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Hello everyone! In this edition, we celebrate our Winter 2025 Cohort’s recent completion of Phase 1 of Curriculum Integration. Also, we have gathered Curriculum Integration strategies for nine subject areas and presented them here in a new convenient format for you. Just select the subject area you’re interested in to see a relevant CI strategy/ies.
On April 8th, faculty champions in the second cohort of Human Skills Curriculum Integration gathered at Newnham Campus to share some of their ideas for meaningful integration of critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Faculty champions learned more about the origins of the Human Skills priority area from Dean of Flexible Delivery, Claire Moane and engaged in discussion surrounding next steps of the project with T&LC director Amy Lin.
Faculty Champions also shared some of their recommended goals from their roadmaps for the next two years, and received feedback and inspiration from others in the room. Todd Malarczuk and Jamie Arfin are thrilled to have worked with this cohort and look forward to seeing the Human Skills more explicitly woven into programs and course clusters in the upcoming months and years to come. Please don't hesitate to reach out to them and the Teaching and Learning Centre team (teaching@senecapolytechnic.ca) if you want to discuss Seneca's Human Skills framework and ideas for integration in your own classroom/ course/ program.!
On April 10, 2025, our faculty champions, CI faculty, and guests participated in Giveaway Day to mark the end of the first phase of Curriculum Integration for the Winter 2025 cohort in Truth & Reconciliation, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion, and Sustainability. We celebrated the faculty champions’ achievements and hard work as well as the confidence they had gained from the CI first phase to start incorporating TRC, EDI, and SUS principles into their courses. At the same time, we remembered that teaching will always be an ongoing journey alongside students, and there will never be such a thing as a “perfect” course. No teacher will ever know all the answers to all the questions that might ever be asked, but the goal is progress, not perfection.
The highlight of the event was learning from the faculty champions’ presentations on their action plans for curriculum integration. Their ideas and strategies showed creative and inspiring CI applicability to a wide variety of subjects including English literature, communications, math, science, pharmaceutical regulation, and medical ethics.
The reason it’s called Giveaway Day is based on a teaching from Elder Blu in Chapter 12 of Skoden. Now that our Faculty Champions have gained knowledge and insight into these three pillar areas, how will they give away what they have learned to others and enable a shift in their perspectives? With gratitude and appreciation, we look forward to our Faculty Champions giving away their learnings as they start the second phase of their CI journey.
Captions: Photo 1: Faculty champions, faculty, and guests introduced themselves; Photo 2: Enjoying a coffee break; Photo 3: Hearing CI experiences from different disciplines and departments within Seneca; Photo 4: CI Winter 2025 Cohort Giveaway Day participants. Source: Seneca Polytechnic.
In April 2024, we first published a letter to our first cohort of Curriculum Integration Faculty Champions, from Mark Solomon, Associate Vice-President in the Office of Reconciliation and Inclusion. In this impassioned letter, Mark spoke of his experience starting at Seneca as its first Indigenous employee back in 2006 and witnessing the growth of Seneca over time. As we as Senecans continue to seek truth, reconciliation, equity and sustainability in our communities, Mark’s message encourages us to step up to the challenge and to be brave and be Seneca.
Visit this link to read Mark's letter in full.
For our supersized edition, the editorial team has compiled summaries of practical Curriculum Integration strategies from nine subject areas. These strategies have been tried out by your fellow faculty and appear in earlier newsletter editions. Have a read for some handy tips and inspiration!
It’s Audit Time for Carbon Emissions (SUS)Using the framework for carbon accounting emissions standards from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GGP) resource, students complete GGP analysis worksheets, present their findings to the class, and receive feedback from their professor and peers on their analysis.
Read more about the Accounting strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for November 18-22, 2024.
What’s the Deal with Steel? (SUS)On a weekly basis, students read sustainability articles about steel production and discussed them in class during “What’s the Deal with Steel” conversations. After a few weeks of discussions, students were asked to find their own relevant articles/videos and provide the class with guiding questions. Students also worked through an asynchronous module and watched videos about new technologies used to eliminate fossil fuels in the production of steel.
Read more about the Applied Science & Engineering Technology strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for October 7-11, 2024.
