What does it mean to be a socially just educator in the Fraser Valley?
Project lead: Vandy Britton
This FIT proposal is being implemented as a project based learning (Allen, 2015) experience for the 2018-2019 Bachelor of Education students and faculty. The inquiry, which will last the entire year of the program, is centered around answering the driving question of: What does it mean to be a socially just educator in the Fraser Valley? Faculty will be supported in this inquiry by participating in a workshop on Spirals of Inquiry (Halbert & Kaser, 2013). This approach aligns inquiry with the First Peoples' Principles of Learning. Students will be introduced to this inquiry at the beginning of their program, during their orientation, and it will be developed through course work and experiences over the year. Given the diversity of the Fraser Valley, these experiences include learning from our local communities including local Indigenous peoples, members of the Indo-Canadian community, people who identify as LGBTQ+, and people with invisible and visible disabilities. As well, atypical school sites will be visited with the desire to broaden perspectives on what it means to teach and what makes a school. Students are provided with collaboration time throughout the year in order to analyze these experiences and work towards representing their new understandings they have come in the form of workshops/presentations. In June 2019, students will organize a professional learning conference to share the results of their inquiry, inviting UFV and local community members to attend.
FIT-Final Report - Vandy Britton
Ebook - Preparing Teachers as Curriculum Designers
Published by the Canadian Association for Teacher Educators, this edited text examines Design Thinking in Teacher Education. Our chapter focuses on the creation of a redesigned program focused on developing socially just teachers. We illustrate how design thinking can enable a department to approach programmatic change that honours the stakeholders that are involved.
Agriculture Technology Outdoor Classroom
Project lead: Renee Prasad
The Agriculture Technology Department is using its FIT grant to develop an outdoor classroom. The outdoor classroom is located behind the Agriculture Centre (greenhouse and barns). The funds from the FIT grant have been used to establish a series of raised beds that are currently being used by the Seminar class as their experiential learning on designing and executing small-plot field trials. What's exciting about the outdoor classroom is that the same plots will be used by the same cohort of students in a winter semester class on sustainable agriculture practices. Additional activities in process with our FIT funds include expanding a pollinator garden that is also part of the experiential activities for the sustainable agriculture class, and establishing a weather monitoring station that will be used for our soils classes. All of these activities benefit students in both the horticulture or livestock programs, as well as those students taking the Bachelor of Agriculture Sciences.
Adoption of WebWork for Math courses
Project lead: Kseniya Garaschuk
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics initiated the switch from publisher-provided online homework systems to an open access and open source system, called WebWork, currently used by over 1000 institutions worldwide. The system gives immediate feedback to students and can be used for homework, quizzes, and diagnostics. It provides instructors with real-time data on student progress they can use to better tailor their lectures to students’ needs. WebWork’s flexibility and freedom from publishers allows instructors to use other open access resources to create more customized and appropriate content at low to no cost to the students. In Fall 2018, WebWork was fully integrated into 11 sections of first-year math courses, with total enrolment of over 300 students. Set up as a sustained initiative, we will be using WebWork in all of our science stream first-year courses; with potential future additions of second-year math and statistics courses.
FIT-Final Report - Kseniya Garaschuk