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Welcome to CALS 501-Leading Climate Action in Society Part 1

Welcome

Welcome to CAL501. This course, and the complimentary course for year 2, CAL 601, weave a coherent thread through the program to optimize the cohort learning. The course includes a 2 week Learning Intensive and four additional seminar style units that occur in between the other first year courses (check the course schedule in Moodle for exact dates).

In this course, you will be examining current thought leaders working in research or practice on concepts related to climate change, climate adaptation and mitigation, climate action leadership, and resilience. Throughout CAL 501, faculty and other knowledge holders from multiple relevant disciplinary areas and with experience and knowledge of indigenous world views will introduce and discuss key theories, debates, policies and contemporary developments in the field of climate action in order to help you situate and contextualize your learning. The structure of this year-long course begins with a 10-day Learning Intensive focused on introducing Western and Traditional Indigenous Knowledges, theories, and perspectives on leadership, climate change and climate action and design thinking.

The Learning Intensive is followed by a series of online units or seminars which build on the program course work done to date and take up subsequent aspects of the design thinking process introduced during the initial Learning Intensive as you work towards completing the design challenge. These online units insert between each of the other courses in the program over a five day timeframe and have pre and post components which provide an opportunity for you to reflect and integrate ongoing coursework and readings into the CAL 501 design challenge. The open learning outputs of CAL 501/601 over the 2-year program may include student- produced resources and reflections and community based projects, and outputs associated with students’ selection of thesis, internship, or course-based tracks. The CALS 501 Learning Intensive focuses on

Process

  • Program & Competencies Overview
  • Cohort & team building
  • Introduction to Faculty

Approaches to learning

  • Open Learning
  • Critical, Academic, and Transdisciplinary Thinking
  • Two Eyed Seeing or the Two Row Wampum Belt
  • Indigenous – embodied, place-based learning

Content

  • Climate Change Adaptation & Mitigation: concepts and current challenges
  • Complex adaptive systems
  • Climate Action Leadership
  • The role of policy in change making
  • Resilience

Outcomes

  1. Introducing and support your familiarization with the MACAL learning ecosystem
  2. Providing practice with critical, reflexive, trans-disciplinary, and embodied/holistic thinking
  3. Developing an understanding of critical reflection and personal reflection, and working effectively in teams
  4. Developing some initial comfort applying climate action concepts to complex challenges
  5. Introduction to climate action competencies and the application of a career-management and portfolio learning approach in the program
  6. Initial foundation in core topic areas: climate adaptation and mitigation, complexity science, and the role of policy in affecting climate action

 

Stay Connected

  • To the program through the MACAL Program website where you will find updates on events, links to careers/job postings, MACAL related webinars and blogs, and program resources.
  • Instructor email addresses can be found in Moodle.