Centre for Teaching Excellence

Springing into Land & Place-based Learning

March 6, 9am-noon followed by lunch. Meet in BR 126.
The workshop will take place inside and outside.
Space is limited, register now.

Workshop Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
1. Reflect on how their own discipline shape their understanding of land and place and how this understanding offers unique learning opportunities.
2. Identify how the disciplinary knowledge embedded in the natural and built environments of Capilano University can serve as learning opportunities for other disciplines
3. Articulate the reciprocal relationships that always exist between human institutions and the more-than-human world, and how the gifts and responsibilities that come with community can translate into learning opportunities.
4. Identify how collaborations within land and place might address challenges to student learning in their courses

About the workshop:
This workshop invites participants to explore 1) how academic disciplines shape our understanding of place and land and 2) the challenges and opportunities that land and place-based assignments could provide in our own courses. Beginning with a brief survey of place-based approaches in post-secondary education, we will use reflective-writing and reciprocal interviews to identify our own disciplinary ways of thinking. We will then work together to identify the disciplinary knowledge embedded in the natural and built environments of Capilano University. Heading outside, exercises grounded in the close observation of an awakening ecosystem will help us articulate the reciprocal relationships that always exist between human institutions and the more-than-human world. To conclude, we will identify challenges of student learning in our individual courses and seek to identify how collaborations within land and place might address these challenges. Overall, this workshop is offered from the belief that as Canada attempts to reconcile its own complicated history, stories of place—shared or contested—may be an important path to common ground.

About the Facilitator
Lyn Baldwin is a plant ecologist whose research focuses on applied questions around plants and their conservation. She also studies how tools from outside science—including place-based learning and the arts—can help students learn. In 2018, she was awarded the Desire2Learn Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning for her innovative use of drawing and creative writing to help botany students engage in learning. Working from the belief that restoring the world must include our own re-storying within it, Lyn uses the practice of illustrated field journaling to help re-imagine her relationship with home and community, place and dwelling. Lyn has shared the these stories, expressed in image and text, in art galleries and science museum, and within the pages of journals such as The Goose, Terrain.org, Camas and The Journal of Natural History Education and Experience.