Hi everyone. Welcome to our CTLT 2023 spring institute session titled, How do instructors design experiential education activities in large first year classes in the faculty of arts? My name is Naomi Hudson and I'm an undergraduate research assistant at the UBC Office for Regional and International Community Engagement. I'm joined here by my fellow research assistants, Asim Jashkabai and Liria Perez, as well as our panelists, doctors Neil Armitage, Katherine Lyon, Jiang Wang, and Breanne Orr-Alvarez. Thank you so much for all of you for joining us here this afternoon. Before I continue, I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the lands upon which we're gathered. While we may be located all throughout the province, country, or the world, I'd like to acknowledge that UBC Vancouver is located on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Musgrim, Squamish, and Slewa II peoples. And as we proceed through this session on experiential education, we encourage you to think about the ways in which you can challenge your centric and paracletal theories of education and promote and encourage more emancipatory ways of learning that promote truth and reconciliation. We encourage you to learn more about the indigenous lands upon which you live, work, and play. So as previously stated, this session is on experiential education, specifically in large first-year classes. It'll be an interactive session where we'll present research and personal insights into what experiential education looks like or can look like at UBC. And we hope that at the end of our hour and a half together, we'll leave feeling more confident in your ability to design and implement experiential education into your courses. We'll begin with a session, we'll begin our session with a brief presentation from the Oris Research Assistance on some of the research that we've conducted over the past year and a half on experiential education in large first-year classes. And after that, we'll hear from each of our four panelists on their experiences with experiential education. And finally, we'll end the session with time permitting, obviously, with some our breakout rooms where we invite participants to discuss some of their key takeaways from this session. If you have any questions throughout the session, please feel free to raise your hand or ask them in the chat and we'll be more than happy to answer them. Are there any questions before we get going? And if not, we can just jump straight into our presentation. So, without further ado, I'm very excited to introduce the first-year experiential education or FYEE project from UBC Oris. So, in this presentation, the Oris Research Assistance will be sharing some key findings from the research that we've done on how to minimize faculty barriers to experiential learning in large first-year arts courses. So, just for a brief overview of what's to come in this specific presentation, we'll begin with the quick introduction of the FYEE project itself and the team behind it. Then we'll introduce you to some in to existing information on this topic. From there, we'll delve into our preliminary findings and we'll end our presentation with some recommendations on how to improve the state of experiential education at UBC. To dive a little bit deeper into the project, the general purpose of our research is to identify challenges and facilitators in the application of experiential education in first-year large classes, specifically in the Faculty of Arts, and to eventually develop resources to help promote experiential education around the faculty, again focusing on first-year and large classes. Our study populations comprised of instructors and students in the Faculty of Arts across various departments and we aim to answer the following research questions. How can first-year better prepare and scaffold students for second and fourth year or upper year EE courses? What prevents instructors from implementing EE in large first-year courses? And finally, what makes it possible to do EE in large first-year classes and what motivates instructors to do so? To introduce the first-year experiential education team, we have our supervisors going left to right, which include Tamara Baldwin, the director of the Office of Regional and International Community Engagement, Dr. Neil Armitage, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Dr. Katherine Mayan, an assistant professor of teaching in the Department of Sociology, and finally Dr. Siobhan McBee, an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Geography. At the bottom, we have our research assistants including myself, Asam Jeksebay, Naomi Hudson, and Blair Parris. Now to dive a little bit deeper into the project, our literature review established the connection between experiential education and its uses in large first-year courses, specifically by discussing the foundational theory behind experiential education, the outcomes for students and instructors, the benefits and drawbacks of implementing it, and the motivations behind it. For the purposes of our research and the scope of this project, a large class was defined as more than 50 students, or even greater than 100 students, as is most common in large research universities such as UBC, and experiential education, or EE, was defined as a learning philosophy that is based on the premise that certain knowledge can be acquired more effectively through experience rather than didactic classroom content. We found that existing literature tends to emphasize experiential education as a successful learning strategy specifically for upper-year smaller classes, despite the well-documented benefits of experiential education across all educational levels. And so our literature review identified an opportunity for the development of better support systems for faculty and students. So this led to this research project, and our research data included input on experiential education at UBC from both instructors and students with an emphasis on the former. We interviewed 13 professors, all of whom had experience in experiential education and arts classes, and while not all of them implemented EE in first year, all of them had experience with EE in large classes overall. Additionally, we conducted a focus group with approximately 30 upper-year sociology students on their views and experiences of EE at UBC to gain a better understanding of EE and the experiences from the student side. All interviews and focus groups were qualitatively coded and formed a basis for