Summer 2022: Semester in Trust, Money and Power: Funding Change

Youth are often told to be the change they want to see in the world. They get an idea about something they want to change then they start to direct their energies to realizing it. A few months later, exhausted by the hours and hours of unpaid time, they get frustrated and their idea gets relegated to the back burner. 

What if that weren’t the case? What if young people learned about how to access funding to support their ideas? What if in the act of learning about how to access this funding, they started to question the way in which funding is raised and allocated? And what if, in questioning the way funding is allocated, they started to design new approaches to it?

Trust, Money and Power: Funding Change was an immersive seven-week student-centered Semester in Dialogue course that explored the different ideas about how to fund social and environmental change including traditional grantmaking, philanthropy, Indigenous approaches to giving and reciprocity, other approaches to giving such as giving circles, and youth centered approaches to crowdsourcing

In addition to learning about funding change, students were introduced to the practice of dialogue. Students learned how to develop keen listening skills and elicit ideas from others by creating a respectful, positive environment. They also learned to develop and express their ideas in a way that other people can readily understand and that connects with their concerns.

Over the seven week period, students:

• Hosted dialogues with foundation CEOs, Indigenous elders, allied professionals, grant recipients, researchers and innovators who are questioning and redefining the philanthropic sector
• Engaged in self-directed learning projects
• Participated in site visits
• Built their skills in workshops
• Reflected weekly on their learnings
• Drafted a fundraising case for support
• Wrote a publishable piece
• Applied their skills in grantmaking as a small group
• Worked as a class to design and deliver a public dialogue on funding the public good

Course Instructors

Shauna Sylvester was the lead instructor for the Trust, Money and Power: Funding Change, the Semester in Dialogue Summer 2022 course. Shauna is the former Executive Director of Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, a professor of professional practice in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and has over 35 years of experience working in the charitable sector. Shauna loves supporting students through intense experiential learning opportunities and this is the third time she has co-taught in the Semester in Dialogue program.

Shauna is a passionate changemaker. As a grantmaker, social entrepreneur, foundation advisor, fundraiser, volunteer, philanthropist, charitable law reform advocate and educator, Shauna has seen philanthropy from all sides. As a social entrepreneur, Shauna is the Co-founder and first Executive Director of five pan-Canadian initiatives: SFU Public Square, Renewable Cities, Carbon Talks, Canada’s World and IMPACS – the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, a media and democracy organization that operated in Canada and in conflict and post-conflict zones around the world. Each of these initiatives has helped frame her understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of the philanthropic sector in Canada.

Dr. Jacqueline Koerner is a Fellow in the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue where she is exploring philanthropy, specifically issues of power, trust, community and transparency. She is excited about teaching in the Semester in Dialogue, drawing on her academic and work experience with undergraduate students at UBC and in the not-for-profit sector. Dr. Koerner has an extensive background in the non-profit sector and in philanthropy, both professional and voluntary, public and private. She is passionate about learning and community engagement, directed at building dignity and justice broadly. Dr. Koerner is a founder, and current Co-Chair, of Ecotrust Canada, a Vancouver-based enterprising charity that works with rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. 

Kris Archie,  Ts’qescenemc ell  Seme7 is passionate about learning, community and liberation. Kris is the Chief Executive Officer of The Circle, a Fellow at the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and an instructor in SFU’s Continuing Studies Certificate in Community Engagement Program. As CEO of The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, Kris has focused on building a national member based organization that is increasingly focused on moving money from settler philanthropy to Indigenous communities, nations, movements and projects. Prior to joining The Circle, Kris was the project manager for the Vancouver Foundation’s youth homelessness initiative, called Fostering Change. Kris is an experienced facilitator and teacher - serving as an instructor in SFU's Continuing Studies - Dialogue and Civic Engagement Program. She was instrumental in the programming of the 2019 Jack P. Blaney Award for Dialogue with Siila Watt Cloutier and will be teaching in the 2022 Summer Semester in Dialogue on New Approaches to Philanthropy.

Fall 2021: Semester by the Salish Sea - Explorations in Reciprocity and Care 

The Fall 2021 Semester in Dialogue brought together engaged students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to explore our relationship as urban residents with the ocean. This full time 13 week program dove deep into the ecology, history and political realities of living in a coastal city on the edge of the Salish Sea. We explored a wide range of issues connected to blue urbanism, sea level rise, coastal development and ocean life. Students worked on a project connected to a local not for profit/local government related to their interests. 

The semester was an immersive, team learning environment combining interdisciplinary skills with the complexity of collaborating within a group setting. The course combined the processes of dialogue and human centred design. Students engaged with communities and researched existing issues in order to design projects to improve the world around them. Students were encouraged to bring an open mind about project scope to the program.  

Students cultivated the skills necessary to conduct dialogues, public presentations, and multi-stakeholder discussions. The course offered facilitation and dialogue experience, field experiences, reflective writing, on-the-ground training, leadership development, group process, and project management skills.

Poster design by Ronnie Dean Harris: artist, performer, researcher and facilitator based in Stō:lo Territory. 

Course Instructors

Dr. Janet Moore is a Professor of Professional Practice at Simon Fraser University where she co-creates, co-designs and co-teaches in the SFU Semester in Dialogue program. Janet is the Co-founder of CityStudio - an innovation hub that connects students with City Hall to co-create, design and launch experiments. Janet has spent 20 years imagining, designing and facilitating intensive, interdisciplinary programs that focus on dialogue-archive, social innovation, group process, divergent thinking and urban sustainability. Janet has an BSc in Marine Biology from McGill (she loves whales and intertidal zones) an MSc in Ecology from UBC (where she fell in love with teaching, hummingbirds & the west coast). Her PhD at UBC combined lessons from the School of Community and Regional Planning (urban sustainability, systems and feminist methodology) and the Faculty of Education (transformative learning & participatory methods).

Janet is passionate about new possibilities in cities and thrives when co-creating imaginative solutions to complex problems.  Her interests include transdisciplinary higher education, transformative learning, social entrepreneurship, social innovation and organizational change in higher education. She is learning to reconcile what it means to be a settler on the west coast of Canada. She loves riding her bike, digging in the garden, hanging out with her family and walking her dog Magic in the rainforest.

Ginger Gosnell-Myers, who is a member of the Nisga’a and Kwakwak'awakw Nations has been bringing forward new perspectives of Indigenous peoples in cities for over 20 years, while breaking down misconceptions about urban Indigenous realities in order to reframe our understanding of both issues and opportunities. This led Gosnell-Myers to become the City of Vancouver’s first Indigenous Relations Manager where she was central to advancing Vancouver as the world’s first official City of Reconciliation, and created the City’s reconciliation framework to ensure Indigenous identities and worldviews were respected and reflected in all City plans. Key to this work was supporting Vancouver City Council in recognizing that it was on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh homelands – the only government in Canada to officially recognize this truth. Also integral was implementing the 28 out of the 94 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Calls to Action, along with the adoption and recognition of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into all aspects of City planning. This has significantly changed how the City of Vancouver operates, and ensures that Vancouver will create a new urban identity that respects, includes, and reflects Indigenous culture.

