Post-Practicum Reflection, CONS 101,  University of British Columbia, 11/16/21

Over the summer my advisor Dr. Hinch helped me line up a guest lesson in CONS 101. He has been solicited to speak on salmon conservation and management issues to this class in the past, and thought this would be a good opportunity for me. I arranged the specifics of the lesson with Dr. David Bunn, a jolly South African professor who just took over the course after moving to Vancouver with his partner. He was fun to work with while discussing ideas for the lesson, and I enjoyed observing both him and Dr. Cole Burton teach lessons in the leadup to mine in order to get a feel for the class.

CONS 101 is a high enrollment course with 250 students. Many of those are from the Faculty of Forestry, but many others take the course as a non-majors elective. The class meets for 90 minutes in a large, steep lecture hall and streams video and slides asynchronously to complement the synchronous lecture. It seemed that synchronous attendance was typically ~80-100 students, but this still made for a large contingent in person. The size of the class and room, diversity of student majors, asynchronous streaming, and wearing a microphone while teaching were all new experiences for me.

Dr. Bunn’s course syllabus and schedule were structured by the following categories: grand global challenges, conservation frameworks, case studies / local instances, and ways forward: hope. I decided to generally match these themes and progression with the design of my lesson on addressing salmon sustainability challenges in British Columbia. I included some grand global challenges such as broad climate change impacts and the effects of hatchery releases by other north Pacific countries, but spent the majority of the time discussing local issues. Dr. Bunn was pleased about this because my lesson was one of few in the course addressing local conservation challenges.

Observing Dr. Bunn’s and Dr. Burton’s lessons helped me develop the idea for the “bridge-in” or “hook” for the lesson to grab attention. I haven’t been consistent with including these despite the Foundations of Pedagogy lesson design training, but they both employed effective ones that reminded me of their importance. Deciding how to approach this took more thought than any other single aspect of the lesson design, but eventually I came up with an attention-grabbing paradox that helped frame the lesson. I first presented a poll showing that declining wild salmon stocks was the #1 issue of concern identified by a poll of BC citizens this summer. On the next slide, I juxtaposed this with a headline from research showing that there is a higher quantity of Pacific salmon now than at any other time in modern history. So what gives? This mini-discussion was the first of several chances for the students to engage and provided a nice hook as well as a bridge to global and local challenges and how they are linked.

I included many links to Indigenous knowledge and practice, similar to my other practicum lessons involving fisheries resources. Some of the motivation for this was driven by transformative learning theory, and attempting to influence students’ frame of reference toward the role that Indigenous title and expertise could/should play in resource management. This was reinforced throughout the lesson by several case study examples and discussion points.

One disciplinary behavior I incorporated into the lesson is prioritizing goals for conservation and management efforts. Before getting into some examples from a litany of issues facing salmon, I showed the students the reflection/discussion questions we would tackle at the end, and one of them asked which issues they would prioritize and why. This way, they had the question in mind and could weigh each issue as they went along. The other question asked if there are public policy changes they might advocate for to benefit salmon. This was to highlight interdisciplinary forces in the bigger societal picture that affect salmon management decisions and conservation outcomes. I tried to include many of these nuanced considerations throughout the lesson in order to guide students toward seeing connections, an important concept I noted from the CATL session of “bringing everything together”. At the end, students were given several minutes to reflect and write their answers to these questions and then we finished with a class discussion in which many students shared thoughts with their peers.

Overall I am proud of how the lesson went. I think it was well structured and struck a nice balance between breadth and depth of issues covered. Regular opportunities for students to engage were successful in sparking a lot of great student discussion. Feedback from Dr. Bunn and the students generally concurred that the content and discussion in the lesson was highly effective. This was not an easy lesson to pull off logistically, and the physical environment in particular was a bit intimidating. Unfortunately I was not relaxed, and was concerned about properly presenting the nuances of the many issues facing salmon. Due to those two factors, I was not able to focus as much as I would have liked on an exciting delivery, and this was pointed out in some student feedback and comments from Dr. Bunn. I am confident that this experience will help tremendously in a more relaxed and dynamic delivery next time I am facing a complex subject with a large class. I’m very glad I gained this experience!