preliminary findings and recommendations that you will see later on in this presentation. Okay, so here we have an overview of some of our key findings. We'll be addressing some of these more in depth later on in the presentation, but for now here's a summary of what we found through our data collection process. Firstly, we found that most instructors understand experiential education as community engaged and specifically in first year as bite-sized learning, which we'll delve into later on. Secondly, we learned that experiential education has many pedagogical benefits, including helping students develop both hard and soft skills that they can use throughout the rest of their degrees and in their future careers. Thirdly, we found that experiential education in lower years, so i.e. first or even going into second year, can help set the foundation for EE in third or fourth years and beyond. Fourthly, we found that institutional and equity-related barriers are hindrances to the implementation and design of EE. And finally, we concluded that a strong network of support is needed for the successful implementation and design of experiential education. So what does EE look like in first year? Most of the activities described by instructors who conduct experiential education in first year courses at UBC were primarily strategy-specific or community-engaged activities. Strategy-specific activities in this case or in this context refer to short-term bite-sized versions of larger projects that aim to develop specific skills such as reflection, critical thinking, technical skills and so on. And they acted as both an introduction to the university as a whole and experiential education. Examples of experiential education described by instructors excluded more extensive projects that require deeper engagement, more time commitment and higher skill levels. So for example, it excluded very extensive international experiences or more direct involvement with community partners, which were more prevalent in upper-year EE examples. Instructors in our study therefore strategically chose experiential activities that they deemed appropriate for first-year students in order to build the foundation for their learning experiences later on. So we are asking ourselves why EE in first-year classes. So with our study, we found that EE in first year in the Faculty of Art was often seen as a stepping stone to larger, more immersive and substantial EE opportunities in upper-year courses. And the rationale being that first-year students may not have the capacity to handle more substantive EE experiences when they first join the university. So exposing students to experiential education as early as possible can help them build the strong foundations necessary to take full advantage of the more extensive hands-on educational opportunities that they may encounter in upper years of their undergraduate degrees where most of EE experiences are found. So this foundational build-up can be seen through three of the benefits that EE has in first-year students in the long run. First being that EE is highly effective introduction to students' discipline of choice. Second being EE teaches students skills and knowledge that will be more easily retained throughout their course after a degree. And third, EE helps students build an early strong sense of identity as members of the wider academic community. So when analyzing our instructor interviews, we found that barriers to experiential education can be divided into two broad categories, institutional or school-related barriers and equity barriers. So starting with institutional barriers, then those can be split into two sub-categories, access to resources and class structures. Let's start with class structures. We identified three main class structure-related barriers, time constraints, assessments and class sizes. I'll focus on the first two since we'll delve more into class sizes later on once we talk about resources. So with regard to time constraints, many professors felt like the traditional three-credit semester-long course structure doesn't really give students or instructors enough time to fully benefit from all that EE has to offer. Rather, they suggest that six credit year-long courses, often found in certain programs like the Coordinated Arts Program, would be more conducive to EE classes. Assessments were another concern at a primary source of stress for instructors and students alike. Students may find that they're not willing to take EE classes due to anxieties about the class affecting their averages and they would rather stick with the familiarity of the traditional lecture style learning. And professors may find it difficult to apply quote-unquote traditional forms of assessment to experiential education, especially when students input their own views and experiences into their classwork, which can be pretty common in EE. I mean after all, how does one assign a grade to a student's own personal experience? And so moving on to types of resources, there are two main types of resources that professors indicated that they lacked adequate access to, human and financial. So with regards to human resources, in this case, this largely referred to TA and academic assistance report, especially in large first year classes that often have hundreds of students. With regards to financial resources, some professors expressed that there is a lack of sustainable funding for EE opportunities. And they also said that the temporary nature of grant funding can be a large cause of stress for instructors who are seeking to maybe introduce more immersive or cost-intensive opportunities to their students. In addition, instructors are very rarely rewarded monetarily for implementing EE. And these barriers disproportionately affect marginalized scholars, so academics of color, women, queer academics, etc., who are more likely to take on these opportunities in the first place, which brings us to our second barrier, equity. Again, we divided this barrier into two subcategories, instructor barriers and student barriers. And since we already touched a bit on instructor equity barriers, let's expand upon that first. So like we stated before, marginalized professors are often the ones that take on most of the burden of the design and implementation of EE. These instructors are also less likely to be tenured or tenure-track, which means that they have heavier force belts in their white, straight, male, or cis counterparts, resulting in an even higher burden being placed