Student Projects
FLAP - Fatal Light Awareness Program
A team of OISE B.Ed students headed up by Raysha Carmichael, Michelle Attard and Sindy Lui led the FLAP eco-art project to help raise awareness of the challenges of bird deaths around high buildings in the city. Over 300 handmade bird prints were created and distributed to all of the exterior OISE offices, reminding faculty and staff to do their part. The prints act as an artistic reminder for people to close their office blinds each night, as well as turn off overhead office lights and use task-focused lighting at night. For more information on their project, visit: oiseflap.weebly.com/
Cycling for Energy
OISE B.Ed students Andrew Rogers and Jason Sanders-Bennett built an energy-creating bicycle for one of their course projects, creating sufficient electrical energy to power a MP3 player, as well as a tester of different kinds of light bulbs. Learn more about their project at: bikingforenergy.wordpress.com/our-project-explained/
Students for Environment Blog
StudentsforEnvironment is an online forum created for the purpose of encouraging collaborative learning across the Toronto District School Board on topics that are central to Environmental and Sustainability Education. This forum was started in March 2011 by three environmentally aware teacher candidates from OISE as part of a course project. Our environmental teaching and learning focused on water conservation and protecting our local watershed, which is the area of land that catches rain and snow and drains into a marsh, stream, river, lake or groundwater. The three schools involved, Grey Owl Junior Public School, Duke of Connaught Junior and Senior Public School, and Bala Avenue Community School are situated in The Rouge, The Don, and The Humber watersheds, respectively. We hope to see this project expand to include a number of different schools across the city interacting and conversing about the environment. For more info, visit the forum at: www.studentsforenvironment.blogspot.com
Teaching Sustainability
OISE B.Ed student Liza Mazzulla developed and implemented units on sustainability for her three geography classes, in which students reflected on their own relationship to nature and then looked further into the role Canada plays on the national and global environmental stages. Students engaged in debates over waste disposal plans, tracked the environmental impact of consumer goods, and researched what makes a resource “sustainable.” The units focused on heightening the critical awareness of the students in regards to their own consumption and how they themselves can work for positive environmental change. For more info, you can read an outline of the units here.
Graduate Student Research
Erin Sperling's doctoral research in the CTL Department is a community-based, participatory action research inquiry with youth around issues of social justice and food security. It is connected more broadly to conceptions of formal and non-formal educational spaces, pedagogies of empowerment, and youth activism around issues of science, technology, society and the environment. For more information about Erin's work, she can be contacted at: [erin.sperling@utoronto.ca].
Rachel York-Bridge's doctoral research aims to explore the role of arts and creativity in environmental education, and find out how media arts and eco-literacy are connecting students to their natural environments. Her inquiry aims to record the new ways in which teachers, schools, and students are engaged in using media for environmental education and then generate a discourse around the possibilities for transformative learning and promote environmental learning among students. For more information about Rachel's work, she can be contacted at: [rachel.york.bridges@utoronto.ca]
Joanne Nazir is a Doctoral Candidate in CTL at OISE. Her dissertation, Mapping the Intersection Between Outdoor and Environmental Education, explores the nature of environmental education at one well established outdoor education centre in Toronto. The study is prompted by her personal passion for environmental education and the recent surge of interest in environmental education worldwide. As one of several avenues through which educators provide environmental education, outdoor education is one avenue that is severely under-researched. However a growing body of literature, and my own experiences with teaching/learning have led me to believe that outdoor education, as provided by outdoor education centres, provides a unique and powerful methodology with great potential for environmental learning. The study focuses on the phenomenon of outdoor environmental education from the experiences/perspectives of outdoor educators who work at the centre and focuses on the perspective of practitioners’ questions about the deeper nature of outdoor environmental education, especially questions of philosophy and practice. It will tap into practitioner knowledge about environmental education, and provide insights into how practice in the area can be improved. Joanne can be contacted at [joanne.nazir@utoronto.ca]