EDST 565A: Special Course in Subject Matter Field:
Educational Environments
Summer 1, 2021 (May 10-June 17)
Course Description
“Educational Environments” is an elective graduate course open to all Master’s and Doctoral students at UBC. Educational environments are considered broadly, to include formal as well as informal spaces and places for learning. There are no prerequisites. Educational Environments invites students to spatially contextualize specific educational settings through various lenses, such as Indigenous perspectives on land-based education, critical place inquiry, ecological criticism, critical cartography, spatial theory, digital environments, critical theories of security and surveillance, environmental humanities, affective geographies, space/place and critical race theory, critical disability studies, decolonization, and critical spatial perspectives on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Course Objectives
The course aims to connect pertinent scholarship on the topic of educational environments to relevant learning contexts from the students’ perspectives. The course is designed to:
- Introduce or expand awareness of various bodies of scholarship and modes of inquiry for the study of educational environments.
- Offer opportunities for students to develop their own space/place-specific inquiry related to an educational environment of their choice.
- Showcase student learning through their online portfolios, emphasizing opportunities for creative expression, analysis, and generative scholarship.
Course Mode
UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT) developed five recommendations for faculty in response to student experiences with online learning in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic: (https://ctlt.ubc.ca/resources/student-experience-of-online-learning-recommendations-for-faculty/ ). This course follows CTLT’s recommendations, with limited synchronous and expanded self-paced asynchronous learning, student-instructor and peer-to-peer interaction, modification in teaching practices, student-focused Canvas organization, and faculty training/support (thanks to our Learning Designers, Helen DeWaard and Shur Lim, from the Faculty of Education’s Educational Technology Support group!). The course is organized into three, stand-alone modules that can be navigated consecutively or concurrently, with peer feedback and instructor feedback throughout, connected by student-created portfolios. Pre-recorded videos and audio presentations (podcast-style) created by the instructor will serve as guides to each module. On selected Tuesdays the course will meet via Zoom for an interactive session to discuss ideas and responses to the course materials. Live Zoom sessions will be held on the following dates: Tuesday, May 11, 5:30-6:30pm; Tuesday, May 18, 5:30-6:30pm; and Tuesday, June 8, 5:30-6:30pm.
Course History
An earlier iteration of this course was taught in Summer 2017, under the course heading EDST 513, Campus Environments: https://blogs.ubc.ca/campusenvironments/