Skip to content

Welcome to CALS 602-Conducting Climate Action Research

Chiefs’ Traditional Welcome
Welcome and Overview for Conducting Climate Action Research

Welcome

Welcome to Conducting Climate Action Research (CALS 602). This second-year course builds on your growing understanding of climate action developed over your first year and helps you to develop important skills to propose and evaluate climate action research and projects. Over 10 weeks you will focus on three key topics to better orient your thinking (weeks 1-3), know your purpose (weeks 4-6), and write a convincing research or project proposal (weeks 7-10). Over weeks 1-8 you will write or record field notes of your experiences as a participant observer, documenting your experiences and observations while developing as a climate action leader.

Do you want to evaluate information to support climate action or aim to propose new research adding to our current knowledge? This course can enable you to select credible sources, help you understand where and how research can be developed and applied, and strengthen your communications skills to gain support for climate action projects.

Climate action involves people who come to understandings and decisions from many different perspectives or worldview. A person’s worldview is shaped by beliefs and attitudes that influence ways of thinking about and understanding life. In the first unit of this course, you will explore and identify worldviews that inform research on climate action and consider their influence on what research methodologies and methods are appropriate to your questions.  

Questions shape answers so we need to know the aim or purpose of climate action research and projects to understand how to best apply their outcomes. In the second unit, you will focus on key choices that shape the design of a research process so that its outcomes are credible, ethical, and applicable. This unit starts with reviewing published research and build skills in accessing and assessing literature. You will develop skills and experience in clarifying a project purpose and developing a guiding question, identifying a suitable methodology that supports the question you have chosen, and evaluate what range of data collection and analysis methods support exploring and answering that question.

In the final unit of this course, you will focus on writing a proposal for a climate action project that addresses a research or leadership question. Your goal will be to develop a complete, consistent, and actionable draft project proposal. We will identify and consider the criteria for evaluating a research proposal, review successfully completed and communicated projects and hear from a project funder about how to overcome some common errors and omissions.

CALS 602 focuses on

Content

  • Skills and abilities needed to conducting climate action research
  • How worldviews influence research methodologies and methods
  • What defines focused and answerable research questions
  • Credible and persuasive proposals for climate action research and projects
  • Qualities of a credible, ethical, and applicable research process

Outcomes

  • Experience in critical, reflexive, trans-disciplinary, and embodied/holistic thinking
  • Understanding processes of literature review, participant observation, data collection and reflection in climate action research and projects
  • Ability to identify and discuss diverse worldviews and their influence on designing climate action research and projects
  • Experience in evaluating and preparing project proposals to develop new knowledge
  • Initial foundation in core topic areas: research methods to inform climate action, interdependence between worldviews, research questions and methodologies, and elements of effective project proposals.

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.
  • #RRUMACAL on X (Twitter);
  • subscribe to the Resilience by Design YouTube channel
  • Instructor email addresses can be found in Moodle.

Share this