upon them. And so if we shift the focus over to students, we'll see that there's a lot of overlap in the equity barriers facing both students and professors, specifically identity-related barriers like what we just discussed earlier, but also accessibility barriers, financial barriers for students who can't afford the more cost-intensive opportunities, as well as students that have responsibilities outside of school being affected by the time constraints that are often associated with EE. So in response to the challenges, we have grouped the facilitators that are called Motivated Instructors in Design, Development, and Execution of Extrational Education in first-year large classes. So similar to our challenges, these groups, which are really summarized for this presentation, correspond to first, Institutional Facilitators, which this time explains how existing or possible class structure resources and organizations within EBC have been helpful so far to implement EE. Second, we have Equity Facilitators, which this time focuses more on professors' desire for UBC Vancouver to recognize the immense labor of both faculty and students that often goes into the implementation of experiential education. And third, we have an Extra Social Component, which talks about the need of creating spaces for instructors to get to know what other structures are doing, share resources, and find support within each other instead of implementing EE in isolation. So we have joined these three groups into what Montaigne Hubber referred to in their 2021 article, As the Village, which explains how educational designers, administrators, teaching assistants, and technologies create this digit village community to successfully incorporate the sociological and ecological aspects of EE. And so we'll conclude our presentation with a list of recommendations on how to improve the state of EE at UBC. And these recommendations are largely based on the barriers and facilitators identified by students and instructors in our research collection process. So firstly, there's clearly a need for more access to human resources for instructors like TA and AA support. And these positions, because they're often occupied by students, can also serve as sort of a de facto form of experiential education in and of themselves. So you're kind of killing two birds with one stone in that regard. We'd also advocate for more access for networking opportunities for instructors, and this can manifest in a variety of forms, including conferences, fellowships, mixers, and much more. We'd also recommend the creation and distribution of peer-reviewed resources on assessment to help professors navigate how to assess EE in an alerting environment that doesn't always make it super clear how to do that. Additionally, we would recommend the development of resources on course design, including on how to incorporate equity, diversity, and inclusion in EE course content. And finally, on the instructor side, more institutional recognition for professors to implement EE is also necessary. And we also have some recommendations specifically on how to increase student engagement in EE. This includes more low-to-no cost opportunities for students who may not be able to afford the more costly opportunities such as Go Global, more year-long six-credit EE courses so that students with responsibilities outside of schools such as work or commuting are not so pressed for time, as well as more research into student and TA perspectives on EE. While we were able to engage students with our focus group and we found that research to be incredibly valuable to forming our findings, this project was still largely focused on the instructor's perspective. And so we feel like in the future, having a project that may be focused on the student and TA perspective can help us gain a fuller understanding of the benefits of EE and how to really take full advantage of them going forward. So as we get to the end of our presentation, we would like to jump right to introducing our panelists. So if you have any questions about any of the information shared in our presentation, feel free to write your questions in the chat or bring it up at the end of our panel. So we have a pleasure to share this space with four wonderful professors who will talk about the different ways they have worked and implemented EE in first-year large courses. First, we'll have the opportunity to hear from Dr. Breanne O'Arbarez, Associate Professor of Teaching and Head of Spanish Studies and the Director of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies Learning Center. Later, we'll hear from Dr. Chen Wang, Associate Professor of Teaching and Director of the Chinese Language Program at Asian Studies, who will be followed by Dr. Katherine Ryan and Dr. Neal Armitage. Can you all see my screen? Yes, okay, wonderful. So thank you so much for the introduction and I'm very excited to be part of this panel. I'm going to open up the discussion on what EE looks like in a language specific setting. So we'll start with the language and then move into the sociology views. And I focus this part on my intervention, I guess, on three specific questions. Why do we do experiential education in FHIS, which is the French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies Department? How we do it particularly in Spanish, which is the context that I'll speak to in terms of examples and then what some of the challenges and solutions are in my specific context, which I think align very well to what we've heard already. So why is experiential education important in my department in general? We're a department of romance languages. So we teach French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and even Catalan. So we have several language contexts and we have majors and minors in French and Spanish and Italian also has a minor. So we are a unique major and minor in the sense that a lot of our students will start at the basic 101 level in first year Spanish, for example. And they've never spoken a word of Spanish, but by fourth year, which are also taught only in Spanish, they have the proficiency level of someone who is potentially a near native speaker. So we get them through all of those layers in a quick four year sequence, which is quite the challenge. So one of the reasons why we do experiential education is precisely to promote student engagement. As you might imagine, a language classroom can be an intimidating space, particularly because everything is happening in a language that