I think Kerry will probably get us started. The questions that we have here is, are, why is this work that you're doing important to you. And what is the role of universities. The role of sustainability and climate education and feel free to add questions in the chat. We might have time to address those now or might come to addressing them later on in the session. Over to you, Kerry. Thank you Oliver. Welcome everyone it's lovely to see so much interest in what I think is such an important area. For me, in terms of responding to Oliver's questions about why I think this area of works important is without wanting to date myself too much. I read Silent Spring as a child and it had quite a profound effect on me. And certainly the way in which I engage with my work. It's relational. I have a background in partially in biology so relationships and interrelationships for me with those sorts of notions and idea are inevitable. So for me, I'm looking for ways in which Western universities can respond to the challenge particularly about global warming sustainability in a way that they haven't done previously. Cast in a Western view of the world in linear fashions that we through capitalism we take what we need and don't think what the long term consequences are is problematic for me. So I think the question's an idea about engaging with sustainability about living in a world with limited resources and not stealing the world and the land from our children are important motivations for me for engaging in this project. And when I chat a little bit later with the project that I'm working with Sylvia Bartolik with you'll see the some of the things that are guiding the work that we're engaging with and that we're trying to do. My interest started with a student I had a student do an honors paper on fast fashion, and this is not something that any of our courses in the family studies area or the family sociology area actually talked about so you know we, we talked about family studies and all kinds of other things but we didn't actually talk about value systems and the complex choices that people make in their everyday lives and so Kerry is going to present her project and you'll see how that sort of parallels what we do in our project. But this is where it started for me to thinking about, well, how do we get individual people on board, and it's not just convincing the one person but it's convincing their whole social circle to perform differently or try different things and it's also complicated by socio economic status and all these other factors so that was really my starting point just really getting interested in what are the dilemmas around these choices we make in our everyday lives, and I'll stop there and let someone else talk. Thanks and hello everyone and it's great to see such a great crowd here feel under pressure those were such terrific answers, but I'll just add to this by saying that to me. Sustainability is an ethical concept, it's like justice or fairness, you know, which says that things in the future, you know, should be better than they are at present, and I think that's a legacy that we need to leave for our students, but I also see it as a way of thinking like a skill set. So, in many ways it's like numeracy, or literacy, it just needs to sort of, you know, transcend all of our courses and all of our educational offerings. And one of the key messages I think, you know, based on some of the work that we're doing here in the faculty forestry is, you know, we need to better understand that delicate balance between the environment and society and the important role I think that and Carrie touched on this that consumption plays in a post material world. And, you know, this is becoming increasingly difficult, I think, where, you know, in a world where virtually every trajectory points to this neoliberal ideal of amassing individual wealth. And so we need to, as much as possible, bend away from that curve, those sort of atomizing forces to look more holistically at community based solutions, really bold and innovative and imaginative solutions and I think our education and our institution really need to reflect that sort of that sort of egos. Perhaps I'll stop there. Thank you. So I think to me, climate and sustainability education can kind of be seen as a strategy for coping with climate anxiety and as a precursor to the climate action that I think we know needs to happen to contribute to just and sustainable futures and growing up kind of maybe being the youngest one in the room. I grew up with a lot of ego anxiety. I had farmers in my family who were really stressed about climate change and the rain. I always, it's always about the rain and whether we're going to have it and what that was going to mean for their livelihoods. And I didn't really understand and I saw these really sad photos of polar bears and things like that and it was just really a bombardment of that. And I became really obsessed with recycling because I thought that was the solution to this like climate problem. And then in high school and university, I've been really fortunate to have these learning opportunities where I think I was really able to reduce my anxiety and feel a sense of empowerment through understanding that there's a need for this collective action. It's not only my responsibility as an individual, but it's definitely part of my responsibility. There are these like really wonderful networks, especially beyond the community beyond the university within communities that you can tap into to be doing this work. And I also think that in university is