Introduction
This course, CALS 691, is focused on getting underway with making your career in Climate Action, and optimizing how you will navigate the “portfolio option” in the MACAL program., which involves optimizing your choices in both internship and elective courses experience forthcoming.
This course is all about you – it’s about practicing the telling-of-your-story through the lens of climate action; building your climate action network, which helps inform your story and taps into all kinds of expertise and opportunity; and finally doing a mock interview to practice telling your story for a potential job competition.
By the end of this course, your practitioner portfolio will showcase your passions, competencies, existing career and educational expertise, future aspirations, and your expanding climate action network. Your portfolio will begin to showcase your interactions in both professional climate action and local climate activism undertaken through community endeavors. We really can’t be climate action leaders unless we are acting both locally (in the community where we live) and professionally (in a sector and/or discipline).
This course is built as a “learning-by-doing” experience, drawing from learning theory-and-practice that includes theory-practitioners such as John Dewey (pragmatism via a hands-on approach), Lev Vygotsky (sociocultural theory of cognitive development) and others. Learning-by-doing has important theoretical frameworks and knowing more about this helps us to tap into the layers of meaning-making that are implicit in learning-by-doing. You will get a chance to discover and reference “learning-and-doing” theories in work you undertake in this course.
Rather than having the instructor identify readings that support each stage of the work we will be undertaking, each of you will source a reading to become exposed to the theories embedded in this course. We will have periodic asynchronous discussions in Moodle to share what we are each discovering about the theoretical underpinnings of our own “learning-by-doing”. These will be scheduled as we advance along the trajectory of the course.
Why does this learning-by-doing approach matter? Because we practice learning-by-doing throughout our lives, and certainly not just in a graduate program at Royal Roads University. Learning-by-doing is an active learning methodology where concepts are realized through actions. Learning-by-doing helps us embed new knowledge into memory. By developing a critical thinking approach to our personal learning-by-doing journey, we can better navigate the challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, and mistakes, and develop our own conclusions and wisdom by analyzing our practice in a spirit of continuous improvement.
Instructor-student coaching
Throughout the 10-week journey of this course, the instructor will provide up to 3 X 45-min one-on-one coaching sessions for individuals who have not yet determined their pathway for the MACAL Portfolio option.
How will we undertake a learning-by-doing journey as we design and build our practitioner portfolios?
Through several practices…..
- Reflection, on who we are, the competencies we had before MACAL, the new knowledge and competencies we have developed over the past several months through MACAL, and the sense-making of developing a practitioner portfolio to realize and expand climate action career goals.
Sharing our portfolio as reflective practice learnings to prompt new ideas within us and amongst us
- Discovery – the instructor is not the architect of a curated reading list for this course – instead, we will each do our own discovery, on finding readings that illuminate theories and practices within this course, and the climate action priorities we are interested in pursuing for the portfolio option of MACAL. We will write short blog post “essays” to contribute to our practitioner portfolio, artefacts from our discovery/desktop research, which add value to our portfolio by citing peer-reviewed and grey literature texts.
- Concept Mapping – in this course, we will be doing lots of concept mapping – about who we are, what’s happening re: climate action in our lived community, where our interests lie in the field of climate action, our unique competencies that be applied to this field, and our theory of change. By undertaking this mapping, we will have a targeted way to improve our existing and emergent networks, helping to learn-and-do-and-discover meaningful professional opportunities.
Sharing our increasingly rich concept maps that will form the basis of our portfolio, and prompt new ideas amongst us; the maps will begin to reveal a potential trajectory of future career focus, and it becomes a design document to align and build our practitioner portfolio. Our concept maps also become a specification to help guide the target networks we need to establish.
- Writing short pieces in blogs, that showcase our interests, competencies and knowledge. The act of writing will help take each of us into the world. By writing, we will be getting ideas focused and well-ordered, with narratives that have clarity, all intended to build a professional portfolio and be ready for job interview questions. We need to practice our unique stories through a crisp narrative and/or logical presentation so story examples can be surfaced quickly in response to questions in a job interview. We will build out our portfolio artefacts through writing blog posts.
Sharing our writing improves how we communicate, and it prompts new ideas amongst us.
- Establishing meaningful connections, though social media (primarily LinkedIn) to learn through our networking, where we will find newsworthy postings, webinar/event promotions, and research outcomes and scholarship. By undertaking the building of our own personal network (PLN), we will develop an applied understanding of the theory and practice of shared cognition and trust networks.
Sharing who we are networking with advances each others’ networks.
- Pitching – getting focused on aligning our talents to pitch for job opportunities by monitoring Indeed and other job boards. We will scour job boards and choose 3 positions for which we might want to apply; then we will update our CV, write a one-page cover letter for our favourite job opportunity; and then perform a practice interview with a “panel of our course-mates” where we will have an opportunity to tell our story and showcase out practitioner portfolio.
NOTE #1: The instructor will invite you to be a LinkedIn connection early in the course (by Week 2) so if you have a bit of set-up or tidying up to do with your profile, please get underway. Don’t worry about making it awesome since this course is a journey to get your LinkedIn profile richer than its current state.
NOTE #2: The ”pitching for a job opportunity” activity takes place in Weeks 7-9. But it would be a good idea to start watching Indeed and LinkedIn for job postings earlier than Week 7.
Outcomes
2.1 Examine personal beliefs and worldview with a critical lens to develop solutions, strategies, and recommendations
4.1 Discern and describe their personal leadership style, strengths, and limitations
4.2 Recognize their own multiple identities, experiences, and biases and how these affect their ability to lead
4.3 Facilitate multi- and trans-disciplinary discussions and collaboration
5.3 Mobilize knowledge to share, reuse and contribute to the commons
6.1 Monitor and reflect on self-awareness, self-confidence, and perseverance to improve professional practice and policies
6.2 Adapt in positive and resilient ways to changing circumstances and in working with ill-structured problems
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 twitter;
- subscribe to the Resilience by Design YouTube channel
- Instructor email addresses can be found in Moodle.