Reposted from the CTLT Spring Institute program.

Knowing the Land Beneath Our Feet: Integrating a digital Indigenous walking tour into UBC classrooms

Event Details:

May 26, 2015
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Lillooet Room 301
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In this talk, we share our experiences piloting a digital Indigenous walking tour with over 300 undergraduate students. Knowing the Land Beneath Our Feet (KLBF) is a digitally-augmented walking tour of the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus that is being researched and designed by Spencer Lindsay and Sarah Ling with advisors from academic and Indigenous communities on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people. [1]

Using Quick Response Codes and Global Positioning Systems built into cellphones, KLBF augments the UBC environment with stories, videos, photographs and text drawn from archives and interviews with community members and elders. While the tour is designed for a range of users, this presentation focuses on students’ learning experiences. UBC Vancouver is marked by a longstanding engagement with Indigenous communities and cultures, but this continued presence remains invisible to the majority of students. Through place-based knowledge, KLBF’s pedagogical design provides students the opportunity to connect their learning to local contexts and make their classroom experiences more relevant to their everyday lives. Students engage with campus sites that tell stories, encode values, and point the way to respectful relationships with Musqueam and other First Nations. We share challenges and successes in how we integrated this technology into our course designs, and blended in-class and beyond-the-classroom learning environments. More broadly, we reflect on the ways that technologies and place-based learning environments can contribute to deeper appreciation and understandings of Indigenous histories and issues in colonized and contested spaces. 

[1] For more information, please see here

Presenters:

Sarah Ling, Project Manager and Faculty Liaison, MA Candidate, Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program

Spencer Lindsay, Research and Public Relations, MA, School of Community and Regional Planning

Dr. Daniel Heath Justice, First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program Chair, Associate Professor, FNIS and English

Dr. David Gaertner, First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor

Dr. Kathryn Grafton, Coordinated Arts Program Co-Chair and Instructor, Department of English

Dr. Evan Mauro, Coordinated Arts Program Sessional Lecturer and Stream Leader

Amy Perreault, Strategist, Aboriginal Initiatives, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology

 

This function is part of the CTLT Spring Institute.  This two day long initiative features events that highlight and promote Inquiry-based Experiential Learning through interactive workshops, open lectures and discussion sessions.  Workshops and sessions this year will focus on the process, supports for and evaluation of Experiential learning.  For more information, please click here