is not our own. So experiential education helps us work on the knowledge and skills and scaffold it throughout our programs from the first year throughout the fourth year. And also the work of communication skills, which is key to a foreign language and also building community within the classroom and then showing them that when we learn another language, there's also this whole community outside of the classroom that we like to engage with. It also works on students' intercultural competence. So when they're thinking about their own cultures through the lens of other cultures, and then they're also focusing on empathy, really trying to understand what's happening as they're engaging with other languages and cultures. And then the reflection skills like how did I learn? Why did I learn that way? This really comes through in some of the experiential education that we're doing. So similar to what some of the findings that were shared to open up this session, our department has several options to provide flexible and accessible ways to engage with learning by doing from the first year through the fourth year in the classroom, outside of the classroom. So just to give you an example of the range that we have as a department, we do engage in study abroad in global seminars, which as Naomi mentioned, are quite costly for students. But we have those available for options to do intermediate language courses or even more culture or literature-centered global seminars that take place in Barcelona, for example, or in Mexico, if we would like to go there. We also have Maria Carbonetti in Spanish, who is a professor who works quite closely with the communities in Vancouver and abroad, specifically South America, to do community-engaged and experiential learning at the third year in Spanish. So really getting involved with some of the communities and partnering with institutions, both locally and globally, so that our students are getting a feel for how Spanish is used in the business community or in other communities related to some of the things that we're studying inside of the classroom. So community engagement is an option. We also have different course-based options in all of the languages that we teach, and I'll be talking more specifically to that example in a moment. And I'm directing the FHS Learning Center, which is a tutoring center that is run by and for student volunteers. So all of the students that come through our programs, not all of them, many of them, we wish all of them would do it, but many of them who are first-year students actually come to our center to practice their skills with a third or fourth-year tutor who's actually doing this type of community building if they're looking to go into teaching or wanting to work on tutoring skills in a small group or individual setting. And then we also have work-learn placements, and we're working on developing a co-op option for our students as well. So we have a breadth of opportunities for our students, and it looks like we have a clear structure, but we actually don't have a way to document what is happening all the time in all of these options. So that's what we're hoping to get toward as we move through. So I'm going to share two examples of how I engage in learning by doing in two specific course contexts in Spanish. And they're very different contexts. The first one is Beginner Spanish 101 and 102. These are multi-section courses with 16 to 20 sections of students. Many of our classes have 55-plus students enrolled, and we have one instructor and TA support. So I really love the idea of providing bite-size opportunities to get students involved. I think that's exactly what we're going for in these first-year Spanish courses. Students have minimal language skills and they're working on their comfort communicating in a different language. So we've found that it's key to introduce learning by doing in small, low-stakes course assignments that build toward a broader course-based portfolio where they're actually showcasing their journey through learning Spanish. And we even call it el español cerca de mí. We've called it mis exploraciones. We typically use the, sorry, the textbook that, oh my gosh, I'm sorry, the textbook that we're using at the moment to introduce a title for your journey through this course. So some examples of assignments that students might do is if we're learning about food, for example, we might teach them how to make a traditional dish from Spain or from Mexico and kind of walk them through a lesson, maybe have them share a dish that's close to home for them and do it in a video format. And then another part of that same assignment might be to go out to visit a restaurant where we know that food from Hispanic culture is served and Spanish is most likely spoken. The menu might be bilingual and they can try their hand at ordering in Spanish. So it gives them a feel for how things are meaningful for them, how to link Hispanic culture to their own food culture, and then what's happening in Vancouver in terms of Hispanic studies and opportunities to engage with the communities. I just taught a class at 10 this morning where we're learning about Argentina and the asado, the barbecue culture and also the tango. And then one of my students actually dances tango. And so he invited a partner to come in and actually dance the tango for our students. And then we shared with them how they can go out into the culture and dance tango and learn tango right here in Vancouver. So these are just little ways to get their feet wet in a language course. And the idea then is that at the second year where they're getting more involved with the language, that they would actually do a deeper project that maybe engages with the First Nations communities in Canada and also the Indigenous communities of Latin America and look at what that looks like through film, literature, and even right here on campus. So this is an example of what we might do in a language course. And then another opportunity to learn by doing is in a course called SPAN 280 or Spanish 280. And it's part of the Romance Studies program, which is a program that mostly focuses on English-based content courses meant to expose students to romance languages and cultures in a way that invites connecting the different aspects of the romance world and potentially focusing on one area of the romance world. So this particular course focuses on the topic of revolution. And we might have seen a week or so ago in the news that there was a push to dissolve