Familiarizes students with the history of the concept of sustainable development and its core principles. Discusses innovations happening on the ground in Canadian communities. Grounded in systems thinking, emphasis will be placed on new models of collaboration, integrated decision-making and planning, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Examines key issues to provide a deep understanding of the complexities of solving and implementing such ‘messy, wicked’ problems. Emphasis will be placed on ‘making a difference through research’, learning and using modern research dissemination tools including social media channels.
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.
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.
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.
Explores the applicability of environmental sustainability concepts and principles in developing a sustainable society. Highlights the tensions that exist between our various value systems and how underlying root metaphors influence attitudes towards the environment. Investigates how environmental sustainability concepts and principles inform the development of a sustainable society from the perspectives of community, business, governance, and leadership as well as how they influence the measurement of performance and outcomes will establish the overall philosophical orientation of the program, and helps each student better define for him or herself what sustainable development means, and why it is such an important concept today.
This course is a foundational introductory, interdisciplinary course about the nature, causes, and impacts of climate change. Resources will include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Canadian and BC government reports as well as significant current journal articles and publications. Impacts covered will include warming, sea level rise, melting of permafrost, and altered distribution and migration patterns as well as impacts on livelihoods and cultures. It will combine perspectives from geology, biology, sociology, and modelling.
This course reviews and evaluates existing policy instruments and governance institutions designed to address climate change (both adaptation and mitigation) now and in the future: e.g. COP process including COP 21- the Paris Agreement, UNFCCC, local, regional and national policies in Canada and elsewhere. It will include human dimensions of such policies and governance such as gender, equity, indigenous rights, communication and others.
This experiential course enables students to work with their own or other organizations addressing climate change. It represents the transdisciplinary part of the course as it promotes working with and incorporating other ways of knowing and non-academic organizations. Students will arrange placements with First Nations, Government Departments at any level, Business and Industry and Civil Society, or NGOs. They will work with a supervisor in that organization as well as an academic advisor to enable them to wrest meaning from the experience and add value to the organization.