Plenary presentation, Slide 1.

Slide 2.

Slide 3.

This week’s plenary presentation was definitely a success! We hope the majority of LFS 350 students managed to get an idea of what our CBEL process consisted of – it was quite a challenge to convey it in such a short time. We urge anyone with questions to leave a comment on our blog and we will get a response to you as soon as possible!

Now that we have set definite headings to organize each of our plant posts, this week was mainly spent finalizing all of them, and tidying the database for consistency and organization. We have begun editing to ensure that there is identical formatting (bullet points, bold letters, italicized words, etc.) used throughout each page. Now every plant also has an accompanying image, most of which were obtained from Wiki Commons to avoid copyright issues, although of course they must be credited properly according to Creative Commons copyrights. Currently we are looking for an appropriate disclaimer to include, hopefully at the top of the database, warning readers to use caution or consult a doctor before ingesting any of the plants for themselves. We’re having trouble finding a way to integrate this into the website in an unobtrusive but consistent way. Although this warning is a necessity, it is yet another challenge for us to word the disclaimer in such a way that it does not discredit Aboriginal knowledge. As we have seen throughout the term and mentioned in previous blog posts, when working with Aboriginal knowledge we’ve made a conscious (and not always easy!) effort to be aware of the language that we choose to use (or avoid).

As we start to wrap up, we are looking around and realizing that all of us are grateful to have had this opportunity to work with such an enthusiastic group of people, not to mention the chance to research Aboriginal plants that we may have not been familiar with previously. Despite not having a typical community visit, the events we attended such as the pipe-mix workshop, the FeastBowl, and the Botanical Garden during Applefest, are our fondest memories.

Next week we will discuss our final recommendations. We are finding ourselves repeating that our greatest regret has been that we did not have sufficient time to obtain Ethics Board approval to interview Aboriginal community members and include first-hand information in our database. This would have required more involvement from the community, culture sharing, and building of relationships that would have benefited the database, the LFS students, and the community members. Furthermore, the current accessibility of the database is restricted to those involved with the project, or other LFS students and faculty. Although there may be reasoning for this that we are unaware of, the inaccessibility of this information to Aboriginal community members in general is problematic since the information that we have gathered originally came from those communities themselves. It also goes against what we have learned throughout this course, which emphasizes working with local community members.

Next week marks our final week of class, during which we will have our final presentation in our breakout rooms. A few of our team members have been doing the bulk of the organizing of the presentation, while Saki prepares the Prezi that will be accompanying our presentation before she has to leave for Japan. To reduce our upcoming final exam stress, we have also started to type our final project paper.

EDIT: Check out the Digital Resources page for our final Prezi!