Category Archives: Teaching

New Title: Learning from our Past

Learning from our Past is a new release published by the University of Victoria Libraries ePublishing Services. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace

cover for Learning from our Past textbook

This middle school learning resource focuses on the history of livelihoods and lifeways in the Banda District of Ghana, West Africa. Today a rural district in west central Ghana, Banda has long been a crossroads of trade and a place where people from different backgrounds settled and formed communities. The fascinating history of how Banda area people interacted with neighbouring communities, responded to changing climate, and drew on local knowledge and resources to sustain their families comes from studying archaeology, oral histories and textual sources. Among the topics covered in this open-access resource are trade and the effects of global connections on rural life; the science and innovation behind local industries like potting and metallurgy; the role of weaving as a technology that transformed local materials into valued goods; and the range of ways in which people provided for their families through farming, fishing and hunting. The resource combines background information with suggested hands-on activities that support learning. The resource is available in English and in Nafaanra, which is one of several languages spoken in the Banda District.

Authors

Allison Balabuch is a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. She earned her degrees from the University of British Columbia – a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science and a Bachelor of Education – and the University of Victoria – a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction. She has been a French Immersion teacher for 25 years in British Columbia and England. Her teaching and research are centered on project-based learning, arts-based learning, land-based learning, and interdisciplinary studies in the classroom. Her current research is focused on community-based and interdisciplinary collaboration with the goal of improving and decolonizing educational systems and pedagogy.

Dr. Esther Attiogbe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Professional Studies Accra. She holds a PhD in Adult Education and Human Resource Studies from the University of Ghana. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Administration and Master of Philosophy in Administration from the University of Ghana. Esther did her Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the University of Ghana in collaboration with the University of Victoria, Canada. She teaches at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research interests are in the areas of higher education management, adult learning and human resource management. Her teaching philosophy is underpinned by the concept of gameful learning where learners and instructors collaborate and interact to make the learning environment interesting, engaging and personalized. With a passion for educating the youth, she is involved in youth programmes in her community. She is an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Human Resource Management, Ghana.

Dr. Ann Stahl is a Professor in the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology who earned her M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Calgary (1978) and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1985). She is an anthropological archaeologist whose long-term research has focused on how daily life in rural West Africa has been reshaped over centuries by involvement in global exchange networks. Funded by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant (“Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past,” 2018-2022), a recent project involved collaborations with partners in Ghana and the University of Victoria Libraries to develop sustainable and accessible digital heritage resources that help communities to sustain place-based relationships and foster knowledge revitalization (Banda Through Time). Her most recent work, supported by an SSHRC Connection grant, has involved collaborations with educators to enhance the role of heritage-based knowledge in classroom learning. She has held faculty positions at Binghamton University in New York (1988-2008) and University College London’s Institute of Archaeology (1985-1988) and her work has been funded over the years by the British Academy, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme. She is editor of a key text on African archaeology (African Archaeology. A Critical Introduction, 2005, Blackwell), co-editor with Andrew P. Roddick of a multidisciplinary collection, Knowledge in Motion. Constellations of Learning across Time and Place (2016, University of Arizona) and author of Making History in Banda. Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past (2001, Cambridge University Press). Her most recent book, Archaeology. Why It Matters was published by Polity Press (2023). She is the 2020 recipient of the University of Victoria’s REACH Award for Excellence in Knowledge Mobilization and a Faculty of Social Sciences Lansdowne Distinguished Fellow (2020-2023).

Translator – English to Nafaanra

Mr. Sampson Attah is a resident of Banda-Ahenkro, Banda District, Bono Region, Ghana. He is a member of the community-based Banda Heritage Initiative and a long-time contributor to work of the Banda Research Project (1986-2011), which studied the archaeology and history of Banda’s global connections. From the mid 1980s to the early 2000s, Mr. Attah worked as a Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation (GILLBT) translator and he is a strong promoter of indigenous language literacy and revitalization of Nafaanra, which is among Ghana’s at-risk minority languages.

New Title: Toward a Moral Horizon

Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice edited by Rosalie Starzomski, Janet L. Storch, and Patricia Rodney is a new release published by the University of Victoria Libraries ePublishing Services. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021

This third edition of Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice will assist nurses and all health care providers to take up the challenge of embedding ethics in health care practice, education, research, and policy at all levels—from local to regional to global. In the current, complex health care environment, more nurses are engaging in graduate studies to enhance their knowledge and expertise in providing necessary leadership in all health care settings. As a result, there is a growing need for an advanced nursing ethics text, and so this book is targeted towards graduate-level and upper-level undergraduate nursing students, as well as nurses in leadership roles—providing a much-needed resource for these groups.

