Welcome
CALS 692 is designed to engage you in a personal course of study (COS) as part of your portfolio learning. This course supports you as a leaders of your own learning. The focus of the COS you design, should be relevant to your specific learning needs and professional goals within the field of climate action leadership. It should also demonstrate a consideration of not only what you want to learn, but how you want to learn and how this is grounded in either/both Western and Indigenous learning styles and epistemologies The types of opportunities each student will create will vary and can include mentored learning (i.e., experiential directed studies), working on a community or organizational project, critical reflection on prior learning, learning through participation in MOOCS, Webinars, and other informal or less formal learning opportunities. In each case you will be called on to critically reflect on these experiences in order to synthesize and integrate the learning and demonstrate the competencies acquired through that learning by producing knowledge products (e.g., reflective blogs, journal articles, reports, digital stories).
In this course you will:
- Define and design your independent COS. Please note that if you intend to collect and make use of primary data (e.g., holding an interview, analyzing data, and including results in your course of study deliverable/s) you will need to apply for and receive ethics approval prior to any such research activity.
- Establish key learning goals and learning outputs.
- Obtain approval from faculty and program head for your proposed independent course of study agreement (COSA).
- Pursue the agreed upon course of study.
- Support peers in their learning.
- Evaluate your learning and participation.
CALS 692 credit load will vary from student to student, ranging from 3-9 credits.
Community of Practice
This course includes a learning component in which you will work online with other self-directed learners, sharing knowledge, and receiving and giving peer support and feedback. Your role in this regard is to engage in and contribute to a student-led Learning Community of Practice (CoP). The purpose of this CoP is to provide peer support and feedback as you work independently on your COS. The Individualized nature of the learning in this course provides you with flexibility in the design of the learning activities and the outputs to meet your personal and professional learning and career goals. The CoP provides you with opportunities to check in periodically with each other, contributing to some social learning in what is largely an individual learning environment.
Faculty Advisor
The role of the faculty advisor overseeing this course is twofold: to support you in creating a structure for self-managing your own learning and contributing to the learning of others through the CoP. The faculty advisor will also work with you to assess and assign a credit load to the learning activities, and review and assess the agreed upon learning outputs to grant credit. The faculty advisor will not lead the CoP but will serve as a sounding board and contribute to the CoP with their own reflections.
Outcomes
1.3 Examine the role of reconciliation as a component of climate adaptation and low carbon resiliency
2.2 Communicate effectively using coherent, synthesized, well organized, edited, logical and fully supported work
2.4 Apply transdisciplinary thinking to complex climate-related problems and issues
3.1 Ask relevant, probing, and detailed questions to deepen knowledge that informs arguments, choices, and practices
5.3 Mobilize knowledge to share, reuse and contribute to the commons
6.3 Apply lateral, creative, and future thinking to the field of climate adaptation
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.