Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Forestry – Andrew Almas, Alexander Martin, Kaysha Reeder
Project background
UFOR 402: “Urban Forestry Administration, Policy and Law,” is a core, fourth-year course in the Bachelor of Urban Forestry (BUF) program. Students move through the program as a cohort taking core courses together. The course brings knowledge from diverse disciplines together to understand, interpret, and operationalize various policies related to the human dimensions of urban trees globally. UFOR 402 meets for two 90-minute classes per week. In the past, it has included readings, activities, lectures, in-class problem solving and various guest speakers. Students gain an understanding of the interactions between urban forestry governance structures within the urban environment, and then translate this knowledge into practice and critiquing norms of practice.
The goal of this project is to identify and ameliorate barriers to success. This will include addressing barriers to success recently identified by evaluations from students:
- The course lacks in practical application, is too theoretical and unclear about how theory applies in a job setting.
- The scope and scale of the course is unclear, often repeating material learned in other core BUF courses, while lacking higher level learning tiers (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy 1956), such as synthesis and evaluation of the learning materials.
Project details
This faculty-student partnership for course redesign comes at an ideal timing for UFOR 402 because:
- UFOR 402 has undergone two teaching changes in the past few years, and will be taught in January 2023 for the first time by Andrew Almas, who has not taught this subject in the past.
- No course planning has occurred for this new iteration of UFOR 402, allowing the time and space for the faculty-student partnership to truly demonstrate shared decision-making responsibilities as per Arnstein’s (1969) Ladder of Participation, defining ‘partnership’, rather than ‘tokenism’ or other less powerful/involved/collaborative forms of participation.
- We have student expertise and experience with previous iterations of the course for insight and connections with the diverse student cohort, and can gather input to identify specific barriers and generate creative solutions in a way that faculty cannot.
- Equity, diversity, and inclusion are one of UBCs strategic priorities and redesigning this course through that lens is of interest given that the subject matter is traditionally framed in a Western cultural perspective based on British and Common Law frameworks.
- Understanding governance models and approaches is a learning outcome for this course. A faculty-student partnership in which students have a larger role in the planning and delivery of this course provides an opportunity for implementing/demonstrating a model in which learning, which is actively constructed from the interactions between peoples’ ideas and experiences. Rather than telling students how things work, knowledge acquisition and retention is enhanced by guiding them (Von Glasersfeld 1998), showing an alternate model of class governance in action through which they make their own discoveries and construct their own conceptual frameworks.
- The redesign of UFOR 402 can build upon the recent partnership in UFOR 300, which incorporates partnership learning communities and promotes their use in other courses in the urban forestry curriculum.