Sarah Hay is a practicing designer of graphics, objects, experiences and communication strategies. Armed with two professional design degrees and 10 years of experience in the sustainability and design space, she splits her working time as a freelance designer, facilitator and instructor. She serves as co-director of the Vancouver Design Nerds Society and is a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Summer 2021: Semester in New Times

We are living through extraordinary times. A global pandemic, climate collapse, and a tremendous civil rights movement are transforming life as we know it. Change is all around us. We are curious about how we may likewise shape, and be shaped by, change. Semester in New Times imagines new frameworks for social transformation. The course is an invitation for students to consider the parallel journey of personal inner work and large-scale social change, to connect meaningfully in a time of isolation, and to think and plan together as a new era emerges.

Semester in New Times is a multidisciplinary offering for students curious about navigating life in multitudes and bridging seemingly disparate worlds in the service of ethical social transformation. 

We will focus our thinking, engagement, and research about social transformation in the following three domains of research practice and community mobilization:

• Making infrastructures (communities)
• Building care structures for mental health 
• Forging social and environmental justice 

These pools of activity will set the context through which students will engage in dialogue-archive and mount projects to form horizons for social transformation in new times.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Am Johal is excitedly returning to the Semester in Dialogue for the third time! Am works as Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of the Community Engaged Research Initiative and the host of the Below the Radar podcast. He is author of 'Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene' (2015) and co-author with Matt Hern and Joe Sacco of 'Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale' (2018). He is a board member with 221A, the Indian Summer Festival and the Bloom Group.

Stuart Poyntz is tremendously excited to join the Semester in Dialogue program. Stuart has been involved in media democracy projects and youth arts organizations for more than two decades and is currently, Co-Director of the Community Engaged Research Centre (CERi) at Simon Fraser University and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication. He writes regularly on children’s media cultures, public scholarship and urban youth arts cultures, and he has published four books and written many articles and book chapters for national and international publications. He is also a Dialogue Associate with the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.

Jackie Wong is thrilled to teach in the Semester in Dialogue's summer session for the second time. She loves working with students and learning alongside them. She started teaching journalism and writing in post-secondary contexts in 2012 while she was working in journalism and non-profit organizations in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown communities, through which she has written about housing, drug policy, and racial equity issues. Jackie has spent recent years specializing in delivering facilitation, program design, and editorial services for community organizations, and she now works with SFU's Community Engaged Research Initiative as its Community Strategic Initiatives Associate. She is a dialogue-archive associate with the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and a board member of SWAN Vancouver.

Spring 2021: Semester in Wicked Problems

The world is becoming increasingly complex. Climate change, mass migration, and epidemics of chronic disease are just a few of the wicked problems we will face in the coming decades. The Semester in Wicked Problems (Spring 2021 Semester in Dialogue) will explore some of these problems and many others using dialogue-archive and systems thinking.

Dialogue is intended to be an engaging and inclusive conversation for all participants and is based on an understanding that everyone in the room is coming from a different background, and will have different interests and views. The goal of the Semester in Dialogue is to create a space where views can be expressed and where participants can actively listen to each other and learn something new. Dialogue ultimately provides a space to bring together diverse viewpoints, explore these differences, and work towards understanding them better. Systems thinking recognizes that complex problems are different from simple or complicated problems. Some systems are only simple or complicated, meaning they will be predictable, controllable and designable, e.g. sending a rocket to the moon. Other systems are complex, meaning they are unpredictable, self-organizing and emergent, e.g. raising a child.

The Semester in Wicked Problems will enable exploration of a variety of complex problems, what makes them complex, and how solutions to complex problems need to be quite different from the “tried and true” solutions to complicated problems we’ve come to rely on.

What wicked problem keeps you up at night? 

COURSE INSTRUCTORS    

Dr. Diane T. Finegood is a professor and fellow in the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.  Diane came to the Centre after a five year leave of absence from SFU to serve as President & CEO of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (2012-2016). She has been on faculty at SFU since 1997 in the Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology where her research interests included the pathophysiology of obesity and diabetes. More recently after an opportunity to serve as the inaugural scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (2000-2008) her academic interests have broadened to include population and public health, health policy, knowledge translation and complex adaptive systems. Her passion is to help people understand that complex is not the same as complicated and that different strategies are needed to address wicked problems.

Chris Yakimov is the Associate Director, Digital Community Engagement for the Office of Community Engagement, SFU External Relations. He has worked as a digital strategist in the private, nonprofit and now public sector, and has a BA and MA from UBC in Psychology and Education, respectively. His graduate thesis was a narrative inquiry that explored the power relations brokered by the word “self” in academic, therapeutic, and everyday discourse. He’s heavily influenced by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Damasio, Jaron Lanier, David Krakauer and Judith Butler, and brings an abiding and passionate interest in the roles of emotion, autonomy, language and power within the complex bio-relational system that is “us”. Current interests include: critical deconstructions of individuality and economic systems, blockchain, complexity science, chaos theory, and the under-utilized potential of fiction for knowledge mobilization and pedagogy. Vancouver-born, he loves hockey, photography, cli-fi, homemade omelettes and playing Pandemic: Legacy with his 5-year old daughter.

Ilhan Abdullahi is a Somali-Canadian whose parents’ migration journey brought her to the unceded Coast Salish Lands at a very young age. Stemming from her family’s experience of navigating their new world as newcomers, Ilhan has been passionate in addressing social and health inequities experienced by underserved communities from an intersectional lens. With over 10 years of community-based advocacy, leadership and youth outreach, she‘s eager to continue exploring how grassroots community organizing and the process of decolonization through a systems change lens can lead to the liberation of these communities. She hopes to bring her grounded expertise and knowledge in community engagement, health equity, systems thinking and public health to this course.

Fall 2020: Semester in Dialogue: The Department of Living

Meet the Fall 2020 Cohort! 

Department of Living brings together engaged, innovative students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to consider what it means for young people to thrive in an urban environment. This full time 12 week program follows from the SFU Semester in Dialogue's work with CityStudio in 2018 that produced the Vancouver Student Manifesto. Students will work on a range of projects connected to relevant and timely urban issues in Vancouver.  

The semester will be an immersive, team learning environment combining interdisciplinary skills with the complexity of collaborating within a group setting. The course combines the processes of dialogue-archive and human centred design and requires students to engage with communities and research existing urban issues and design projects to improve the world around them. Students will co-create projects based on needs of the community and are encouraged to bring an open mind about project scope to the program.  

Students will cultivate the skills necessary to conduct student led dialogue-archives, public presentations, and to engage in multi-stakeholder processes with policy makers and City of Vancouver staff with our collaboration at CityStudio. The course offers facilitation and dialogue-archive experience, field experiences, reflective writing, on-the-ground training, leadership development, group process, and project management skills.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Janet Moore is a Professor of Professional Practice at Simon Fraser University where she co-creates, co-designs and co-teaches in the SFU Semester in Dialogue program. Janet is the Co-founder of CityStudio - an innovation hub that connects students with City Hall to co-create, design and launch experiments. Janet has spent 20 years imagining, designing and facilitating intensive, interdisciplinary programs that focus on dialogue-archive, social innovation, group process, divergent thinking and urban sustainability. Janet has an BSc in Marine Biology from McGill (she loves whales and intertidal zones) an MSc in Ecology from UBC (where she fell in love with teaching, hummingbirds & the west coast). Her PhD at UBC combined lessons from the School of Community and Regional Planning (urban sustainability, systems and feminist methodology) and the Faculty of Education (transformative learning & participatory methods).

Janet is passionate about new possibilities in cities and thrives when co-creating imaginative solutions to complex problems.  Her interests include transdisciplinary higher education, transformative learning, social entrepreneurship, social innovation and organizational change in higher education. She is learning to reconcile what it means to be a settler on the west coast of Canada. She loves riding her bike, digging in the garden, hanging out with her family and walking her dog Magic in the rainforest.