when I started to learn a lot about what it means to build a just future and knowing as a settler that my ancestors were involved in creating this climate of colonization and capitalism that now leaves us in the place that we're in today. I think just really motivated me to know that I have a responsibility to do better for future generations and also for my current generations and peers. So powerful. Anybody else want to share the comments Maggie. Sure. Yes. Thank you to my fellow panelists. Those are very powerful insights and welcome everyone. It is really lovely to see so many of you here. I think, I think for me, kind of what Delaney said about a sense of responsibility kind of kind of hit home. I do feel a huge sense of responsibility working in a privileged institution and colonial institution like EDC to really put time and effort and passion towards, you know, how do we contribute to a more equitable and just world. And for me, it's been a real journey. I started my degree. I started kind of my trajectory to where I am now in, in the field of environmental studies. And even before that in high school, I, you know, I was kind of a nerdy like camp kid and loved being outdoors and new, even in high school that I wanted to study environmental studies. And at first I thought of maybe the science biology group, but quickly realized I was actually more interested in kind of policy and governance. And I've kind of followed that trajectory as an environmental studies and then environmental science and then environmental studies, and to just watch the, the, the way we understand at least in Western world view the, the problems that we're facing. As particularly around sustainability and climate change to kind of be part of these conversations and follow it for a long time. And be able to care about it. I just, yeah, I just feel this like very, the sense of responsibility to stay attuned to it. And yeah, and being in, I mean, I'll go on this a little bit more later on but being connected to folks that feel similarly. And can help us understand these problems in like the various facets of the, of the problems is just really helpful and hopeful. Maggie, do you feel like you, you'd like to maybe get started with sharing about your project. Yeah, thank you so much so I have the great opportunity today to just very quickly talk about the project that I've been involved when involved in the last two years through the sustainability fellows program and I did the name of the project was sustainability education at UBC, what can we learn from participatory urban and indigenous planning. And I was part of a wonderful team, including Allison Earl, bill the covax who's a PhD candidate and a GRE on on the project and then a collaborator in the faculty of education, Rob Van Weinsberg. Next slide please Oliver. So really quick overview of our project we collaborated with Rob Van Weinsberg to think about how we could expand help expand the sustainability curriculum for pre service teacher candidates in the faculty of education and specifically students in the sustainability cohort of the teacher education program. And the idea was to enable teacher candidates by communicating the importance of participatory, democratic and indigenous planning and education for sustainability. And so to do this we put together for related sustainability oriented modules to be used in fourth year, a fourth year class for pre service teachers, but we quickly realized that these sustainability modules could be used to support sustainability curriculum, potentially in other disciplines or other units across UBC, and we did have a chance to kind of test that these modules in specifically the School of architecture and landscape architecture curriculum. So next slide please. So I won't get into too much of the details of the the modules themselves but we had one taught by me in indigenous community planning, another on participatory planning with children and youth that was taught by COVEX Tactical Urbanism by Allison Earl, and then another module about around systems thinking and happy to go into details of these modules later. But just to say that the way they were structured was the each of us taught a three hour essentially a three hour workshop on these topics in an existing course. Often we would try to order the modules in a particular way so I would start I would start my module first and then we'd have Ildy come in the next week to do hers on participatory planning, Allison the following week, and then the systems the systems thinking module would go either before or after our three. So next slide. And this is just a really quick rundown over the last two years where and how these modules have been taught so in various courses in education and in landscape architecture. And you'll notice that we were able to design these modules both well we were in a way had to design these modules, both for online and for in class teaching, which was I would say a really valuable while challenging very valuable experience over the last two years. And then next slide. Very quickly, just a couple lessons so these photos are from the very last module that I facilitated in an outdoor class, which was a very different from one of us, you know, starting from the first modules with online and everyone was new to it and zoom zoom land. But we originally had hoped and thought that the modules would kind of easily be able to be adapted to to go into many different courses fairly easily but of course realizing that a lot of time and energy needs to go into adapting each module to fit. You know the