Internet Access in Urban and Rural Communities in Ontario (EDI, TRC, SUS)
Students investigate the differences in internet access in urban and rural communities across Ontario through surveys and data collection, analysis, and visualization. They then evaluate the existing infrastructure in urban and rural areas, explore solutions for more equitable internet access across the province, and assess the feasibility and effectiveness of different solutions. Finally, they write and present a policy and recommendations report for addressing the based on their findings.
Read more about the Applied Science & Engineering Technology strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for February 17-21, 2025.
Using Design Thinking to Address Real-World Problems (EDI, SUS, TRC)
In this Communications assignment, titled Writing for Social Change, Professor Candace Duval-Clarke required students to select a social problem meaningful to them. Then, after identifying the elements of the problem, the purpose of the solution, the stakeholders, and opportunities to address it, the students had to write persuasive articles calling for action, providing research to support their views.
For Professor Duval-Clarke, an important learning outcome was for students to remember not to focus on "saving the world" but to understand how to address problems in ways that promote meaningful action and change. An effective engagement strategy for her was bringing a personal and relatable example of systems thinking to her students. For example, as an avid coffee drinker, she opened a lesson by showing her class an image of a coffee bean and then asking if they knew where Starbucks sourced its coffee.
Read more about the Communications strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for December 2-6, 2024.
Fast and Slow Thinking in the Classroom (EDI, Human Skills)
This strategy draws from the work of Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Through discussion of readings from the book and videos on the subject followed by reflective assignments where students evaluate their own decision-making processes, students understand the differences between “fast” and “slow” thinking, identify cognitive biases associated with “fast” thinking, and develop strategies to encourage deliberate and analytical thinking.
Read more about the strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for March 17-21, 2025.
Enriching Video Game Design with EDI (EDI, SUS)
This activity and assignment start with discussing the significance of inclusive environments within immersive video games, after which students perform their own research on representation and inclusivity in popular video games and online gaming communities. In small groups, they choose a game to evaluate and then develop a design proposal by which the game can be made more inclusive and representative of its players.
Read more about the Game Design strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for March 3-7, 2025.
Exploring Environmental Relationships (SUS, TRC)
In Wai Chu Cheng's Exploring Environmental Relationships class, students used a "two-eyed seeing approach" integrating Indigenous and Western worldviews to learn about environmental issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and air pollution. Instrumental to this strategy were readings and guided discussions from the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robyn W. Kimmerer, which interweaves traditional stories and teachings about the land and people's relationship to it with the author's scientific training and knowledge.
For assessment purposes, students had the choice of completing a reflective essay and in-class discussions about how their new knowledge affected their lives and goals or reflecting and discussing asynchronously on the online discussion board.
Read more about the General Education strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for February 3-7, 2025.
Read more about the General Education strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for March 17-21, 2025.
BOGO for Sustainable Marketing
In a twist on the conventional "Buy One, Get One" strategy, students developed "Buy One, Give One" marketing campaigns that promote sales and social responsibility at the same time. Students chose appropriate products for buying and giving/donating, created marketing videos using the BOGO approach, and explained how their campaign encouraged responsible consumption and production.
Read more about the Marketing strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for November 4-8, 2024.
Calculating CO2 Emissions with Riemann Sums (SUS)
Students applied first-year calculus skills towards calculating and comparing total CO2 emissions for the United States and China from 1980 and 2015 and then reflected on the possible effects of these emissions on the Earth's climate and communities.
Read more about the Mathematics strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for October 21-25, 2024.
Social Privilege and Social Justice in Nursing Relationships (EDI, TRC)
Achieving cultural competence as a nurse requires approaching service delivery from a place of cultural safety and humility. In this learning exercise, adapted from one at the University of British Columbia, Professor Michelle Pang asks students to identify themselves according to social domains such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, language, ability/disability and reflect on whether the identity or identities place them in a position of privilege or marginalization relative to the populations they may encounter.
Through group discussions, students explored their different social identities, discovered which ones they were the most or least aware of, and discussed how their positionality influenced their approach to patient care.
Read more about the Nursing strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for December 16-20, 2024.
Read more about the Psychology strategy and related resources in the CI Newsletter for March 17-21, 2025.
References
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