the National Assembly in Ecuador. And the Assembly is a big part of voting culture. It's a big part of a governing structure in the Latin American context. And so the Assembly is meant to be kind of this community in our classroom where when we're going into the Assembly, which occurs every Friday, the students are dominating this space. And so the Assembly is a student-led and a student-created and facilitated portion of the class, sort of like a student-led tutorial. And so each week the students sit with the same group and they have one to two facilitators each week that will come up with some questions that are related to a topic or readings that we're seeing in class. And then really show us their way through the topic in a way that is engaging and fun and connects to the discipline that they bring to the class. Because the course is taught in English, I found that we have students enrolled in the course, which are probably close to 80 students is what I'm typically working with. We have students from psychology, international relations, political science, even Spanish majors that are interested in taking a course in English to see how the readings differ or not from the Spanish counterpart. And so we have students from all across the arts. And so this assignment really asked them to think about what their disciplinary lens tells us about revolution compared to what we might see in a literary context. So the learning by doing part is that they're actually teaching their peers about the material while they're also exercising interpersonal and empathy skills and really trying to come up with questions that will get their classmates involved in the 30 minute discussion that they're guiding. They also demonstrate online facilitation skills and that they are to come together all of the facilitators from the week to co moderate the weekly Canvas discussion where we take outside of the classroom some of the topics that came up in the assembly. This activity also connects outside of the classroom because not many students but at least five in the last five years have gone on to create their own student led seminars at UBC. So I definitely get the feel that when we're giving the students the space to teach each other in the classroom, they then might feel more confident to come up with their own course plan and syllabus and find a way to find the gaps in their discipline and maybe the courses that UBC doesn't offer to create their own pathway for their peers. So these are just a couple of examples of how we're engaging in experiential education in a way that is looking beyond the community engagement lens and really thinking about how what we do in the classroom invites students to look out into the community. And so I'm ending now with just a quick mention of some of the challenges and potential solutions which also align with how we opened up today. What I'm finding is that it's difficult to find a vision of what experiential education looks like with all of the different options available to us and to students while at the same time respecting some of these challenges at an institutional level that we're brought out in the first few minutes today. It's been very important to think about the learning outcomes that are involved in an experiential education initiative and also how we assess learning with students and I find that the best way to assess learning that brings a personal element is actually to ask the students themselves what they're valuing and what they would like us to look at together in terms of their learning process so metacognition or how to talk about how I'm learning and why this is important and how this applies not just to this course but others is a very important key to experiential education and then I think just integrating it in a way that respects all of the time and energy and passion in workload constraints that this type of education brings even in the classroom it's a lot of moving parts that come together so trying to think of a way to integrate it and also recognize the the great work that students and faculty are doing is a is a key challenge but I think it's also a solution to inviting others to do more. So thank you so much I will leave it to Chen. Thank you my name is Tian from Asian Studies and I'm actually presenting on behalf of myself and another professor is Xiangning Wang who's currently on leave. I'm glad we're we're going second after Brie because Brie kind of set the ground for experiential learning in language programs so we're I'm going to present some other examples from the Chinese language program that may look similar or different from the examples that Brie talked about. I'm still there's a mess up with the with the wording but I'm still going to present my land acknowledgement here in written words which includes the English the simplified Chinese the traditional Chinese traditionalized simplified Chinese and the pinging words which is messed up and the reason why I'm presenting this at the beginning is that is actually related to one of the little bite-sized project that we do on the 200 level where students are invited to doing their own land acknowledgement in the target language that they're learning Chinese which is very simple but we still wanted them to experience doing the land acknowledgement in a different language so we were tasked to answer or to discuss three questions how do we do experiential learning why do we do them and the challenges I'm going to group my answers to the discussion of the first two questions kind of together and then lastly conclude with the the challenges um so in the Chinese language program I'm going to introduce examples that from courses not not just taught by me but by by other instructors in the program program we have three parts the the heritage courses on top left the knowledge courses on the top right and on the bottom is our literature courses so on the heritage side we do service learning with project that I'm going to show you in a second and then from non-heritage side we invite students to learn the language through living their lives experiencing the language that they're learning and on the for the large courses where we have a lot of international students we engage students in experiential learning by inviting them to help learners of Chinese to practice and gain better understanding of their own learning as an international student here at UBC so first my PowerPoint is frozen so let me give it a second to to um navigate to the second page but