students and the course content and the instructor, each time that it is taught. Next slide please. Another interesting observation we made was there's quite a high level of, I would say kind of anxiety within students that that change from the first year to the second year. There was expressed through feedback that we received after a few after a few of the modules had been given and so. Yeah, interesting insights around how in the first year I think the importance and what we were trying to get across seem to land quite well with with many of the students and in the second year that was a bit more varied and we did receive more feedback around students kind of questioning the relevance of what we were teaching and so that was some really important feedback for us to consider. And then just the last slide. Lastly, one of the biggest learnings was or I mean, privileges of doing this work was working with this project team and being able to learn from other folks doing and teaching about sustainability in various ways and other parts of the university so getting getting to work with Rob LB and Allison was was a great pleasure. And I will leave it with I'll leave it there and pass it on to my other fabulous panelists to talk about their projects. Maggie if you had any tips for anybody who would want to get started on this kind of work faculty members would just arrived at UBC let's say. What would you. What would you share. Maybe the low hanging fruit but there are amazing resources at the Center for teaching learning and technology. So just by even being in these workshops or checking out some of the incredible resources that are there with huge help to me. My first year, my first year here and also in the indigenous initiatives workshops are fantastic. Ready to move on. Thank you Maggie. Moving on moving on to Rob's project what I missed saying at the beginning before Maggie started was that the three projects that we are sharing with you today. Our part, or were partly supported by the by a grant that we offer at the sustainability hub interdisciplinary education grant and as I said, additionally, the fact these faculty members are also sustainability fellows within within the sustainability hub. Okay, so Rob, we're ready to go. I have your first slide up. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Oliver. Yeah, so unlike Maggie's presentation. This this project is fairly nascent. We just got started on it. Last September. Let me just start by saying I'm really happy to be part of the sustainability scholars program so thank you for the opportunity. And it would if anyone is interested in this program I would definitely recommend it's just a great opportunity to sit down pretty casually and have some great conversations with with, you know a group of peers who are passionate about sustainability and climate change and so forth so definitely highly recommended. I'm going to talk about our projects with which as I said is fairly nascent. I should say that Steven shepherd, who many of you might know is the leader on this project and I'm very much writing on his coattails. But he's on holiday so so I'm going to be presenting this so if I misrepresent this I do apologize Stevens truly the leader on this project but we've got a number of folks involved. Who's the coon who's the project coordinator, you're in debt or who's in the Center for advanced with processing. Owen Croy, who is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Forestry and an urban forester in the city of Surrey, and you're manoeuven and who's our assistant dean of professional programs. And so our project is called climate hacks in the community, a field course on community engagement. Next slide please. And you know it's built around an alarmingly simple notion of, you know, affecting meaningful and tangible change with respect to adapting to and mitigating against a warming planet by doing alarmingly simple things, you know at the scale of local communities. And so our project goal is is to develop an interdisciplinary field course where urban forestry and wood product students work together with the local residents and youth to design and install what we are calling climate hacks. So just a little bit of background here at Forestry is an inherently interdisciplinary faculty but but we had two programs that didn't really interact at all, urban forestry and wood products processing and so one of the many motivations behind this project was to create an interdisciplinary space for these two quite disparate groups of students to come together and work on an interesting project and the project that we devised was this thing around climate hacks. So next slide please. Yeah, so climate hack just refers to small climate action projects to tackle the climate emergency in people's own neighborhoods. And so, you know these are just when we refer to climate hacks where we're talking about really simple nature based actions and activities that can be taken at a community level, you know which when aggregated truly can have, you know, truly are effective tools for climate mitigation and adaptation. Next slide please. There we go. And so really simple examples like tree planting which has impacts on cooling cities, stormwater reduction, carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services, planter boxes for local foods and pollinators, shaded benches for gathering places and cooling, other shaded other simple shade structures and screens for cooling and growing local foods, lawn conversion for leaf litter retention to reduce water and fertilizer use, or the