Enhancing Reconciliation Curriculum Tools to Create Open Educational Resources for Post-Secondary Science and Engineering Programs
Principal Investigator
Pamela Wolf
Faculty
Applied Science
Funding Year
2021
Project Summary
The proposed project is to adapt and enhance a suite of curriculum resources, assignments, grading rubrics, lectures, and training slides as an Open Educational Resource in order to help support post- secondary instructors in science and engineering in incorporating reconciliation into their classrooms. Developed in partnership with Curtis Rattray, a member of the Tahltan, the package consists of three modules and competencies that are aimed to facilitate respectful dialogue around decolonization, promote deeper appreciation of Indigenous epistemologies and cultures, and further the understanding of the role engineers and scientists have in reconciliation. The curriculum suite was designed in careful and considerate collaboration to be freely, openly, and widely shared to assist the traditionally colonial spaces of post-secondary classrooms to begin the process of decolonization, and equip students to incorporate reconciliation into their behaviours, careers, and thought processes. The content was thoughtfully crafted with Curtis Rattray to ensure that the traditional knowledge and epistemologies of Indigenous peoples are presented in an authentic and non-exploitative manner that both up-lifts and respects Indigenous cultures. Having already been adopted by the majority of departments in the Faculty of Engineering at UBCV, the growing interest for reconciliation curriculum resources has been expressed by UBC Skylight: Science Centre for Learning and Teaching, as well as institutions across the nation, ushering in the need for the current suite of reconciliation curriculum tools to be adapted and enhanced into an Open Education Resource. The project thus serves to remedy the gap between the current need for instructors to be equipped with resources and material to thoughtfully introduce and integrate reconciliation into their post-secondary STEM programming.