Cohort March 2022: Faculty of Forestry – Susan Day, Finn Koepf, Han Yan
Project background
UFOR 300, Arboriculture Principles and Practice, is a core, 3rd-year course for students in the Bachelor of Urban Forestry (BUF) program. Students move through the program as a cohort and take core courses together. The course brings knowledge from diverse disciplines together to understand, interpret, and steward the life of an urban tree from seed to end-of-life. UFOR 300 meets six hours a week and includes online readings, activities, and lectures as well as in-class problem-solving and field exercises. Students gain an in-depth understanding of the interactions of trees with the urban environment, and translate this knowledge into professional practice where they must learn, practice, and critique norms of practice. Many students thrive in this environment, but students have diverse backgrounds, interests, and abilities.
Our faculty-student team has identified two areas that create barriers to success:
- How online content connects to class activities and field exercises, and
- Gaps in the laddering of field skills. Broad student input is needed to further articulate these barriers and create novel solutions.
Focus Area 1
For each module, there is a series of online readings, videos, practice quizzes, and other materials followed by a graded quiz. These are presented with learning outcomes, study questions, and materials to give additional context. Some materials are quite challenging and students’ evaluations of teaching indicate the workload is very heavy. Yet, many students report feeling unprepared for class activities or having difficulty making connections between these online assignments and the objectives of field exercises.
We propose to engage a diverse array of students from the degree cohort who can identify specific module features that prepare them for class, specific features that create barriers, and devise solutions to overcome these barriers.
Focus Area 2
This course is one of several in the Urban Forestry curriculum with a heavy field exercise component. A learning outcome of this course is that students will develop a suite of skills that they can bring together to assess, analyse, and create recommendations for urban forests and trees. Some students have difficulty implementing knowledge and skills from earlier parts of the term into later parts. For example, tree condition assessment is taught early in the term and is a foundational skill. In later exercises, students must assess tree conditions and use these for tree protection recommendations. Student assignments later in the term, however, indicate that they are not always successful in assessing the condition of trees in different contexts and interpreting the implications of tree conditions for protection recommendations.
We would like to identify the field skills that students most value and develop a strategy with students for all students to feel confident in their expertise as they build skills and learn how to use these in different contexts to synthesize complex information.
Finally, we envision the activities proposed for the teaching and adaptation phase of our plan as an avenue to permanently incorporate partnership learning communities in this course and promote their use in other courses in the urban forestry curriculum.