creation of signage to identify local climate actions. Next slide please. So, in this particular course so again we're going after these fairly simple community based climate solutions but we have four kind of overarching experiential learning objectives. The key one being for students to develop skills in community engagement so it's really a social goal if you will. The other three are around appreciating the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Again, we're bringing two quite disparate groups together here. Understand how to implement climate action solutions at the community level, and applying students subject skills in the real world so we see this as, you know, in the end it's about students as agents of change within the communities doing what they can. Next slide. So, the course structure as we've mapped it out thus far again let me remind you that this is a fairly, it's fairly early days here. But the idea is that we would have two groups of students working on two community projects, at least for the sort of pilot running of this course. And the course itself will be covered in or will be offered over both the fall and the spring term, and will comprise four distinct activities. First initial workshops for kind of intensive learning so that's the sort of classroom based stuff but the second part will be field work and this is where students meet neighborhood champions and residents they assess sites they they look at built precedents they co developed plans with the communities and then ultimately implement the projects. The third component will be mentoring by instructors and professionals both in the fields of wood science and urban forestry. And the fourth component is a final report which documents the process and evaluates the, the outcomes of the project next slide please. In terms of the plan timeline, we are currently in phase one. Again just starting. So that would be developing and preparing the course package and coming up with our partnership arrangements and recruiting our students. Over the next year or so. Well, we will be delivering the pilot course as a direct study, starting in September, running all next year. In phase three would be the evaluation of those courses will tinker make improvements to the courses and the with the ultimate aim of finalizing the course offering, which is to say having a Senate approved course for not this academic year but next academic year. Next slide please. So in terms of our progress to date, we have met and consulted with the program directors from each of those two programs. The idea being, we want to figure out if there was room and elective freedom in each of the programs if it made sort of pedagogical sense to have a course like this. And so we worked with our program directors on that. And we also worked with them to identify students who had both the credit room and the interest in doing this course. And so the goal was to identify eight interested students for from each program for the pilot course. It says for students signed up so far actually the update is that we've got all eight students signed up now so we're good to go. An important part of this project that sort of discovery phase if you will was to identify community partners. And so what we're doing there is we're leveraging relationships that we've fostered through our collaborative for events landscape planning's cool hood champs program, which seeks to empower local citizens to take climate action through a series of DIY activities. And we're also and this is an important part of the course we're also identifying organizations for this this project to supply the materials. Hopefully we all know that trees and wood are one of nature's most effective tools for per sequestering carbon and combatting climate change. So an important aspect of this course was that we not use more trees than we have to in our built solutions. So we've partnered with the Vancouver Parks Board to use urban trees that needed to be felt either because of illness or age or safety concerns. We're working with an organization called unbuilders who demolish homes and resell the wood components. So we're using recycled wood or wood that would have been diverted to landfill or burnt. And then currently we're also developing our syllabus and our final schedule. So that's I think all I've got to say about our program thank you for your attention. Rob. What if I was going to ask you about how you're building those relationships with organizations in the in the community but you, you sort of explained that with partnerships that already existed and definitely a very important aspect of the project. The idea of the project is to have students engage in with with communities and work with communities and co develop sort of questions with communities and solutions that that really is our motivating learning outcome, if you will. Okay, thank you. Any, any questions from the audience for Rob I know there's a question, sort of a delayed question for Maggie. In a minute, but anything you'd like to ask Rob. Christina is asking do you need to get approvals from cities for any of these projects. Probably. But I think in general, we will see the extent of the project. If it's a large scale project and yes, we would need approvals. That's a very good question. But we are working closely with the city on this project so they're fully aware of what we're doing. Well, people think about questions for Rob I'll go back to a question for Maggie from Chloe. How did you and your team balance the theory and practice of the four themes or domains