okay here we go I want you to first talk about the heritage on the heritage side we have an um for example we have a business Chinese course where students are applying their business language culture and knowledge in a local community service project um how do we do that is by partner with NGOs with I've listed two that we've explored once with the classical Chinese garden of Dr. Sun Yi Xian and the the second one is actually a multi-service agency to help people in to settle down in Canada um the acronym is a success um as you can see both are um NGOs um this is an example and a snapshot of the um project based on Dr. Sun Yi Xian's classical Chinese Chinese classical garden and the students were asked to apply and improve their interpersonal interpretative interpretive and presentational language skills and to enhance and broaden their intercultural comprehension through the the the process at the same time they will identify the needs of the NGO the organization and try to solve real problems and integrate resources and showcase uh plans and products to their not just their peers but also the staff members that we invite to into our classrooms and other community members um I just wanted to quickly show you one group project so that's what they've come up with um as a as a project uh plan lots of pages and then finally they come up with two videos as you can see the screenshot on top and bottom um two videos that promotes the the garden um they did two versions to suit different needs um so that's the example of the heritage class um the business heritage class on the non heritage site um Esprit has already mentioned our goal is actually in a language course it's not just to for student to memorize the vocabulary and the grammar patterns um we the the foreign language courses at the university level has the responsibility to encourage intercultural understanding and build students intercultural competence and in order to do that in in a language class we um we purposefully encourage activities or learning opportunities that would encourage intercultural understanding um I'm only going to introduce one little example which is a class project so the class project um is viewed on uh three class assignments little class assignment where and then the final one is um a project so in this um assignment or project students are encouraged to look for Chinese characters either on campus or on street or the signage or artifacts that they can find around them they're going to introduce these characters and show them as people probably are aware of of the examples of such characters in Vancouver is actually we have lots of them um so here is a very that's one of the examples that I remember very clearly from my students so the student took a picture of this place I don't know if people know this um but this is the food court under McDonald's in University Village it's one of the the um combo the fast food services it it has this character that we're learning which means family so the student introduced this character that we're learning uh with the picture that um he found with this character um well he took the picture while he visited the place and um then another student to actually find another example of the same word in another context the student explained um so that's on the bottom you see what the students share right so explain the the sound the meaning and the context and the um the personal importance I I'm sorry Dia it was cut off without finishing the student explained that um he she always visits um his friends um her friends family where she saw this picture never know uh never know what this means but later on she found out that in her friend's family um their zodiac animal are all pigs so they have five little piglets um in their family um and that's the character of family with that picture posted on their door um I found that to be very very useful for students learning um one second um I have some other more other examples this is a student taking a picture of a seasoning taken from their own kitchen and the ointment that they use and this is a picture taken on UBC campus on student day um where students took a picture of the characters introduced the characters and explained the significance uh this is the final example where the student are introducing um a poster that they see on Buchanan walls it's a grad school application service and the students explain read through the different characters explained his journey of learning Chinese relying on this poster so um this is not a random poster anymore for the student who's learning Chinese but actually means a lot the student even went on to discuss the uh some of the the sorry the um the message that he could analyze from the the poster about how how competitive it is to apply for grad schools for students and um yeah um the last example that I'm going to give is for the international students so we talked we talked about the examples for character students and the knowledge students um we have a lot of international students who took Chinese at the 400 level so they may seem like to be not a first year but I wanted to say that these students actually majority of them take our 400 level literature courses when they're in their first year or or second year um for these students we asked them uh to help uh the learners from first second and third year who are learning Chinese to practice to be engaged in a weekly Chinese language practice of 15 minutes um through the whole process the the international students who are learning who are taking our 400 level literature courses um get a sense of fulfillment they are engaged with the UBC learning community as an active member um I can't emphasize enough but majority a lot of the international students from um Asian find themselves to be in isolation or in their little group they they felt that after four years they're still an outsider of UBC so this is our opportunity to engage them and then um through the process that they actually get a better understanding of their own learning for example we talk about core syllabus um for the learners and we show them here is a core syllabus for the learners that you're working with um and through the process somehow the international students start to read their own core syllabus and understand what core syllabus mean for their learning um the uh in the year of 2020 and 2021 we had uh in the year of 2021 as you can see here we have over uh 1000 uh volunteers who participated and uh what I wanted to emphasize