Introduces students to a design thinking methodology, including processes and practices which encourage creative thinking and innovation in trying to solve social challenges. Students will apply a human-centered approach to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. Provides students with a better understanding and practice of how to incorporate stakeholder and consumer insights in rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective social innovation solutions.
Author: Darija
DEMN502: Foundations in Disaster and Emergency Management
Examines the socially constructed relationship between hazards and disasters. Introduces the key stakeholders involved with emergency management, and explores the historic and contemporary principles, policies, and legal frameworks guiding the field of practice. Analyzes different paradigms for conceptualizing the practice of disaster and emergency management in Canadian and international contexts.
DEMN503: Facilitation, Coordination and Decision-Making in Multi-Stakeholder Environments
Analyzes contextual factors that need to be taken into account by emergency managers when developing hazard mitigation strategies, and preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters. Explores competencies required to effectively engage stakeholders and take into account the diversity of perspectives present in the multi-sector, multi-agency, collaborative environments that characterize disaster and emergency management in the 21st century. Examines characteristics and processes of ethical decision-making.
Pre-Requisites:
DEMN504: Human Dimensions of Disasters
Explore the ethical, social, cultural, psychosocial and behavioral implications of disasters. Examine the influence and interaction of human, event, and contextual characteristics and their contributions to social vulnerability and resilience, decision-making, and leadership.
Pre-Requisites:
DEMN552: Hazard and Disaster Risk Management
Examines the changing hazard landscape in the 21st century and explores contemporary approaches to disaster risk management. Explores hazard, vulnerability and resilience in greater depth and analyzes risk management frameworks that structure the assessment of hazards and their impacts on contemporary society. Uses research literature to examine best practices in minimizing residual risk by proactively managing risk, with particular attention given to the preparedness dimension of emergency management practice.
Pre-Requisites:
DEMN553: Disaster Response and Sustainable Recovery
Analyzes response to and recovery from disaster events across different social units (e.g., household, organizations, communities). Examines paradigms, theories and models that aid in the understanding of disaster response and sustainable recovery. Explores the ways in which life in a digital world is influencing and shaping response and recovery practices. Examines what is empirically known about disaster response and sustainable recovery and appraises the implications of this knowledge for advancing response and recovery practice.
Pre-Requisites:
EECO500: Developing Environmental Understandings
Explores how personal environmental identities, values, beliefs, feelings and attitudes are formed. Considers how environmental education and communication programs approach building a sense of place and wonder; offer direct experience in the environment; help develop responsible environmental behaviours; and build the capacity to implement meaningful environmental actions that resolve environmental problems and issues. Students examine the historic evolution of environmental education and communications, and various theories of environmental learning and literacy.
Co-Requisites:
EECO503: Foundations for Environmental Communication
Explores the intersection of communication and the environment in various mediated and unmediated forms. Introduces a range of significant interpersonal, group/organizational and mass communication theories to environmental communication. Examines those theories from the context of their practical contributions to environmental communications and our understanding of how we form notions about the environment. Highlights the essential role communication has played in getting us to our current environmental situation and the role communication might play in helping us to change course.
EECO504: Systems Perspectives
Explores the value and implications of engaging in systems thinking for environmental education and communication. Investigates what systems thinking means, and what systems thinking entails through reviewing, engaging with, and applying key concepts and common approaches that are used in systems work. Considers the source and nature of various perspectives on systems, and reveals how different approaches lead to different understanding and thus different action. Distinguishes the opportunities and constraints of acting responsibly in a complex systems world.
EECO508: Learning Theory and Program Design
Cultivates increasingly sophisticated understanding of learning processes. The search for meaning through the active elaboration of our meaning system – one possible definition of learning – seems to be at the core of being human. As a result of this course, educators will be better able to design effective programs and products. Instructional design will be seen as an intentional process to create learning environments that support effective and efficient learning and instruction appropriate to particular bodies of skill and content and in specific contexts. With support and critique from classmates, students will design or re-design an instructional module they use or plan to use in their environmental education work.
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