This edition was written during a period when the COVID‑19 pandemic caused a health care crisis in Canada and around the world, provoking what the authors of one of the chapters called “a clarion call for change” in health care provision. The pandemic brought the fault lines of the Canadian health care system to the forefront of awareness, and profoundly affected patients, families, communities, as well as nurses and other health care providers. In addition to the influence of the pandemic, society is in the midst of rapid growth in science and technology. Now, more than ever, nurses need to use nursing ethics when developing their moral compasses for leadership. In this book, the writers focus on ethical knowledge for advanced practice nurse leaders to effect change and improve moral climates in nursing research, education, practice, and policy settings. They focus on social justice and equity as essential values of nursing ethics. Several chapter authors describe ways that nurses can press for improvements in the health care of vulnerable people who may be lacking access to quality health care: for example, Indigenous people, older adults, those who are coping with mental illness, substance use challenges, and those who have a disability. Social justice and equity issues are also explored in a chapter on global health.

This book is structured in three sections, comprised of 22 chapters written by Canadian experts in ethics. In the book, authors map the moral climate for health care and nursing ethics and describe theory related to nursing ethics. They illuminate the use of nursing ethics in diverse populations and with people at all stages of life; and apply nursing ethics to new developments in health care issues and technologies. Educators will be able to bring the content of this book alive with Ethics in Practice scenarios and reflective questions for students that are located in each chapter. Many chapters also include figures or appendices showing models and guidelines that can be used to assist with ethical decision making.

This third edition includes several new chapters, including a chapter on nursing ethical theory as distinct from bioethics, as well as chapters related to people with disabilities, Indigenous health ethics, nursing leadership, and digital health technology. Many topics covered in previous editions are revised and updated. For example, the updated chapter about health care at the end of life now includes an in-depth discussion of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Further updates are included in the areas of research ethics in nursing; the development of the Canadian health care system; nurses as moral agents, and the problem of moral distress; the application of nursing ethics in caring for patients at all stages of life; home health care ethics; ethical issues in biotechnology, and the broad areas of public health ethics and global health ethics. Chapter authors model the use of inclusive language in their writing as applied to gender diverse people and people with disabilities. Extensive references and resources are provided for readers at the end of all chapters.

This edition is cutting-edge as the authors recognize the importance of inclusive language, since language affects attitudes towards people and the way they are treated. In particular, chapter authors in this text model the use of inclusive language in their writing as applied to gender diverse people and people with disabilities.

This third edition is an open access, online publication, meaning that the book is accessible to all with no cost to the readers. This online publication also allows for new features, including two videos, with their accompanying transcripts, where listeners will gain a personal understanding of the contributors’ perspectives. In one video, Indigenous nurse scholars form a traditional circle online, as they discuss nursing ethics from their Indigenous perspectives. The other video showcases two nurses with expertise in digital health technologies in conversation with the book’s editors.

It is the hope of the editors that readers of this third edition will step boldly into shaping the future of health care by becoming more engaged in ethical practice, and becoming more confident in their leadership roles in health care. The content of this text can contribute to the knowledge needed for nurses to make ethical choices knowingly and wisely, so they can demonstrate moral imagination and moral courage in the face of challenges that confront them at all levels of the health care system.

Editors

Dr. Rosalie Starzomski is a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria School of Nursing. She is a graduate of Dalhousie University with a Bachelor of Nursing, the University of Calgary with a Master of Nursing, and the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Nursing. Her research, practice, teaching, and publications are focused on health care and nursing ethics, organ donation and transplantation, nephrology, biotechnology, end-of-life care, and advanced nursing practice. She is an advanced practice nurse leader in nephrology and transplantation, and for a number of years, was an ethics consultant at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and committee chair for several ethics committees. Dr. Starzomski is co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

Dr. Janet (Jan) Storch is a professor emeritus at the University of Victoria School of Nursing. She earned her degrees from the University of Alberta: a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a Master of Health Services Administration, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Sociology. Dr. Storch has been a scholar in health care ethics and nursing ethics since the mid-1970s. She was a professor in the Health Services Administration program at the University of Alberta and developed and taught courses on the history and values of the Canadian health care system. Dr. Storch is a former dean of the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary, and a former director of the School of Nursing at the University of Victoria. She is co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

Dr. Patricia (Paddy) Rodney is an associate professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia School of Nursing. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Alberta; a Master of Science in Nursing from UBC; and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Nursing from UBC. Dr. Rodney worked in critical care nursing at St. Paul’s Hospital, where she had the opportunity to learn about—and later teach in—a rapidly evolving area of clinical nursing practice. She came face to face with ethical challenges regarding end-of-life decision making for patients and their families, and witnessed the moral distress experienced by nurses and other health care providers. This fostered her lifelong interest in nursing ethics and health care ethics. She is a co-editor of three editions of the book Toward a Moral Horizon: Nursing Ethics for Leadership and Practice.