around which you develop the modules. Thanks Oliver and thanks Chloe I was just for your question and I was just kind of taking a quick answer but one of the. One of the ways that we did do that was to kind of balance theory and practice and given that each of the modules were kind of in a three hour, I would say workshop type format. We did have a structure where each module did have pre required readings or podcasts or videos. We tried to limit that to like one or two that we would ask each, we would ask the students to do a week before the module. We also had provided kind of the foundations and some of the theory part, and then each module did have more of an interactive piece built into it that would kind of allow for putting the theory into practice as best as possible. And so that is I gave up pre reading around from Musqueam authors around what community planning looks like for Indigenous planning looks like for Musqueam, and then during the module we actually did a tour of the Musqueam house posts on campus, and we had a really great discussion, kind of connecting like why we at EBC, you know, it's important for us to understand the house posts and connect to that to planning concepts. So, and I would say all four modules we kind of put that into practice, and we got better at it as we as we run along. We'll move on to the next presentation but if you do have questions for the previous presentations, don't be shy please share them in the in the chat and we'll read them out later. So I'm going to pass it over to Kerry right. Correct. Thank you all over Sylvia and I share an interest in families and how they work and function together. One of the delights of being involved with this project is we were asked to create a partnership, a connection across two different faculties. And for me that's one of the very positive bits of this program in that we are encouraged to move beyond the immediacy of our own work and to seek out colleagues and like minded partners in other areas and so that's an incredibly powerful thing to do. Oliver if you can skip through the next one through to the third slide that would be great because what I'd like to do is to then quickly provide an overview of the purpose and the some of the context of content that we're actually looking at in what we're trying to generate. So the, the ideas that Sylvia and I have worked together on is looking at the practices exists within human ecology, what exists in terms of the everyday living decisions that are made in context to family. So what we are interested in doing is looking at how sustainability is both impacted by and can be created within context of the base unit society which is family in each and every one of its forms. And so what we're interested in doing is is working with students to build an understanding and appreciation of sustainability that exists in context of what we do within our everyday lives. Oliver if you'd like to go to the next one, like Rob's project we're also only just at the end of our first year. And looking back it's been an interesting journey as we've solidified our ideas and thinking around what we intended in our proposal and what's actually emerging from it, but there was two areas that we particularly agreed on is that we needed a theoretical model, but we also wanted to have courses that were very much experiential that actually gave people not only understandings about sustainability in, in everyday thinking, but also how they might go about it. So one of the things that we're working to at the moment is developing up four courses, one which which has family sustainability is a theoretical base and a required course that we're looking at. And then we're developing, we have developed up three other courses, one that looks at family and sustainable food, family and sustainable clothing and family and sustainable resources. And the focus of those like I suggested are going to be very much hands on, because we are also working towards a certificate of family and sustainability. And we're moving to include electives that work towards that also include three credits, and there are a number of pre-existing courses that allow that connection between family and everyday decisions that we're able to draw from. And so at the moment what we're working through is we've got the penultimate drafts of our four core courses or key courses, and we're now working through to actually get those accredited before we then trial those next year. Oliver, if you'd like to take us to the next slide please. One of the things that we did in our planning was to map out what we saw as program objectives, and then to look at what our course objectives were. And then, in the third bit to make sure that each one of the program objectives are reflected in each of the four course objectives that we're actually developing. And we wanted to make sure that if our program objectives were core that guided the way in which we thought then it was important to have each of those expressed through different medium if you will through resources, food or clothing in each of the courses. So while you may not see the detail there, you can see that we've actually tried to work very, very hard to make sure that there is coherence between the program objectives that we're working at together with how we're expressing those through individual courses. Oliver, if you can skip the next slide, because what I'd like to do is just quickly show you some examples of assessments that we're working with for each of the four units we're developing. So in the first one with family and