Holly Schmidt is a Vancouver artist, curator and educator. She has a research-based practice that engages processes of collaboration and informal pedagogy. Moving across disciplinary boundaries, she explores the relationships between practices of making, knowledge creation and the formation of temporary communities. Her exhibition, public art and residency projects include Pollen Index (2016) Charles H. Scott Gallery, Till (2014/15) with the Santa Fe Art Institute Food Justice Residency, Moveable Feast (2012) Burnaby Art Gallery, Grow (2011) Other Sights for Artists’ Projects. Upcoming projects are Lost Lessons (2019) Boca Del Lupo, A-Y Bread for Locals Only (2018) AKA Gallery, and Accretion (2018-) 10 Different Things with ECUAD Living Labs, City Studio and Vancouver Public Art. She’s developed and taught course in social practice at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, as well as curating community engaged artist projects with the Contemporary Art Gallery. Holly co-taught the Fall 2018 SFU Semester in Dialogue at CityStudio program. She is also on the CityStudio Vancouver Society Board of Directors.

Adrian Sinclair is Co-Founder and Director of Engagement for both Transformation Projects and The Vancouver Mural Festival. He is a Visiting Faculty at the SFU Semester in Dialogue at the CityStudio program. Through practical, on the ground experience, Adrian has become an expert in public engagement and fosters a passion for dynamic, creative and inclusive cities. Past projects have included design and event production for organizations including The City of Vancouver, Museum of Vancouver, Hootsuite Media, The Dragon Boat Festival and Sun Yat Sen Traditional Chinese Garden. He recently co-authored and illustrated Freestyle Focus Group: Learn to Freestyle Rap and Build Community, 2016. In his spare time, he is the Vice-President of the Mobile Sauna Society. Adrian completed his MA in Philosophy at The University of Western. Adrian co-produced Ten Different Things on behalf of CityStudio in partnership with Living Labs at Emily Carr University.

Summer 2020: Semester in Democracy: The Next Frontier

Meet the Summer 2020 Cohort!

Democracy: The Next Frontier is an immersive 7 week Semester in Dialogue course that examines the institutions, culture and practice of democracy in Canada. Through self-directed learning projects, dialogue-archive with thought leaders, site visits, group projects and skills building workshops, students will experience what it means to live in a democracy. Students will also explore the new frontiers of democracy by developing, designing and executing a democratic engagement project and delivering a public dialogue-archive on democracy. Whether you are a democratic champion, a skeptic, or completely new to the study of democracy, we invite you to join us as we explore uncharted territory and go where no citizen has gone before.

Democracy is rooted in the fundamental belief that the people, the demos, exercise supreme authority over how they are governed. From Rousseau’s social contract to Locke’s rule of law, the democratic system of government was designed to place citizens at the centre of decisions that affect their well-being; it meant giving voice to citizens. Winston Churchill once famously quipped that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried from time to time. Yet, as we await the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century, alarm bells for the state of democracy are ringing louder than ever worldwide. Rising anti-democratic populist movements are putting pressure on how democracy’s institutions work, making it difficult to respond to the needs of the electorate. Increasing polarization is undermining the ability to reach consensus on solutions to serious policy issues, raising questions about the ability of political leaders to solve problems. And, the growing influence of social media networks is poisoning civil discourse and providing fodder for those seeking to sow discord through disinformation. Few, but the truly uninformed think Canada is immune to these global forces. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Canadians don’t hesitate to stitch a maple leaf to our backpacks when we travel abroad or to cheer when “O Canada” plays at the Olympics medal ceremonies. It shows we all have a deep, shared pride and sense of our place in the world. And, why not? As a country, Canada routinely places near the top of most lists of the best place to live; this includes indices that trumpet us as a model democracy. Yet, according to the 2019 Americas Barometer, Canadians’ sense of pride in their system of government has taken a hit over the past decade or so, dropping from 63% in 2006 to 39% today. In a 2019 SFU Centre for Dialogue survey, just a third of Canadians said they trusted elected officials in this country; another 68% felt their representatives didn’t really care what ordinary Canadians like them thought. Hardly a ringing endorsement of a well-functioning democracy.   

How did we get here, and more importantly, what is needed to bring the demos back into democracy? Without the “stamp of approval” from Canadians that their democracy is delivering the goods for citizens, our democracy is at great risk. While strong democratic institutions are critical to the health of our democracy, they are only as strong as the people who believe in them.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Shauna Sylvester is the Executive Director of Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and Co-Founder and Senior Advisor of SFU Public Square. Shauna is a skilled facilitator, social entrepreneur and commentator on international issues. She has led several dialogue-archives on density, business development, transportation and energy and she served as the lead facilitator for the Mayor’s Task Force on Affordable Housing in Vancouver. Prior to leading SFU Public Square and Carbon Talks, Shauna served as the Founding Executive Director of Canada’s World—a national citizen engagement initiative on foreign policy. In addition to her international work, Shauna is involved in her community. She is a current board member of Mountain Equipment Cooperative and has served on the boards of Vancity Credit Union, Vancity Capital, the Voluntary Sector Initiative, the BC Assessment Authority and numerous non-profit organizations. In 2010, Shauna was recognized by The Simons Foundation as a Peace Leader. In 2003, she was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in the Globe and Mail after receiving a similar award from Business in Vancouver Magazine in 2000.

Daniel Savas worked as a Senior Vice-President at Ipsos Reid for more than 17 years, as a public affairs and market research specialist. He conducted research projects for private and public sector clients, as well as advocacy groups. As Senior Vice-President at Ipsos, Daniel led and managed Ipsos' public affairs practice in Western Canada from 1992 to 2006. Since 2006, he has been responsible for leading Ipsos' Higher Education Research Account Team for North America. In 2009, Daniel set up his own research consulting practice – Infuse Creative Insights – working with Ipsos in the higher education sector, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and with other clients seeking research advice and expertise. In 2010, Daniel accepted a position as Adjunct Professor in Simon Fraser University's Master's of Public Policy Program, teaching research methods and survey design. He also teaches market research in Simon Fraser's Writing & Publishing Program.

Spring 2020: Semester in Wicked Problems

Meet the Spring 2020 Cohort!

The world is becoming increasingly complex. Climate change, mass migration, and epidemics of chronic disease are just a few of the wicked problems we will face in the coming decades. The Semester in Wicked Problems (Spring 2020 Semester in Dialogue) will explore some of these problems and many others using dialogue-archive and systems thinking.

Dialogue is intended to be an engaging and inclusive conversation for all participants and is based on an understanding that everyone in the room is coming from a different background, and will have different interests and views. The goal of the Semester in Dialogue is to create a space where views can be expressed and where participants can actively listen to each other and learn something new. Dialogue ultimately provides a space to bring together diverse viewpoints, explore these differences, and work towards understanding them better. Systems thinking recognizes that complex problems are different from simple or complicated problems. Some systems are only simple or complicated, meaning they will be predictable, controllable and designable, e.g. sending a rocket to the moon. Other systems are complex, meaning they are unpredictable, self-organizing and emergent, e.g. raising a child.

The Semester in Wicked Problems will enable exploration of a variety of complex problems, what makes them complex, and how solutions to complex problems need to be quite different from the “tried and true” solutions to complicated problems we’ve come to rely on.

What wicked problem keeps you up at night? 