UVic Open Education Resource Grant – CFP

The University of Victoria provides grants for the purpose of the adoption, adaptation or development of Open Educational Resources (OERs), with the aim of replacing existing textbooks or other types of educational resources that can be prohibitively expensive. Ideally, the completed OERs will be useable not just at UVic, but other post-secondary institutions.

Open Educational Resource (OER) Grants are offered as a partnership between UVic Libraries (Libraries) and the Division of Learning and Teaching Support and Innovation (LTSI), with invaluable support from the 2020 BCcampus OE Sustainability Grant, as well as the Division of Student Affairs, the University of Victoria Students’ Society (UVSS) and University Systems.

About the Grant

Grant Deadline: January 31, 2023

TK Labels: Tool for Indigenous Peoples to assert sovereignty over traditional knowledges

Source: https://indigenousknowledge.unimelb.edu.au

August 9 marks the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, an annual celebration of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007. It is an opportunity to highlight the significant contribution that Indigenous Peoples have made to our world and it serves as a reminder to reaffirm everyone’s commitment to advancing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and to working together to address the challenges they still face around the world.

This celebratory blog post is dedicated to Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels) – a framework for preserving Indigenous knowledges in digital environments. It will outline how the system works and discuss how it can be helpful in scholarly work.

1. What are TK Labels?

Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels) is a digital tagging system developed by the Local Contexts initiative in partnership with Indigenous communities worldwide to recognize, categorize, and acknowledge traditional knowledges of Indigenous Peoples and their contexts and regulate how and by whom that intellectual property can be used. Together with other tools such as Local Context’s BC Labels, GIDA’s CARE Principles, or the Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS), they ensure the cultural sovereignty of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

2. What can TK Labels add to existing frameworks regulating intellectual property?

TK labels appear to be akin to statutory copyright and trademark law. Yet they were developed because legal concepts of regulating intellectual property are often at odds with how traditional knowledge is passed on, shared, and exercised. Copyright laws have been exploited many times to appropriate Indigenous knowledges and traditional cultural expressions, including by the scientific community.

Instead, the concept of TK labels is loosely inspired by Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses form another labeling system, that is intended to complement copyright by offering a more general framework for sharing intellectual property. But TK labels are more elaborate than Creative Commons and designed to provide a holistic perspective on the context in which traditional knowledges and Indigenous cultural heritages live. They can, for example, show provenance and specify protocols that should be applied when using the knowledge and they can be customized to serve local contexts. TK labels also contrast with Creative Commons because the open philosophy of which these licenses are a component is not in harmony with indigenous traditions of learning, teaching, and knowing.

Although not legally binding, TK labels create a safe space for traditional manifestations of intellectual property and their contexts that existing copyright laws generally cannot capture and legislate.

3. How do TK Labels help protect Indigenous Knowledges and promote Indigenous cultural sovereignty?

Currently 20 different TK Labels help to raise awareness of Indigenous knowledges and their interrelationships. Labeling traditional knowledges that exist in digital environments makes them more recognizable. By contextualizing them with the help of TK Labels, knowledge-keepers can decide to provide clarity, depth, and meaning to audiences outside of their communities. As a result, these labels can prevent misappropriation by making clear where the knowledge and teachings originate and in what way their usage is authorized. This can encourage future use, foster their preservation and prevent undesirable or illegitimate applications. It is the exercise and sometimes the restitution of control over their dissemination. TK Labels help to repatriate sovereignty over knowledges and cultural expressions, that have been torn from their ancestral settings. And not least, they can encourage engagement with the inherent nature of Indigenous knowledge traditions and lead to a deeper understanding of them.