sustainability, we're setting up a multimodal project that draws on broth and burners theories around ecology, but particularly how it works and fits within context of family. And so what we're asking people to do is to look at the theory, but then to explore ways by which it influences not only choices that are made, but also how available resources impact on families both from a social justice point of view, as well as different areas of social and economic standing. In the next slide, there's an example of an assessment that fits for the food sustainability program. And in this one, it's encouraging people to have a closer understanding of current. If you like food and sustainability practices within context of family, whatever shape or form that family might be, but then to also invite deeper understandings of circular food systems rather than linear ones. And then to move on to the ideas about how they might shift and change family practices around food so that they do reflect much more sustainable and much more circular food systems within context of that family. So to acknowledge that it's an ongoing process. It's a learning process. It's an evolving process over time as people come to understand the way in which they work and the decisions that are making the everyday around food. In the next one, we're pulling, we're looking at one of the assessments from the fashion course and it's around fast fashion dilemmas. And so there are a number of challenges in and around fast fashion, and you can see the bullet points there that actually highlight seven of those. And so what students are invited to do is to select one of those challenges and then to think about what does it mean in their everyday lives, what it means around their choices about fashion. And to think of ways in which they might help the fashion industry to move away from fast fashion by in some ways through their own demands, their own expectations and their impact as consumers about what that might mean. And then the last one looking at families and use of available resources. Sorry, Oliver, if you'd like to move to the next one. Thank you. In this one, we're inviting students to engage in an upcycle challenge and reflection. And there is a part of notion of understanding that every family or individual has equal access to resources. And so in this students are invited to create an upcycled object from whatever they may have from within their own homes or that they'd like to restore. The goal is to create something that's of a higher quality than the original one that they're working for. They have a budget to spend. They're invited to keep photographs of before and after and during the process. But the products will be put up for sale. And any of the money that would be raised from that would go to initially what's been identified as a downtown Eastside women's shelter or the group of students may elect another charity that they actually might like to donate to. But they are also invited to reflect on for whom their item their upcycled item would be most valuable and also how they might inspire other people to engage in upcycling processes. And so what we've just wanted to do today is to give you some tasting of the approach that Sylvia and I are taking in our courses to try and not only talk about it in a theorized way, but to actually encourage participants and our students to engage with it both in a collaborative but also in a meaningful way within their everyday lives. Thank you all of them. Thank you Kerry. That's wonderful. I'm waiting to see if there are any questions in the chat but do you have any do you have any tips because this sounds like a lot of work. I'm wondering if you have any any tips for people who are faculty members who are thinking of developing something similar in their own disciplines. What are those first steps? Higher students. Higher student help. That's what we've been doing. We've been hiring help to get it. The other thing is whilst Sylvia and I have a shared interest in family, we don't have expertise across all of these areas. And so Sylvia's point about hiring students and colleagues to contribute that do have that expertise is actually very, very important. And so while we've been able to work for us working through the program objectives and the course objectives have been really important so that then when we've handed it over to others to both negotiate those sorts of outcomes, but it's also provided us with a compass if you like to hold to what it is that we've seen as being important within this project. And so we're both very, very excited to be able to have the opportunity to actually deliver two of them next year. So that's our intent at this stage and obviously take feedback from our students that participate. Yes, it's some hard work, but I don't know any of our work that is any different. I think what's made it easier is we're both passionate about the content area, but we're also committed to it. And so whilst there's been some challenges around content and how we might express it, there's been a pretty strong drive in the and fueling our interest in this area. Thank you. There's a question from Christina. How do you connect individual actions for example food waste fast fashion etc to broader systemic structures and practices since the issues as you noted on a slide earlier cross multiple levels. Yeah. Sylvia might also want to add to this. In part, Bronfenbrenner's model helps us work through some of those, but also personally I'm interested in donut economics, which looks at the notion idea about resources as finite and how