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Diane T. Finegood is an experienced research leader and strategic thinker with an excellent track record of heading national and provincial health research organizations. She served as President & CEO of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (2012-2016) and inaugural scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (2000-2008). Diane is currently a Professor in the Centre for Dialogue and Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. As a bridge-builder and systems thinker, she has successfully facilitated the needs of disparate stakeholders to carve out common ground for effective dialogue-archive, collaboration and outcomes. Diane is also an internationally recognized researcher whose work and expertise range from cell biology, physiology, and mathematical modeling, to population and public health, health policy and knowledge translation.  She has received a range of awards, which reflect her impact as a leader, scientist, partner and mentor.

Chris Yakimov is the Associate Director, Digital Community Engagement for the Office of Community Engagement, SFU External Relations. He has worked as a digital strategist in the private, nonprofit and now public sector, and has a BA and MA from UBC in Psychology and Education, respectively. His graduate thesis was a narrative inquiry that explored the power relations brokered by the word “self”, in academic, therapeutic, and everyday discourse. He’s heavily influenced by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Damasio, Jaron Lanier and Judith Butler, and brings an abiding and passionate interest in the roles of emotion, autonomy, language and power within the complex bio-relational system that is “us”. Current interests include: critical deconstructions of economic and business systems, blockchain, cooperative governance, and the underutilized potential of fiction in knowledge mobilization and pedagogy. Vancouver-born, he loves hockey, photography, cli-fi, breakfast sandwiches and looking forward to whatever his three-year-old daughter will say next.

Fall 2019: Semester in Climate Futures

Climate change poses a profound challenge for the future – for individual lives, communities, nation-states and the world. Deep-rooted action is necessary both to reduce the negative impact of human activities on the climate and to adapt to the climate changes we know we will have to live with for generations to come. This Semester in Dialogue will tackle this global issue from many different angles: through the lenses of the physical sciences, economics, business, politics, ethics, psychology and communications. 

Class projects will focus on what individuals can do to respond to climate change at the personal and community scale. We will explore how different levels of government address climate policy and how individuals can influence those decisions, by working inside government as a public servant or elected official, or by working from outside through grass-roots or stakeholder organizations. We will also explore the role that markets and the private sector can play in moving the world towards a more sustainable, low carbon future. 

Through interactive workshops, dialogue-archives and group projects students will have an opportunity to engage with a wide range of thought leaders who are committed to finding climate change solutions. Students will also explore their own capacities to act, building on their strengths and networks, through coaching, skills-building workshops, and community outreach activities. 

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Michael Small is a Climate Solutions Fellow of the Centre for Dialogue. He co-designed and co-taught the Summer 2018 Semester in Dialogue on Urban Energy Futures. From 2015 – 2018 he was the first Executive Director of the Centre's program called Renewable Cities, which supports cities in the transition towards 100% renewable energy. 

Prior to joining SFU, Michael was a senior executive in the Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and he served as a Canadian diplomat for thirty-four years. He was Canada's High Commissioner to Australia from 2010 - 2014, Assistant Deputy Minister for Global Issues from 2006 - 2008, and Ambassador to Cuba from 2000 - 2003.  Earlier in his career, he played a leading role in shaping Canada’s human security agenda for Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and as the Co-ordinator for the Canadian delegation to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Deborah Harford is the Executive Director and co-founder of ACT (the Adaptation to Climate Change Team), based in the Faculty of Environment at SFU. A member of the first cohort of students in SFU’s innovative Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue, she is a lifelong environmentalist, passionate communicator, and thought leader on the emerging concept of low carbon resilience. 

Deborah was appointed as a Climate Solutions Fellow at SFU’s Centre for Dialogue in June 2015 and is an Adjunct Professor in SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management. She serves on numerous advisory boards, committees and panels, including Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Expert Panel on Climate Adaptation and Resilience Results, and the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Climate Risks for Canada. A frequent media commentator, Deborah is the author/co-author of numerous reports and articles on climate change adaptation, as well as a book on the history and future of the Columbia River Treaty in a changing climate. 

Patricia Lightburn is the Manager of Science and Policy at the David Suzuki Foundation, where she leads the climate policy team to advance climate solutions across Canada. She has over ten years of experience in climate and renewable energy, working for government, industry, and non-government organizations. She has contributed to publications on renewable energy, energy efficiency and district energy, for the Pembina Institute, the International Energy Agency and the United Nations Environment Program. Patricia has her master's degree from Sciences Po, Paris, and completed her undergraduate degree in environmental policy at the University of Toronto.

Summer 2019: Semester in Housing Futures

Full-time, 10 credits (DIAL 390W & 391W)

Application deadline: February 25, 2019

Program dates: May 6 - June 21, 2019

It’s not an easy time to be a young person trying to find a foothold in Vancouver, a city of bold contradictions. Home to one of the most expensive real estate markets in North America, the city, like many urban centers around the world, is also the site of an ongoing housing crisis evident in its growing homeless population and its rental vacancy rates that hover near zero. Unaffordable and inaccessible as they can be, cities are also home to numerous people and organizations who have dedicated their working lives to doing what can seem impossible: creating a more equitable city that a broad range of people can call home.

Through an exploration of the human, textured nuances of what makes a place a home, Semester in Housing Futures will dialogue-archive with planners, community advocates, developers and funders to probe what it takes to build cities that better reflect the housing needs of everyday people—particularly those struggling to get by and get started. We will work together to uncover bold, creative responses to what can seem like an unworkable housing crisis, and consider what it takes to build a city worth fighting for.

The goals of the class are largely about uncovering new ways of talking and thinking about difficult, divisive issues, productively learning from each other, and engaging in dialogue-archive through difference.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Am Johal is the Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.    

Mark Winston is a professor and senior fellow at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue.  

Jackie Wong is a facilitator, writer, and editor. She works in Vancouver’s social change community to advance public conversations about urban health, race, and equity.

Spring 2019: Complexity of Health and Wellness

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W - D100)

Health and wellness are complex topics worthy of exploration on many levels.  

The systems we have in place for “health care” are really “sickness care” systems.  In Canada, this sickness care system is primarily the responsibility of the provinces and territories.  In most jurisdictions the system uses the largest portion of provincial tax dollars, in addition to receiving transfer payments from the Federal government. Wellness in the form of prevention receives a very small proportion of the funding.

Canadian’s tend to perceive our healthcare system as universal and think it is excellent.  But not everyone is treated equally and there are many services not covered. Commonwealth Fund rankings put Canada at 10 out of 11 countries surveyed, including Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden and the UK.  Only our neighbor to the south has poorer performance and costs more.

The Spring 2019 Semester in Dialogue will use dialogue-archive and systems thinking as a means to examine the nature of health, inequalities and the boundary between health and other societal issues.  Specific themes that may be explored with invited guests and through assignments include:

• Mental health and addiction
• Indigenous health and wellness
• Aging, dementia and home and community care
• Precision health and personalized medicine
• HIV/AIDS
• Disability and diversability in the community
• Obesity and chronic disease prevention

APPROACH

Dialogue is intended to be an engaging and inclusive conversation for all participants, and is based on an understanding that everyone in the room is coming from a different background, and will have different interests and views. The goal of the Semester in Dialogue is to create a space where views can be expressed, and where participants can actively listen to each other and learn something new.  Dialogue ultimately provides a space to bring together diverse viewpoints, explore these differences, and work towards understanding them better.

Systems thinking recognizes that complex problems are different from simple or complicated problems.  Think: “cake, rocket, child” (simple, complicated, complex).