An image of 12 different TK Labels and their meaning

Examples of different TK Labels and their meanings. Source: Local Contexts and https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec523/2021/10/02/traditional-knowledge-and-the-commons/

4. What role TK Labels can play in indigenizing digital scholarship

TK labels offer an opportunity to improve the social impact of digital scholarship by promoting decolonization and indigenization. As more non-Indigenous researchers turn to traditional knowledge to solve societal problems to which Western science cannot find sufficient answers, such as wildlife conservation or the life-threatening effects of the climate crisis, it is increasingly important that this knowledge be used appropriately, respectfully, and in harmony with its bearers. TK labels can provide a framework for this use. With TK Labels, global Indigenous communities have an additional tool in their hands with which they can gain recognition for knowledges and cultural practices that have been considered a common good by the scientific community for centuries and have thus been appropriated without acknowledgement of their sources. Now these communities can claim it on their own terms.

5. How students, researchers and academic institutions can implement TK Labels in their learning, teaching, research and heritage work

The labels themselves can only be applied by Indigenous communities. Researchers and educators as well as academic and heritage institutions (archives, museums, libraries) who would like to refer to traditional knowledges in their works or in collections they host can apply a TK notice to them by registering their projects or collections in the Local Contexts Hub. That will notify Indigenous communities of potential Indigenous rights and interests in their publications, data or holdings, who can then decide if and which labels to apply to those projects.

An important application relevant to scholarly and preservation work that includes the TK Labels is the Mukurtu CMS for building digital collections that contain manifestations of Indigenous cultural practices and traditional teachings. Learn more about how TK Labels are implemented into Mukurtu here.

UVic OER Grants – Spring 2021 Awards

What are open Education Resources (OERs)?

“Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”[1]

OER Grants

UVic’s OER grant was established in 2019 with funding from the UVic Undergraduate Student Society, UVic Libraries, the Division of Learning, Teaching, Support and Innovation (LTSI), and UVic Systems. The LTSI, Libraries, and UVSS administer the grants. The grant provides funding of up to $7,500 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt, adapt or create open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.

Proposals were evaluated based on the following five criteria:

The quality of the project goals and motivation;
The potential impact on UVic students in terms of cost-savings and learning based on the cost of educational materials being replaced, class sizes, as well as possible employment of research assistants (RAs) for the project;
Their potential impact on student learning and the student experience in the form of high-quality materials, and open and innovative pedagogy;
Overall alignment with the UVic strategic framework;
Long-term plans to reuse the OER in courses in subsequent terms;
The extent to which the OER will be freely and openly shared throughout and beyond UVic (e.g., through BCcampus);
The feasibility of the plan and time frame: will the OER be ready within a reasonable time frame, preferably ready for the following winter or spring term?
Logical alignment of the budget with the work to be undertaken.

We congratulate the spring 2021 grant recipients:

Valerie Irvine and Michael Paskevicius, Department of Curriculum & Instruction/Educational Technology

Internet Radio for Open Community Engagement

Audio in open education has a long history, starting with early radio, then podcasts, and, more recently, audio-only streams on social media (e.g., Twitter Spaces). This project will install internet radio software to engage learners and the broader global community in our teaching and learning.

Thirumarai Chelvan IIamparithi, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Creating an open textbook for ECE365 (Applied Electronics and Electrical Machines) course.

ECE365 course introduces some important aspects of electrical engineering to mechanical and biomedical engineering students. There are no open textbooks for such a course. The existing textbooks are prohibitively expensive. Moreover, their contents are not up to date. Therefore, the project aims to create an open textbook for the course.

Gerry Ferguson, Law

Global Corruption: Law, Theory and Practice textbook

This project is designed to assist in the creation of a new and expanded open textbook entitled “Global Corruption: Law, Theory and Practice.” The new version contains three new chapters, updates and revisions to the twelve existing chapters, and new expert authors for ten of the fifteen chapters.

Sara Humphreys and Erin Kelly, Academic and Technical Writing Program

Why Write?: A Guide for Advanced Student Researchers in Canada

A team comprising experts in writing studies at the University of Victoria has made notable progress in the past year on an OER designed to support students in first-year academic writing courses. While this open source textbook titled Why Write?: A Guide for Students in Canada speaks to broad concerns about reading, writing, and research, it has become clear that there is a pressing need for an additional OER tailored for advanced academic writers, specifically UVic honours and graduate students.

The project below is funded through BCcampus Sustainability Grant received by UVic Libraries

Michael Paskevisius and Valerie Irvine, Curriculum & Instruction/Educational Technology

Uvic Open Hub Community Development

This project will hire students to develop the UVic Open Hub, a community of practice for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty interested in adopting open practices in teaching and research. This supplements a proposal shortlisted for the UVic Strategic Framework Impact Fund with partners from Education, Libraries, LTSI, UVSS, and Systems.

