Overview
The structure of this year-long course begins with a 10-day virtual Learning Intensive focused on introducing Western and Traditional Indigenous Knowledges, theories, and perspectives on leadership, climate action, climate adaptation, resilience, and design thinking.
Through a series of online seminars, presentations, activities and the design thinking process done in the Learning Intensive, you will be exposed and discuss the interconnection between these various perspectives and being to share to the wider community via your blogs.
The expectation is that during this Learning Intensive you will be able to commit to a full day schedule of synchronous and asynchronous activities. A detailed schedule of each week of the Learning Intensive can be found below, under Learning Intensive Week 1 – Schedule.
Activities and Assessment Overview
Activities are learning activities that are required, but in of themselves are not marked (assessed). A learning activity may or may not relate directly to an Assignment which is marked (assessed) and the Assignments can all be found under the Assessment Tab of the 501 website.
- Read Week 1 readings as required in advance of each day in order to participate in discussing and analyzing various approaches, and their intersection, to climate adaptation, resilience and Indigenous world views.
- We recommend reading the How to Read a Journal Article first, as it will provide you with some tips for reading moving forward
- Review an Indigenous, feminist remix guided meditation for writing by Dr. Eve Tuck – to support you in your writing.
- Review the Learning Intensive Detailed Schedule for readings details and timing.
- Create and participate in community building activities.
- Discuss setting up for success in the course and program.
- Complete a competency profile using the Climate Adaptation Competency Framework.
- Create a team agreement.
- Create your student blog.
- Engage in an Introduction to Transdisciplinary Thinking activity.
- Engage in a design thinking activity.
- Apply a cognitive affective mapping tool as part of the discussion on complex systems.
- Contribute to the MACAL course community.
Learning Intensive Week 1 – Schedule
Access the Week 1 schedule (Google document)
This is the most current detailed scheduled for Week 1 of the Learning Intensive. Please consider this a living document as times for synchronous sessions may change dependent upon speaker availability etc.
Activity 1 Learning Intensive Week 1 – Setting up for Success
Based on the Day 1 overview presentation and your work to date in this program, reflect on what would it look like if :
- you gave 110% to this course?
- you gave 110% to your team?
- your instructor gave 110% to this course?
- you gave 110% to this program?
Review your reflections and look for common themes across your responses. What do those themes cause you to consider or change? What do you need to help you as you move forward in this course? In this program? Create a short 200 – 400 word summary (1-2 paragraphs) of your reflections and come prepared to share this when we connect on Day 2.
Activity 2 Learning Intensive Week 1 – Creating Good Questions
On Day 2 you will participate with the MACAL Indigenous Scholar in residence in a talking circle. In anticipation of this, you will each identify 2 questions that you are curious about discussing with them. These resources, How to Ask Good Questions, and the revised Bloom’s taxonomy might be helpful as you complete this activity.
Add your questions to your Team’s Google Jam Board before Day 2 first synchronous session during which there will be time for each team to briefly review all the questions and decide which 2 questions you would like to put forward as a team as part of the Indigenous discussion circle. Add these questions to the Activity 2: Creating Good Questions: Indigenous Circle Questions sign up sheet.
Resources mentioned during the Indigenous Circle can be found in resource section of course Moodle.
Activity 3 Learning Intensive Week 1 – Team Agreements
Working effectively in multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams is a core competency of climate action leadership. The work of establishing a high-functioning team is often rushed or skipped. Creating a team agreement provides an opportunity for teams to discuss core concerns regarding how they will function, what roles each team member will take, how decisions will be made etc. Team agreements make explicit your agreements about how you will work together, and provide a reference to return to when conflict arises, or when the process of working together gets bogged down or no longer feels safe for one or more members of the team.
Based on the Day 1 session on Working Effectively in Teams and the associated resources shared [1) Build Teams Right – Preparation; 2) What to include in a Team Charter; and 3) View this feedback video from MindTools, which discusses key tips on how to give feedback to your team members. Begin work on developing your team agreement with your team. Remember, this agreement is a living document and should be revisited regularly so that you as a team can decide whether it still works for you, whether you need to tweak/change it, and so that you can collectively remind yourselves of your team agreements.
See the Learning Intensive Schedule for due dates. The MACAL Team Coach will provide some feedback to you on your draft Team Agreement so that you can refine this agreement prior to final submission.When the agreement is completed it should be submitted to the appropriate drop box in Moodle.
Activity 4 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Creating your WordPress Blog Site
Building on the Introduction to Blogs & Critical Academic Blog Writing presentation in Day 2, you have now been provided with access to your own instance of WebSpace powered by WordPress for you to customize and make your own throughout the program. As you build your blog and think about your upcoming blog posts, it is important to remember that your academic blog will likely be quite different from any other blogging you have done previously or perhaps than you have explored on other people’s blogs. Academic blogging requires critical reflection and critical thinking and writing, a process of analyzing and synthesizing ideas, making links between theory and practice, and in the case of MACAL, applying a transdisciplinary lens to your thinking. This resource on Critical Academic Blogging may be helpful to you and don’t forget to explore the resources on the RRU Writing Centre as well.
In order to stay connected to each other via the course blog and your own WordPress blogs – be sure to set up your Feedly. See here for instructions. You will need to add the OPML files to your Feedly for each course.