we might use them in ways that actually are meaningful for not meaningful that are useful for not depleting them but being able to reuse recycle them. In food that notion and idea about broader systems becomes really important and I'm speaking to that because that's my area of expertise in addition to family Sylvia your thoughts. So my thoughts are to well in sociology we think about, you know, different structural problems right. And so my goal for the students is to be careful not to shame people like we obviously want to have an impact in in a positive direction, but we I really want them to see the broader rationale for why people make the choices they make and some of those systemic contributions or limitations to people engaging in, you know, what we might consider positive behaviors. And that's where this you know the Bronfenbrenner model really helps to look at how the individual interacts with different social structures and where there might be some blocks and limitations. And he is one of them right I mean, you know people with lower socioeconomic status don't have the same opportunities as people with higher socioeconomic status to make these decisions in the same way so we just we don't want to shame, we want to inform and look at multiple perspectives and then try to come up with solutions in that way. So some tips and tricks to getting started. What what seems pretty evident to me is that partnering across disciplines opens a lot of doors, and also shares shares the load of work. So that seems to be a suggestion. How did you form those how did those partnerships start. How did you meet faculty from across disciplines. We wanted to do a project. We were working on a dual degree between the family studies minor and the home economics program so that's how Carrie and I met, and then this kind of emerged through our discussions. And at Rob or Maggie. How did you form your partnerships. Good question I was just thinking about that. The project kind of came revolved around Allison and I and it'll be all kind of knowing Rob and Weinberg, and he kind of having this idea to bring wanting to kind of bring planning into hit or aspects of urban role planning into the sustainability cohort curriculum. So he kind of he kind of brought us together and then which was which was absolutely wonderful because we had, you know, so much fun working on this together and I've been able to learn from you know what's what's happening in landscape architecture as well as the faculty of education. Rob. Our partnership is within the faculty so we have a fairly small faculty so we all know each other so it's fairly easy that way but I will say this we have a really multifaceted faculty and work in all kinds of different directions from sort of natural sciences to social sciences and a lot of us don't really get together so I would as much as possible encourage that that sort of interdisciplinary getting together with your colleagues seeking out some common ground and it's amazing what what emerges so Stephen and I have never, but we've worked a little bit together but not much but when we when we sort of started talking and figuring out what what it is that we could do as a team. This really, these really great synergies emerged and so just get out there talk to your colleagues and see what happens. Okay, I have one one last questions before we move into the small groups and this is for all the panelists. How did you negotiate teaching load and teach you credit with your own department of faculty. I'm a dean so I negotiate with myself. There you go. Good answer. I would say that, you know, we look at these sorts of opportunities these sorts of. Yeah, these these these opportunities to create and develop new and innovative and interdisciplinary courses as a very important thing that we should be doing as a faculty and and so we do allocate teaching load credit if you will, to these sorts of exercises of developing a new type of course. My teaching load didn't change. I didn't negotiate well, apparently. At this stage, mine hasn't changed either but I think when the courses come online and we're looking to teaching them then I'll need a conversation with my department. Yeah, similarly, similarly I the extra. Well, yeah, in addition to the courses that I teach per term that we taught the modules it was a couple extra classes that I would teach and yeah I just just did it. And I think I also frame it around, you know, yeah that kind of service work. As well. Okay, thank you. Thank you everyone for responding to those questions. If you have any other pending questions we can post them in the chat or you can use the opportunity of the small group discussions as well to to ask those questions. So now, at least that's going to help us with the next stage which is the breakout rooms. I think all groups are back. I'm counting about 15 people. Yeah. There we go. Any, any thoughts. Was it terrible was there a good conversation. Any tips and tricks. I just wanted to thank the people in my group. So I haven't introduced myself to others I don't know how many other people we have here doesn't look like too many now but My name is Tara. I have an arch go I'm a Academic director of UBC sustainability hub and so I had my own little breakout group that I was talking to in our group we talked a lot about an interest in having guest lecturers or people with with particular areas of expertise available to come into the classroom and we have a program that allows that and this has set that up with graduate students focused on climate change coming into classrooms, but in