• Baking a cake is simple.  It is easily reproducible, context doesn't matter much and it doesn’t require a lot of expertise.  A recipe is helpful.
• Sending a rocket to the moon is complicated.  It is also reproducible after some trial and error, requires and benefits from lots of expertise.  Detailed recipes are necessary.
• Raising a child is complex.  Lessons don’t necessarily transfer from one child to the next. Expertise is not all that helpful.  The outcome is hard to predict. A recipe can’t be constructed.

The Spring 2019 Semester in Dialogue will apply systems thinking to both understanding and addressing complex health and wellness challenges.

Course runs Monday through Friday 9:30-4:30

ABOUT THE COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Diane T. Finegood is an experienced research leader and strategic thinker with an excellent track record of heading national and provincial health research organizations.  She served as President & CEO of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (2012-2016) and inaugural scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (2000-2008).  Diane is currently a Professor in the Centre for Dialogue and Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University.

As a bridge-builder and systems thinker, she has successfully facilitated the needs of disparate stakeholders to carve out common ground for effective dialogue-archive, collaboration and outcomes.  Diane is also an internationally recognized researcher whose work and expertise range from cell biology, physiology, and mathematical modeling, to population and public health, health policy and knowledge translation.  She has received a range of awards, which reflect her impact as a leader, scientist, partner and mentor.

Dr. Scott Lear is a Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and the inaugural Pfizer/Heart and Stroke Foundation Chair in Cardiovascular Prevention Research at St. Paul's Hospital. His research spans the breadth of prevention of chronic diseases at a population level to the management at an individual level. This includes the identification of environmental characteristics that may act as facilitators and barriers of healthy lifestyle habits, investigation of the role of ethnic background in risk for obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and how technology can help improve health care access and delivery.

Chris Yakimov is the Associate Director, Digital Community Engagement for the Office of Community Engagement, SFU External Relations. He has worked as a digital strategist in the private, nonprofit and now public sector, and has a BA and MA from UBC in Psychology and Education, respectively. His graduate thesis was a narrative inquiry that explored the power relations brokered by the word “self”, in academic, therapeutic, and everyday discourse. He’s heavily influenced by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Damasio, Jaron Lanier and Judith Butler, and brings an abiding and passionate interest in the roles of emotion, autonomy, language and power within the complex bio-relational system that is “us”. Current interests include: critical deconstructions of economic and business systems, blockchain, cooperative governance, and the underutilized potential of fiction in knowledge mobilization and pedagogy. Vancouver-born, he loves hockey, photography, cli-fi, breakfast sandwiches and looking forward to whatever his three-year-old daughter will say next.

SFU Semester at CityStudio

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

Semester at CityStudio brings together bright, innovative students from diverse backgrounds, disciplines and universities to collaborate with The City of Vancouver on demonstration projects. CityStudio is an immersive, team learning environment combining interdisciplinary skills with the complexity of collaborating within a group setting. The course combines dialogue-archive and design elements, and requires students to engage with communities, research existing urban interventions and design projects to improve the world around them. Students will co-create projects based on needs of City of Vancouver and the community and are encouraged to bring an open mind about project scope to the program. 

By focusing on current issues that matter in Vancouver, students have an opportunity to develop innovative solutions that assist The City of Vancouver in reaching its goals. Students cultivate the skills necessary to conduct student led dialogue-archives, public presentations, and to engage in multi-stakeholder processes with policy makers and City of Vancouver staff. The course offers field experiences, on-the-ground training, leadership development, group process, and urban sustainability project management skills.

Course runs Monday thru Friday, 9:30-3:30.
Students register through SFU. Course open to students from all participating universities.

Course instructors 

Janet Moore

Holly Schmidt is a Vancouver artist, curator and educator. She has a research-based practice that engages processes of collaboration and informal pedagogy. Moving across disciplinary boundaries, she explores the relationships between practices of making, knowledge creation and the formation of temporary communities. Her exhibition, public art and residency projects include Pollen Index (2016) Charles H. Scott Gallery, Till (2014/15) with the Santa Fe Art Institute Food Justice Residency, Moveable Feast (2012) Burnaby Art Gallery, Grow (2011) Other Sights for Artists’ Projects. Upcoming projects are Midnight Picnic (2018) Boca Del Lupo, Locals Only (2018) AKA Gallery, and Accretion (2018) 10 Different Things with ECUAD Living Labs, City Studio and Vancouver Public Art. She’s developed and taught course in social practice at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, as well as curating community engaged artist projects with the Contemporary Art Gallery.  

Adrian Sinclair is Director of Engagement for Transformation Projects and for The Vancouver Mural Festival. For over 10 years, Adrian has produced civic events, public programming and large festivals in Vancouver. Adrian specializes in event design, stakeholder engagement, and event management that aims to transform how art and culture is seen and experienced in cities. Formerly, he applied his passion in this area as Public Programs Coordinator at The Museum of Vancouver. In addition to his public engagement work, Adrian is the co-author and illustrator of Freestyle Focus Group: Learn to Freestyle Rap and Build Community (2016). He is also Co-Founder of the BC Mobile Sauna Society.

Urban Energy Futures

Full-time, 10 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W)

Cheap, safe, reliable energy is essential to modern urban life. The first and second industrial revolutions were powered by new forms of energy. Modern cities could not have been built without ready access to assured supplies of energy from coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear fission and hydro power. Yet the place of energy in our economy has become one of the most contested issues in our politics - witness the divisive debates over new pipelines, LNG terminals, and the site C dam.

At a global scale, burning fossil fuels for energy is by far the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions which are in turn are driving changes in the Earth's climate with unpredictable effects on the lives of millions of people. Renewable energy offers a promising alternative to fossil fuels - but the transition away from the sources of energy that have driven economic growth for the past two centuries will be contested, disruptive and uneven. 

Against this larger context, cities have become global laboratories for the transition to a clean energy economy. Many individuals and communities are taking their energy future into their own hands by installing their own roof-top solar panels or community owned windmills. Local governments have begun setting targets prescribing how and when energy use in their communities should shift in favour of renewables.

In the last two years, Vancouver has positioned itself at the fore-front of this emerging global movement by setting the goal of 100% renewable energy across all major sectors of urban energy use by 2050. Other communities in Metro Vancouver have embarked on their own low carbon energy transition plans.  

Is the goal of 100% renewable energy achievable at a cost which consumers are willing to bear? How can a city persuade its citizens to make fundamental changes in the way they have always used energy? Is this the job of a city in the first place? And what should be the continuing role of fossil fuels in the urban economy of the future?

This course will tackle these hard questions about Canada's energy future and the role of energy in urban life in Canada within an innovative and intense experiential learning environment. We will take a fresh look at the city around us and learn more about how energy is being used in old and new ways. We will talk to thought leaders, visit energy producers and distributors and develop group projects that serve local communities. At that same time, we will introduce methods of deliberative dialogue-archive and community engagement to learn new ways of talking and thinking with people about these divisive issues.

The goal will be to teach the skills required to build the understanding, empathy and broad-based agreement that will be necessary to move towards a clean energy future in Canadian cities. We welcome applications from students from all disciplines and hope to have as wide a range of them as possible represented in the cohort for this course.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

The course will be led by two experienced practitioners of dialogue-archive and public policy. 

Shauna Sylvester is the Director of the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. She is a Professor of Professional Practice in FASS and has been an experienced facilitator, thought leader and social entrepreneur for over thirty years.

