Cohort July 2023: Faculty of Arts – Juanita Sundberg, Mariam Abdelaziz, Carter Bouck-Armstrong, Valeria Pérez
Project background
The goal of this project is to redesign GEOG 495: Social Movements in the Americas to improve students’ experience of community service learning, a pedagogical model I use to examine North-South solidarity in theory and practice. The objective of GEOG 495 is to create space for students to collaborate with community partners on concrete projects that support our partners. GEOG 495 is an elective fourth-year geography seminar that I offer annually. It is cross-listed with the Latin American Studies Program (LAS) and serves as a capstone experiential learning course for geography and LAS students as well as other students from across UBC faculties, especially Land and Food Systems.
Project details
Since 2015, GEOG 495 has been collaborating with land defenders in a Q’eqchí Maya community in Guatemala; the community has faced violent threats by Canadian mining companies. At the end of GEOG 495 in Term 2 2023, students encouraged me to improve their experience of community service learning. Students identified challenges such as moving from being recipients of knowledge to being agents of change; taking ownership of their learning experience; engaging with faculty as a learner and facilitator rather than authority and purveyor of knowledge; and facing community partners as real people struggling with very difficult situations. Suggestions for change included redesigning the scaffolding of course material to better prepare students for moving from theory to practice; developing an archive of resources for the cohorts to follow; adding materials/activities to facilitate relationship building with community partners; and adopting trauma-informed pedagogical strategies to support student engagement with partners affected by violence.
Our goal is to build on the student partners’ experience of taking the seminar to examine what curricular and pedagogical strategies will better support students’ capacity to embrace the process of experiential learning. We believe students have a better understanding of the materials and activities they might need to move from studying North-South solidarity historically, to enacting solidarity in collaboration with community partners.