this case, the interest was maybe even broader than that so thinking about sustainability and bringing expertise in to share between departments I think there was inspiration from this interdisciplinary education and so that was one of the things that was discussed. We also talked about the interdepartmental climate emergency committees that have been working both in their own areas and interconnecting to do some of that work themselves and particularly the resources that the library is providing to to different departments to allow in particular Asian studies to help them achieve their green day goals where they spend one day per week I think it was per week focused on climate and that was either by working from home that day or by bringing in some topic into their class that has a climate focus, and that might be challenging if you're an Asian studies and you're doing ancient historic work. And so the library was really useful in thinking about ways to bring that in and targeting climate appropriately for the content area of those classrooms. And then we discussed briefly the importance of having strategic plans in place like the Indigenous strategic plan to help drive change. And I didn't get to finish my last comment in the class in the breakout room there that the climate action plan 2030 is another one of those that we have now at GBC that is hopefully going to be making a lot of difference for how we can drive change that and of course what I was talking about was the groundswell of student demand for action. So we had a great conversation. Thank you all in my group. Thank you Tara. How about other groups. Anybody want to share. I can just quickly share. Tara it sounds like you had such a great conversation in your group. I think we did as well it was it was a pleasure. I give a little shout out there somebody here attending from the University of Manitoba so it's fun to to to talk about what's going on in different institutions. So yeah we covered a lot of different a lot of different topics there's a little bit of ideas sharing and information sharing around how potentially a faculty member might be able to get in touch with another group. That can support how curriculum can be brought into one of the assignments for further classes so that was really great. So we did chat about how you know the need for change there's these tensions around how you know I think we need to encourage people encourage that change happens at the individual level and how you know the need for hope and agency and curating that but also how we're all operating in these larger systems that we've inherited that are essentially creating you know the challenges that we're facing so. Lots of great lots of great things shared and it is always nice to hear about what's going on in other institutions. Thank you. Great thank you Maggie. I know there are two more groups. I can jump in Oliver. We had a really great discussion as well, wide ranging that went from Thailand to Sweden to the Bay of Bengal so thank you to my group for that exciting conversation. There were two emergent themes in terms of kind of where we should move institutionally the first very simple message we need to break down the silos of the university encouraging interdisciplinarity as much as possible. And we need a long term vision for how we address these sorts of issues so that came out loud and clear. The other more specific thing but I think important and something that's worth putting on the table is is we need to consider more robust and flexible ways of a assigning teaching load but be the process of promotion and tenure, you know, we are beginning to include things like open education resources, but we should, I think encourage things like, you know, EDI and decolonization strategies in our courses, Indigenous knowledge, interdisciplinarity, and sustainability education so those types of considerations should be built into the process of tenure and promotion. Thank you. Thank you. Those are those are great points. I know there's one group there's also one minute left in our session. Any final comments from that group or from anybody else. We've had lots of the same ideas around breaking down the silos and finding ways to be able to work into interdisciplinary without, you know, challenges with course codes and the ways people are paid and all of those things but also just a big I like the big, the big push for sustainability kind of lost ground because of COVID that we've started to focus on COVID and that we need to come back and focus. You know, I know COVID was a big deal, we need to now come back to some of the conversations and make this more of a focus across campus. Great. Thank you, Sylvia. And in connection with that just wanted to let you know that at the sustainability hub we are planning starting in the fall to have a monthly, monthly sort of meeting space for faculty who are interested in having these conversations. So stay in touch, you can you can sign up for our newsletter or contact me directly so that you know when these things are happening and also learn more about our grant programs. A climate teaching connector another supports that we provide for for the work that you do. So thanks everyone thanks to our panelists. Thank you to CGT for hosting us. I know, at least I was going to share she just did the survey. So please fill out the survey for CTLT so that they can continue to improve these wonderful institutes that they offer to us. And please stay in touch again reach out to me directly sign up for a newsletter and have a great, great wonderful rest of your day.