in this experiential learning project is the the the training that they have to go through um so they have to go through professional training at the beginning and they they have to go through training every week for the for the practice that they're doing um and they receive other organized workshop trainings on professional development um and then here are some examples uh but basically as you can see from the quote here the student feels that by involved in the the um experience they they're more passionate about the work um and they feel uh it's it's a good experience for themselves and not only do we ask them to work we actually celebrate their achievements either well usually in person but during the pandemic it has to be done um online so um I don't think I have a time to go through my last example but in addition to the um the regular experiential learning events uh we also extend our fourth year literature courses by engaging students in um Lenten festival poetry events where they come in and share their learning and then it was moved to online um and I have a video if we have time we can talk about that um but so I hope the three examples that I shared um speak to how we do experiential learning and um explained why we're doing experiential learning in the Chinese classes um but as for the challenges and barriers um I think it's um very similar to what Brie has mentioned and to to what the team has found um it's the logistic of arranging for um all of these experiential learning events to happen for example for our volunteer project we spent about uh 600 student work for student hours on the organization of the event itself um not counting so these are all logistic um making schedules um doing the training and engaging them and the workload for instructors is huge um and the evaluation I didn't have time to show you the rubrics but the developing the appropriate evaluation method is I wanted to say key I think that's all for me um and I'll be happy to get your feedback thank you so my name is Katherine Lyon I'm a sociologist um and I'm going to talk specifically about the ways that I've done experiential education sort of two different streams of ways that I've done it in introduction to sociology I'm going to focus on you know why I did it and I'm focusing on my individual sort of personal pedagogical motivations less so at a program level I'm going to give some examples of how I did it and throughout I'll talk about some institutional facilitators that enabled me to do this work as well as some challenges and at first I was going to present one specific experiential education opportunity and assessment but now I've actually shifted to doing a high level sort of overview of some different options so here we go but I'm happy to elaborate on any of the the things I present in the Q&A so the course that I'm speaking about is Introduction to Sociology um for my sections it's typically being between 100 and 250 students depending on the year and the term um and this course focuses on three main themes and actually Neil Armitage is going to talk about the same course but in a different way so I think that will be really productive um so we focus on social inequality in terms of dimensions and axes of privilege and oppression race gender class age ability we talk about social institutions like family economy work politics military and we talk about social interaction how people see themselves how they relate to others and how they make meaning and so why do I why do I incorporate experiential education into my teaching of this first year course so reflecting on that for this presentation I came up with four sort of four reasons and again they're pretty personal to me so pedagogically my goal is to equip students when they leave the classroom with a particular tools or set of lenses for interpreting the world around them and I feel like experiential education lends itself really well to application and critical reflection um which ties to you know cold cycle of reflective experiential learning having an experience you know thinking about it um generalizing from it extrapolating going back to the field in this iterative cycle um and pedagogically research shows that these types of experiences help foster deeper learning where students aren't just memorizing discrete bits of information but actually making connections and having longer longer memories about what they're learning and then epistemologically in terms of how knowing happens I try to communicate to students and this is sort of a disciplinary uh approach within some areas of sociology is that knowing doesn't just happen from really abstract bird's eye view places that knowing is always grounded in time and place and can be partial and so I feel like having embodied experiences teaches students something about sources of knowledge that it's not just coming from me as this expert and it's not just coming from our textbooks and these abstract concepts but that the community can be a source of knowledge grounded in the particular local settings and histories and then I think I do experiential education um to clarify that the experiences students are having in first year but also just their whole life are moments for critical reflection so a lot of the scholars that I follow talk about their daily lives as the as problematic as the entry point for coming up with their research questions I also want to help students situate their own social location in the systems that they're participating in even the education system and then and I'll talk about how one of my experiential placements was students actually helping instructors in elementary schools and how they were then prompted to reflect on their positioning as students and the power relations in the classroom and so on and then of course within sociology the journal teaching sociology documents so many different benefits of experiential education early on in your in your university career you know connecting to career future careers connecting to being able to apply disciplinary concepts and feeling like you want to take more classes in sociology and then my last reason is fostering connections so particularly in first year students are um well I would say the majority of my students whether domestic or international or new to Vancouver and the way that our campus is structured um some students might actually not leave campus very often or ever and so just getting students off campus to do something in the community in first year I think is really