Shauna has founded four organizations Carbon Talks, Renewable Cities, Canada’s World and IMPACS – the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, and she has led a number of university wide initiatives focused on city-building including two week-long Community Summits: Alone Together: Addressing Isolation in the Urban Environment and We The City.  Shauna also facilitated the Mayor of Vancouver’s Task Force on Affordable Housing, served on the Greenest City Action Plan External Oversight Body and was the lead Convener of Moving in a Livable Region, the largest consortium of business, academic, labour and community organizations working on transportation funding in BC.

Shauna is also an active volunteer and has served as a board member of the Downtown Business Improvement Association, Mountain Equipment Cooperative, Vancity Credit Union, Vancity Capital, the Voluntary Sector Initiative, the BC Assessment Authority and numerous non-profit organizations.

Michael Small is a Climate Solutions Fellow of the Centre for Dialogue. From 2015 – 2018 he was the first Executive Director of the Centre's program called Renewable Cities, which supports cities in the transition towards 100% renewable energy. As Executive Director, he hosted Renewable Cities Global Learning Forum in May 2015 and again in May 2017.

Prior to joining SFU, Michael was a senior executive in the Canadian Foreign Service and a Canadian diplomat for thirty-four years. He served as Canada’s High Commissioner to Australia from 2010 – 2014. In Ottawa, from 2006 – 2010 he was Assistant Deputy Minister for Global Issues and then for Human Resources in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. He served as Canada’s Ambassador to Cuba from 2000 – 2003. Earlier in his career, he played a leading role in shaping Canada’s human security agenda for Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and as the Co-ordinator for the Canadian delegation to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Michael is the author of a case study of third party mediation in international conflict called “The Forgotten Peace: Niagara Falls, 1914” (University of Ottawa Press, 2009).  He is a Fellow of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He was also the curator of two travelling photographic exhibits, “Canada – Cuba: One Hundred Years in View” (2003) and “Pacific Currents” (1996).

Health and Wellness: Complex, Not Just Complicated

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

Canadians take healthcare seriously and see our universal system as a key component of our national identity.  Although perceived as universal, the connected beliefs that the system covers everyone equally and provides excellent health care are misplaced.  Commonwealth Fund rankings put Canada at 10^th out of 11 countries surveyed, including Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden and the UK.  Only our neighbor to the south has poorer performance.   

Why don’t Canadians perceptions match the reality? What implication does this have for transforming our health and wellness systems?  What can and should be done to address quality, sustainability, universality?

Healthcare uses the largest portion of our provincial tax dollars and like most large systems, transformation is fiendishly complex.  The economics of healthcare demand some form of rationing, human biology and behavior are intricate, and the organizing principles on which healthcare is based were developed in a different era.

The Spring 2018 Semester in Dialogue will explore solutions to health and social care challenges through dialogue-archive, as well as a framework focused on complex adaptive systems. We’ll use dialogue-archive and systems thinking as a substrate to examine the nature of health, inequalities, delivery of health care, and the boundary between health and other societal issues. The course will probe the complexities of health and wellness systems that correspond with our values and ethics while being effective and financially stable.

Specific themes that may be explored with thought leaders and through assignments and projects include:

• Mental health and addiction
• Aboriginal health and wellness
• Aging, dementia and home and community care
• Precision health and personalized medicine
• Disability and Diversability in the community
• Obesity and chronic disease prevention

Students will develop solutions appropriate for complex problems, and present them to appropriate stakeholders as well as publicly through a dialogue-archive event they will develop and facilitate.

Course runs Monday through Friday 9:30-3:30

ABOUT THE COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Diane T. Finegood is an experienced research leader and strategic thinker with an excellent track record of heading national and provincial health research organizations.  She served as President & CEO of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (2012-2016) and inaugural scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes (2000-2008).  Diane is currently a Professor in the Centre for Dialogue and Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University.

As a bridge-builder and systems thinker, she has successfully facilitated the needs of disparate stakeholders to carve out common ground for effective dialogue-archive, collaboration and outcomes.  Diane is also an internationally recognized researcher whose work and expertise range from cell biology, physiology, and mathematical modeling, to population and public health, health policy and knowledge translation.  She has received a range of awards, which reflect her impact as a leader, scientist, partner and mentor.

Mark L. Winston is Professor and Senior Fellow at SFU's Centre for Dialogue. He has had a distinguished career researching, teaching, writing and commenting on bees and agriculture, environmental issues, and science policy. More recently, he has utilized dialogue-archive in classrooms, corporations, non-profit organizations, government, and community settings to develop leadership and communication skills, conduct strategic planning, inspire organizational change, and thoughtfully engage public audiences with controversial issues. Winston's work has appeared in numerous books, commentary columns for the Vancouver Sun, The New York Times, The Sciences, Orion magazine, and frequently on CBC radio and television and National Public Radio. His research, communication, and dialogue-archive achievements have been recognized by many awards, including the Manning Award for Innovation, Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, British Columbia Gold Medal in Science and Engineering, Academic of the Year, Eve Savory Award for Science Communication, Michael Smith Award for Science Promotion, a prestigious Killam Fellowship from the Canada Council, election as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and the 2015 Governor-General's Literary Award for Nonfiction, for his book Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive. Dr. Winston is a Professor of Biological Sciences and was the Founding Director of the Semester in Dialogue (2002–2014) and the Centre for Dialogue (2006–2014).

Robert A. Daum is Fellow and Lead in Diversity and Innovation at SFU’s Centre for Dialogue. He is a senior consultant for universities and government on institutional strategic change, public engagement, diversity, equity and inclusion, innovation in teaching and curriculum, leadership development, and conflict management. A researcher-practitioner in complexities of ideas, institutions, and cultures, he regularly moderates public programs on social issues. Dr. Daum is a Collaborator-Facilitator in www.diversitycircles.ca, an applied research project funded by BCIT’s first-ever SSHRC award, which supports BCIT’s faculty and staff in effectively engaging with increasingly diverse students through an Indigenous framework, beginning with the School of Public Health and the School of Business. He is Chair of The Laurier Institution and a founding Director of Reconciliation Canada. Dr. Daum is a member of the UBC Strategic Plan Steering Committee and the editorial board of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation’s refereed journal, Directions. He co-convened the Intercultural and Civic Engagement Strategy Group for the Vancouver Immigration Partnership. A Collaborator on two UBC-led, SSHRC-funded humanities research projects, Dr. Daum co-leads an international, interdisciplinary research consortium. His work has appeared in leading academic journals, and he has presented his research at international conferences in Canada, China, France, Spain, Sweden and the United States.

Fall 2017

SFU Semester at CityStudio

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

Semester at CityStudio brings together bright, innovative students from diverse backgrounds, disciplines and universities to collaborate with The City of Vancouver on demonstration projects. CityStudio is an immersive, team learning environment combining interdisciplinary skills with the complexity of collaborating within a group setting. The course combines dialogue-archive and design elements, and requires students to engage with communities, research existing urban interventions and design projects to improve the world around them. Students will co-create projects based on needs of City of Vancouver and the community and are encouraged to bring an open mind about project scope to the program. 

By focusing on current issues that matter in Vancouver, students have an opportunity to develop innovative solutions that assist The City of Vancouver in reaching its goals. Students cultivate the skills necessary to conduct student led dialogue-archives, public presentations, and to engage in multi-stakeholder processes with policy makers and City of Vancouver staff. The course offers field experiences, on-the-ground training, leadership development, group process, and urban sustainability project management skills.