As you get started, please remember this is not something you will complete in an evening, this is the beginning of something that will evolve throughout your program. Do keep track of any questions you have as you spend a bit of time on this tonight and bring them to the live Q&A with RRU Instructional Designer – see Learning Intensive Schedule for timing. For a full recording of the MACAL blog set up process see below:
- MACAL WordPress video
- Adding Feedly OPML files so you can connect to your cohort blogs
Activity 5 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Climate Science, Climate Change & Current State
Having reviewed the MIT Climate Primer Parts 1 and 2, in this activity you will have an opportunity to connect with a climate engagement professional to explore where we are at today with climate change, what the science is telling us, and what new insights are arising in the 2022 context of climate change and climate service.
Kari Tyler, PCIC, has shared her slides. You can find these and the list of regional, national, and global climate services resources/centers in the resources section of the course Moodle.
You can find the recording in Moodle’s Media Gallery
Activity 6 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Complex adaptive systems
In this activity you will explore complex systems thinking and complex adaptive systems. Working with a lead from the Cascade Institute, you will explore and work with strategies to map causal loops, stock and flow. This activity begins with reviewing 3 narrated powerpoints: Complex Systems Module 1: introduces complex systems thinking and approaches; Complex Systems Module 2: describes the behaviours and characteristics of complex systems; and Complex Systems Module 3 introduces feedback loops and systems diagrams. These modules can all be found in the media gallery of the CALS 501 Moodle Shell.
Each team will work with support from instructors to develop a complex systems map, and then share this map in a plenary session where we will examine the maps and have an opportunity for discussion.
Activity 7 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Writing Your Practice First Blog Post*
*NB: Please note, this is NOT the same as Assignment 1. Activity 7 is designed to get you moving on your student blog. It is required, but not marked. We will provide feedback on this blog so that when you come to Assignment 1 (which is marked) you have a better sense of the expectations.
As you develop your first blog post, it is important to remember that your academic voice and your critical academic blogging will be different than perhaps the blogging you are used to or have experienced. Here is an overview of critical academic writing and a resource on academic blogging to get you started. In addition, this resource on Critical Academic Blogging may be helpful to you and don’t forget to explore the resources on the RRU Writing Centre as well.– no doubt you will find more resources as you go.
Think of your blog posts as critical academic reflection where you are analyzing and synthesizing as you make connections between theory and practice. This resource on Critical Academic Blogging may be helpful to you and don’t forget to explore the resources on the RRU Writing Centre as well and to format your post as per APA.
Write a 300 – 500 word reflection on one of the topics we have explored to date. Consider the following questions:
- What were some surprising ideas that you encountered as you reviewed your notes and artefacts? Why were they surprising?
- Which one idea was especially intriguing to you? Why?
- Did you encounter any ideas that you especially agreed or disagreed with?
- Describe that idea in your own words and examine/discuss on what bases did you agree or disagree with the idea? Was the disagreement conceptual, philosophical, or ethical? What evidence would you use in supporting your agreement or disagreement with the idea?
Post Activity 7 blog in the Unit 1 Draft Blog Moodle Box. You are expected to incorporate APA standards for citations, formatting, and references and to back up your writing with evidence and appropriate academic literature as necessary. You are required to pay attention to grammar and clarity and to avoid colloquialisms. References are not included in the assignment word count.
See the Schedule for due dates.
Activity 8 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Trans-disciplinary Thinking
This activity extends your thinking on complex systems to explore transdisciplinary thinking. Transdisciplinary thinking underpins the CAL program. It is a process of inquiry. Mutual learning, exploration between and beyond disciplines, social responsibility, emergent knowledge, and possibility are all aspects of transdisciplinarity Reynolds (2019). In this activity we will use a google jamboard, to work in teams to apply a transdisciplinary lens to an adaptation problem, a complex problem, to explore both the opportunities and challenges of applied transdisciplinary thinking.
Activity 9 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Mapping Adaptation Jamboard
Considering the readings to date, the discussions of complexity and transdisciplinary thinking, as well as the conversation on Indigenous world views, create a drawing, map, or diagram that conveys how you believe climate adaptation intersects with Indigenous knowledge and ways of being. Take a picture of your drawing and upload it to the Climate Adaptation Mapping Jamboard
Activity 10 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Climate Adaptation Competencies (Prep for Assignment 2: Distributed Learning)
This activity involves a review of the Climate Adaptation Competency Framework which provides suggested competencies (knowledge, skills, mindsets) relevant to climate adaptation actions. This activity prepares the ground for Assignment 2 which is a distributed learning activity.
Distributed learning creates an opportunity for the cohort to extend the scope of their collective learning by having individual teams and team members contribute ideas from multiple resources. In other words, the learning is distributed across the team and the cohort, and then integrated by the cohort.
In this activity you are asked to review the Climate Adaptation Competency Framework, and watch the short animated video that explains the competency framework. After reviewing the framework, we will connect briefly to collectively determine which domain each team focuses on. And then each team will meet to determine who will focus on which competency (or competencies) in that domain for the self-directed study in Assignment 2. Following the sync session, each team member will undertake a self-directed study focused on the competency they have been assigned, using library databases, and search engines to identify and retrieve three relevant resources (readings, videos, recorded webinars, other) that can help inform an understanding of the competency and why it is relevant to climate adaptation.
See Assignment 2 for details on the assignment and how to write the summaries and deadlines. The draft summaries will be shared in class prior to the final submission deadlines and drop boxes..
Draft Summaries – Due in class Learning Intensive Week 2 – check Learning Intensive Schedule
Activity 11 – Learning Intensive Week 1 – Team Coaching
Each team will sign up for a coaching session with the MACAL team coach (sign up using Julia’s wiki in Moodle). This is an opportunity to revisit your team agreements, explore and deepen your understanding of how to effectively manage conflict