I love it when a random question helps me discover something new. I started listening to Seek: How curiosity can transform your life and change the world by Scott Shigeoka. This inspired a random search through the research literature for articles on curiosity and sustainability. I thought the first one I found was super interesting. … Continue reading
I am currently taking a course through Coursera from Western University in Canada. The course is Connecting for Climate Change. It uses a two-eyed seeing approach to view climate change through Western and Indigenous science lenses. I think if you are new to this idea and want to learn more about both climate change and … Continue reading
At the start of the semester, I opened it up for students to ask me questions. One of the questions was what is the hardest thing about teaching sustainability. Without missing a beat, I responded, “the despair.” I kind of joked about it afterwards, but the despair people feel is really serious and, as Bird … Continue reading
I was reviewing student work on climate change a few weeks ago and realized that it was taking a toll on my mental health. The activity in question, asks students to create, take, or find an image that conveys something about climate change. I’ve had this activity in my course for a number of semesters … Continue reading
Failing forward has become a more common term in business settings. It is used to convey a situation where failure is seen as a learning opportunity that helps achieve success. As an educator, I’ve advocated for something similar for a number of years. I believe that failing or falling is part of learning. Unfortunately, at … Continue reading
Collaborative note taking is an activity where students share the load of creating notes from a class or resource. They work in groups to identify key material, examples, etc and record these in a shared document. I’ve mainly seen this activity in relation to accessibility and inclusion. For some reason, a student may not be … Continue reading
QR codes are a type of barcode that can be read using a smartphone to, typically, open up a website where they can access more information through websites, photos, videos, etc or activities on different sites such as interactive quizzes or collaborative documents. They’ve become more popular in the last few years for a couple … Continue reading
I remember playing a game about animal adaptations and survival rates in a bio lab in my first year of university. I remember the general gist of the game and what we learned from it. It’s the only lab I remember from four years of science courses. This was a form of active learning, but … Continue reading
I distinctly remember sitting in a lecture hall listening to the professor talk. I firmly believed that I was learning. I even got home, and something from that class came up on TV, and I said, “I learned what that is today.” But, when someone asked me to explain it, I couldn’t. This is one … Continue reading
I was reminded this week of having students set up “cheat sheets” to support them during exams. Instructors will call these tools many different things, but the gist is that it is a document of a set size that students can prep in advance and are allowed to bring into an exam scenario. My favourite … Continue reading