Course runs Monday thru Friday, 9:30-3:30.
Students register through SFU. Course open to students from all participating universities.

Instructors: Janet Moore, Lisa Novak, Adrian Sinclair

Lisa Novak is an multidisciplinary designer and educator based in Vancouver, Canada. She currently holds a Bachelor of Arts from Leeds Metropolitan University, England, and a Master of Design from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Novak's practice and research heavily focuses on pedagogy, youth engagement, social practice, creative dissent and artistic activism. Formerly of design studio LCND in London, England, she currently teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, where she hosted the Winter School of Disobedience alongside political philosopher Cissie Fu in February 2017.

She is the founder of the School of Collaboration and Invention—a youth-led program focusing on artistic activism, design and social impact—and the Library of Resistance—a multifaceted research project investigating the roles and responsibilities of art and design in social and political movements.

She has previously received the BC Youth Engagement Grant for her project Exchange, which she facilitated and developed in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver in July 2015.

Adrian Sinclair is the Co-Founder of the event-design company: Transformation Projects. His specialty: finding ways to get audacious ideas off the ground that encourage folks to connect in public spaces. Adrian is a co-founder of the Vancouver Mural Festival, the BC Mobile Sauna Society, and the Freestyle Focus Group. During his tenure at Transformation Projects, he has had the chance to co-develop what he calls a “stakeholder-first approach” in order to design events with clients like the Museum of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, the Dragon Boat Festival, Hootsuite Media, BC Civil Liberties Union, The City of Vancouver and Bass Coast Festival. He teaches Gong Fu Cha (Chinese Tea Ceremony) classes at Sun Yat Sen Chinese Traditional Garden, and has led a weekly Freestyle Rap Drop-in for 7 years. Adrian completed his MA in Philosophy at The University of Western.

Summer 2017

SFU Semester Outside in the City III

Full-time, 10 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W)

For the past two summers, students from across universities and disciplines came together to re-vision the potential for outdoor learning within Vancouver. This was part of the Outdoor Learning Project by CityStudio which saw students from SFU Semester in Dialogue and BCIT create innovative temporary installations and educational projects within Everett Crowley Park. These two terms enabled students to deepen their connection with the natural world and be proactive as ecologically caring citizens of the city.  We look forward to continuing this work as we begin Semester Outside in the City III this summer.

The City of Vancouver Parks Board Environmental Education & Stewardship Action Plan (EESAP-2014) "Rewilding Vancouver" identifies the creation of special wild places in the city as its first priority area. This semester will take place in this urban wild, building directly on the work done in the last two summer terms. Likely conversations needing further exploration include: indigeneity and colonization, public conception of the purpose of parks, re-wilding, nature-as-teacher, urban ecology, wildness, ecological vs. outdoor learning, and many more.

We will focus on the continued exploration of urban parks as outdoor learning sites within the city. We will deeply consider the history, ecology and communities of the sites that we engage with as a starting point for design. We will also consider the terms public space, wild space and what re-wilding in urban parks mightlook like. By listening and learning from the multitude of voices that inhabit urban wildernesses we hope to better understand the complex systems, deep connections and our relation to them.  Students will work on both individual and group projects. Don’t miss out on the indoor and outdoor adventures during this innovative and experiential Semester Outside in the City!

For more details on Semester Outside I and II watch these videos and take a look at the reports HERE.

Course runs Monday through Friday 9:30-3:30
Instructors:  Dr. Laura Piersol, Mark Winston and Janet Moore

Spring 2017

Decolonizing Dialogues, Solidarities, and Activism

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

Governments, organizations and individuals in Canada are mobilizing around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action to change Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples. But what does “reconciliation” actually entail?  And what does it mean to live on Indigenous lands? 

We welcome students from different backgrounds and with different levels of experience to engage in deep discussions about the present moment in Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations. Through a series of dialogue-archives with Indigenous peoples as well as activists, allies, academics, and others who are supporting Indigenous resurgence, course participants will consider what decolonization means at individual and collective levels. 

The course will use pedagogies that invite holistic understandings and embrace complexities. Experiential learning, visits with Indigenous communities, thought leaders, dialogue-archive invitees, and reading reflections as well as individual and group projects will help course participants to identify how the personal and the political, the local and the global intersect their own identities and their relationships with Indigenous peoples. 

We will also consider questions of alliances and solidarities, as well as the opportunities and tensions in relation to action. Values of responsibility, respect and reciprocity will guide our exploration of how we might construct ethical activist practice based on decolonizing and transformative learning.  

About the course facilitators:

Lynne Davis lived in Vancouver in the early 1980s and is an Associate Professor at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario in the Indigenous Studies Department. She is on sabbatical in 2017 and was invited to co-teach this course. Lynne’s most recent teaching is on Indigenous and International Community Development; Indigenous-Non-Indigenous Alliances for Social and Environmental Justice; and Transforming Settler Consciousness.

Sean Blenkinsop is a regular course leader in the Semester in Dialogue program. He is an environmental educator and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at SFU, with special assignment to the Semester in Dialogue Program.

Michelle Lorna Nahanee is a member of the Squamish Nation who works within the intersection of class, race, culture and creativity. As a communications designer, Michelle has created social justice campaigns for First Nations organizations across Canada, and within her home community. From health promotion to gender equity, Michelle’s collaborations have influenced opinions, changed behaviours and mobilized community action. She is happy to have recently joined the Board of Kwi Awt Stelmexw, a non-profit organization formed by Squamish Peoples to strengthen all aspects of Squamish heritage, language, culture, and art. Michelle is currently completing her MA in Communications at SFU with a thesis on disseminating decolonizing practices. She is grateful for her teachings.

Dorothy Christian, PhD (Secwepemc-Syilx), is a member of the Splatsin, one of 17 communities of the Secwepemc Nation.  She is the eldest of 10 and has one daughter and over 60 nieces, nephews and great nieces and nephews.  Dorothy’s doctoral research “Gathering Knowledge:  Indigenous Methodologies of Land/Place-Based Visual Storytelling & Visual Sovereignty” looked closely at the connections between land, story and cultural protocols. The impetus for this research came from her production experience in the film and television industry where she delivered many Indigenous stories from Turtle Island (North America) to the Canadian screen culture.  Ms. Christian  accumulated over 100 professional production credits for writing, directing and segment producing her visual stories for a national broadcaster.   

 Recently Dorothy co-edited the book downstream:  Reimagining Water (2017) with Dr. Rita Wong (Emily Carr), published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Other publications include:  a book chapter, “Untapping Watershed Mind” co-authored with Rita Wong in Thinking With Water (2013), C. Chen, J. MacLeod, A. Neimanis (Eds.), published by McGill-Queens University Press; a book chapter in Volume 3 of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation books, “Reconciling With The People and The Land” in Cultivating Canada:  Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity (2011); chapter co-authored with Victoria Freeman (York University), “The History of a Friendship or Some Thoughts on Becoming Allies” in L. Davis (ed.). Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships (2010), published by University of Toronto Press.

Semester at CityStudio

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

Semester at CityStudio brings together bright, innovative students from diverse backgrounds, disciplines and universities to collaborate with The City of Vancouver on demonstration projects. CityStudio is an immersive, team learning environment combining interdisciplinary skills with the complexity of collaborating within a group setting. The course combines dialogue-archive and design elements, and requires students to engage with communities, research existing urban interventions and design projects to improve the world around them.