Open Education Grants @UVic

What are open Education Resources (OERs)?

OER Grants

UVic’s OER grant was established in 2019 with funding from the UVic Undergraduate Student Society, UVic Libraries, the Division of Learning, Teaching, Support and Innovation (LTSI), and UVic Systems. The LTSI, Libraries, and UVSS administer the grants. The grant provides funding of up to $5,000 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt, adapt or create open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.

Proposals were evaluated based on the following five criteria:

The potential impact of cost-savings to students based off the cost of educational materials being replaced, class sizes, as well as possible employment of TA’s for the project;
Their potential impact on student learning and the student experience in the form of high-quality materials, and open and innovative pedagogy;
Overall alignment with UVic strategic framework;
Long-term plans to reuse the OER in courses in subsequent terms;
The extent to which the OER will be freely and openly shared throughout and beyond UVic (e.g., through BCcampus); and,
Feasibility of the OER being ready within a reasonable timeframe, preferably ready for the following winter or spring term.

We congratulate the January 2020 of grant recipients:

Trefor Bazett, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Adapting an OER Differential Equations Textbook for Math 204 ($5,000)

This project adapts an existing OER Differential Equations textbook in order to replace the expensive physical textbook currently used in Math204. The new textbook will include engaging, interactive, online content compatible with both flipped and traditional classrooms.

Sara Humphreys, Academic and Technical Writing Program
Academic Writing for Undergraduate and Graduate Students ($2,250)

The print version of Academic Writing Essentials (AWE) needs revision. The Academic and Technical Writing Program (ATWP), in collaboration with the LTSI’s Centre for Academic Communication (CAC), is proposing an OER to support writing development of the University of Victoria’s diverse undergraduate and graduate student and would align with SEM goals.

Viloeta Iosub, Department of Chemistry
Development of a Spectroscopy Tool ($5,000)

Spectroscopy is a topic newly introduced to second year organic chemistry. This grant will support the development of a web-based platform that will serve as a practice tool for students and replace the current recommended textbook.

Kieka Mynhardt, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Somme Sonder Sukkel ($5,000)

Somme Sonder Sukkel (from Afrikaans) roughly translates to “Problems without problems”, in the sense of “without a struggle”. This grant will support the development of a bank of exercises/examples suitable for an introductory combinatorics course, customized for MATH222. We aim to develop this work into a textbook showcasing underrepresented voices.

Lijun Zhang, Department of Economics
Adaptation of OpenStax Textbook for Econ 104 ($5,000)

This project aims to adapt Macroeconomics (2e) from Openstax.org, available in BCcampus OER category, for Econ 104, and create supplementary materials for the course.

Astronomical Society and undergraduate research

January 2020

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series has published its first Compendium of Undergraduate Research in Astronomy and Space Physics. The papers will be published electronically as they are published throughout the year. They will also be open access!

2020 Compendium Table of Contents: http://www.aspbooks.org/a/volumes/table_of_contents/?book_id=602

Featured Thesis: Korean parents’, kindergarten teachers’, and kindergarten students’ perceptions of early English-language education

by Seon-Young Park

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/4397

Today’s featured thesis is submitted as part of a Master of Arts in Linguistics.

Abstract:

In Korea, English education in kindergartens has dramatically increased in the last 15 years. As a result, almost all Korean kindergarten students are learning English today. The present study aims to understand Korean parents’, kindergarten teachers’, and kindergarten students’ perceptions of early English-language education (EEE). This study is particularly significant because thus far little research has investigated the perceptions of EEE held by the young learners themselves. Ninety-five participants – 30 kindergarten teachers, 33 parents, and 32 five- and six-year old kindergarten students – were recruited from five kindergartens in four cities in Chung-Nam province, Korea. The parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of EEE were examined through questionnaires, whereas the students’ perceptions of learning English were investigated through multiple data collection methods: a questionnaire, an interview session, and a drawing activity. Questionnaire data gathered from the parents and teachers were quantitatively analyzed, and the data gathered from the kindergarten students were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings revealed that the parent and student groups shared more positive attitudes towards EEE than the teacher group. In addition, many more parents and students believed that English education is necessary at the kindergarten level than the teachers did. Concerning kindergarten students’ perceptions, the three data collection methods in this study showed that many kindergarten children consistently held positive attitudes towards learning English. The students were not only interested in learning English, but they also showed high self-confidence in learning English.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Scholarly Communication @ UVic