By focusing on current issues that matter in Vancouver, students have an opportunity to develop innovative solutions that assist The City of Vancouver in reaching its goals. Students cultivate the skills necessary to conduct student led dialogue-archives, public presentations, and to engage in multi-stakeholder processes with policy makers and City of Vancouver staff. The course offers field experiences, on-the-ground training, leadership development, group process, and urban sustainability project management skills.

* Students register through SFU. Course open to students from all participating universities—must apply by March 31, 2016

instructors

Janet Moore is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of CityStudio and Director and Associate Professor of Semester in Dialogue.

Duane Elverum is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of CityStudio.

Adrian Sinclair is the Director of Engagement and Co-Founder of Transformation Projects. His specialty: finding ways to get audacious ideas off the ground that encourage folks to connect in public spaces. Adrian is the Vice-President of the BC Mobile Sauna Society, and Co-Founder of the Freestyle Focus Group. Adrian can usually be found at the centre of thoughtful, engaging and dynamic events in BC. During his tenure at Transformation Projects, he has had the chance to co-develop what he calls a “stakeholder-fist approach” to event design with clients like the Museum of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, Rio-Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival, Hootsuite Media, BC Civil Liberties, City of Vancouver and Bass Coast Festival. He teaches Gong Fu Cha (Chinese Tea Ceremony) classes at Sun Yat Sen Chinese Traditional Garden, and has led a weekly Freestyle Rap Drop-in for over 5 years. He is currently helping launch Vancouver’s first Mural Festival in partnership with the COV, MPBIA and Create Vancouver. Adrian completed his MA in Philosophy at The University of Western.

Semester Outside in the City II

Full-time, 10 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W)

Last summer, students from across universities and disciplines came together to re-vision the potential for outdoor learning within Vancouver. This year, Semester Outside in the City II continues as part of the CityStudio Outdoor Classroom Project. The recently released City of Vancouver Parks Board Environmental Education & Stewardship Action Plan (EESAP) Rewilding Vancouver identifies the creation of special wild places in the city as its first priority area. One of the Quick Start Actions is to determine the feasibility of an outdoor school in Vancouver. Increasing access to nature, increasing city-wide food assets and reducing the city’s ecological footprint are key priority actions for the City of Vancouver.

This semester will build directly on the work done in the first iteration, engaging university students in the co-creative design of innovative outdoor learning opportunities in Vancouver parks and community centres to facilitate community learning and action towards these goals. Students from last year’s cohort along with BCIT’s design students who created several proposals for Everett Crowley Park will be invited to spend time sharing and exploring with this year’s cohort in order to continue building on what has already been learned. Likely conversations needing further exploration include: re-wilding, urban ecology, wildness, ecological vs. outdoor learning, and many more.

With all the above in mind, we will focus on the continued exploration of an outdoor learning site in Everett Crowley Park.

Key Questions for the Site:

What has happened here?
What is happening here now?
What should be happening here?  

We will deeply engage in the site and learn about the history, context, place, ecology and communities that engage with it. We will also consider the terms public space, wild space and what re-wilding might look like. Be prepared to explore and learn from Everett Crowley Park in myriad ways, forms, and times as we come to better understand its complex systems, deep connections and wild places. We are planning many adventures and opportunities along with this hoping to include the multitude of voices that inhabit urban wildernesses during this innovative and experiential Semester Outside in the City II.

• Course runs Monday thru Friday, 10:00-4:00, May 9–June 24

Instructors

Sean Blenkinsop is an Associate Professor in the SFU Faculty of Education with a secondment for five years to the Semester in Dialogue.

Laura Piersol is a SFU course instructor, educational researcher, and wonderer/wanderer within the Fraser River and Chapman Creek Watersheds. She has worked as an ecological educator for 20 years throughout Canada and the U.S. She helped to start two public elementary schools, the Maple Ridge Environmental School and NEST (Nature Education for Sustainable Todays and Tomorrows), where she continues to work as an educational researcher.

Marcus Morse is a Senior Lecturer in Outdoor and Environmental Education at La Trobe University, Australia. He has extensive experience guiding and teaching outdoor and experiential education in Australia and overseas, and is undertaking a study program in Canada during 2016 focussed on outdoor learning. Marcus’ research interests are in the areas of environmental education, meaning making and peoples experience within nature.

Spring 2016. Semester in Experimental Futures

Full-time, 15 credits (DIAL 390W, 391W, 392W)

“Experimental Futures” will explore the intersections of the environment (nature), politics (culture) and the role of the arts and dialogue-archive to rethink and imagine new environmental and political associations and attitudes. Climate change and environmental degradation are rapidly increasing around the world, disproportionately impacting the globe’s most vulnerable. The intersection of culture, language, and ways of being are pushing us all to rethink how we consider, live among, and interact with each other.

We are bombarded with information in this digital age while struggling to find the meaning within it. Profound cultural changes are afoot and clearly needed in this newly named epoch the Anthropocene, compelling us to seek out new and substantially different solutions, shifting how we collectively engage one another. We will use the arts and dialogue-archive as guides to explore building new relationships between people, places, and institutions while enunciating with clarity and impact the communities we seek for the future. 

Focal questions may include:

How can we imagine new disruptive interventions, new models of engagement, collaboration, and governance, even new economic systems?

How can these new ideas be brought to the forefront as we try to bridge that gap between the old way of being in the world with novel ideals and policies for the future?

How do we articulate new progress while honouring powerful and important histories?

What role do the arts and dialogue-archive play in locating and responding to these challenges?

What might relationships between the technological, ecological, and political become in light of these changes and possibilities?

We will explore these questions at various personal, local, regional, and global levels of scale, but focus our work at the local level to facilitate seeking vital responses to the challenges of political, ecological, and cultural issues faced in our immediate communities.

Possible questions might include:

What are the implications of the Anthropocene on the future of the greenest city?

How are the arts understood in the Lower Mainland and what role are they currently playing as disruptive and imaginative forces?

How does this kind of cultural work gain traction in our communities? What is the future of public spaces in the politics of the local?

What role do public movements and changing definitions of the social play in responding to the growing environmental crisis?

Where and how can emergent voices intervene, participate and shape these conversations?

This course will explore these and related themes through dialogue-archives with thought leaders from across the spectrum of the arts, politics, environment and social change.  You’ll be exposed to cinema, fiction, art projects and interventions, theoretical writings, case studies and on-the-ground projects with guest thought leaders, attend public events and organize participatory public programming to develop richer, more nuanced understandings of the challenges and possibilities of the future. You will be challenged to develop practices, ways of being, and the skills needed to play active roles as citizens, innovators (experimental imaginers), and collaborators in this new and changing world. This is about the creative imaginings at the intersection between nature and culture.

• Course runs Monday thru Friday, 10:00-4:00, January 5 - April 11
• 15 credits (Dial 390W, 391W, 392W)

Instructors

Sean Blenkinsop is an Associate Professor in the SFU Faculty of Education with a secondment for five years to the Semester in Dialogue.

Am Johal is the Director of SFU's Vancouver Office of Community Engagement in the SFU Woodward's Cultural Unit.

Melora Koepke is a Vancouver-based journalist, urban geographer-in-training and teacher. Her research work focuses on the processes and practices of food and food security, on scales ranging from local to global, and explores how food is and can become a medium for change in the world and a link between human and natural ecologies.

Leah Wiener is a history PhD candidate at SFU. Her research examines the development of health policies pertaining to Ontario's Aboriginal children in the first half of the twentieth century. She also has keen interests in the pasts, presents, and futures of gender, childhood, health, and colonialism more broadly.