important and then uh because we have students from all over the world having this common community experience I think helps them build friendships with each other and have these common reference points to refer to so how do I actually incorporate experiential education into my first year sociology courses so everything I'm talking about today is with a hundred or more students in introduction to sociology and I want to talk about two strands so field experiences so like field trips and different ways that I've done that and community engaged learning and different ways I've done that during and after COVID and I noticed in designing this this talk that I automatically was defaulting to how how much work it would take a faculty member to do this so I think that says something about my own orientation and experiences so I'm going to focus a bit on like the structure of setting it up uh so basically I'm going to present high intensity and low intensity options uh for the faculty member well also for the students okay so the first thing I want to share is that um a really low low stakes low cost way to do field experiences is to have students complete and complete an experience at a location outside of class um where the faculty member isn't there so something that's been quite successful is sending students to UBC's multidisciplinary undergraduate research conference I've done this in my research methods classes and I've done this in my first year sociology classes thinking about you know how knowledge is constructed and then I've also had students for our unit on social movements and political mobilization I've had students brainstorm events that are happening in the community and vote on which ones they'd like to attend and then in pairs or in teams they attend the event um and so because I'm not there and it's not pre-scheduled I have students take a selfie at the event which I guess maybe it's a little you could say there's like some privacy issues there um and then I have them do a report afterwards so this is the easiest way that I found to do um field experiences then I've also tried field experiences where I actually go and these are pre-booked um and these are more involved so one year I was focusing on criminalization and decriminalization of drugs and the social construction of reality and power relations and so I booked a Vancouver police museum walking tour um and I was teen teaching so the tour had 30 students at a time so we went we each took two tours and it was like on a Saturday um and the tour was maybe $15 per student so we had some funding for this uh pre-scheduled um and uh one of the challenges of this was that although we did pre-vet the tour and we went and did the tour first it depended on the tour guide and the tour guide we got presented the material in a way that we wouldn't have done so ourselves so um so just thinking about that um but I I just found out about Vancouver detours and they seem like an organization that does um really collaborative tours where they can customize them to your class so I'm going to look into that okay so given the challenges of you know paying and scheduling and attending a field experience a few years ago I started collaborating with uh Siobhan McPhee from Geography who's on the project team to try to come up with field experiences that students could do independently or in pairs on their smartphones like a guided walking tour and so we created with a TLF a walking tour of Vancouver protest events kind of like uh Pokemon Go but for academia where students you know download the tour they go to downtown Vancouver and then as they're walking around the audio is prompted by GPS and they hear audio of people talking about the protest events at the locations where they occurred and then they do an essay afterwards uh this didn't translate very well during COVID when students were all over the world and the technology changes really quickly um UBC doesn't have built-in support for this technology and then the annual license was very expensive so I think this is a great option but I would recommend like using pre-existing tours that have already been created instead of faculty created tours um I think having students do virtual tours from home on their laptop is a great idea and I've also played around with students creating tours for other students so more student-generated um so those that's my summary of the field experiences I've tried and now I want to shift to think about uh community engaged learning so I've done this remotely and in person and I really want to stress uh that I wouldn't have been able to do this without two of the offices at UBC the Office of Regional and International Community Engagement and the Center for Community Engaged Learning the the two examples I'm going to present are with CSEL the Center for Community Engaged Learning okay so the first example is during COVID when we switched to emergency remote education um and I had already been working with CSEL for a few years um so we figured out a way for students to still have a community engaged learning experience from home so the theme I was weaving through the course that year was food justice and so CSEL what they do is they have these long-standing relationships with community partners and then based on working with me and other instructors they match you and help facilitate the relationship um so we teamed up with the Edible Garden Project at the uh in the North North Vancouver neighborhood house and um so students this is a first-year class so mostly the reciprocity piece of it is that all the students become aware of the organization and are able to sort of speak positively about it to other people in the community so what we did was the first part was the community partner agreed to dedicate 30 minutes to coming for a Zoom interview with the class where they gave a short presentation and students asked questions and then in teams students did research and prepared social media artifacts that the Edible Garden Project could share on Instagram and Facebook and so this is a pretty light version of community engaged learning that's appropriate for first year and doesn't expect really high-level student outputs so it's really important to manage the partner's expectations in terms of the year level and I also put a selection process in place so that only the best assignments that got over a certain grade were actually sent to the community partner and then part three students did an individual essay where they researched a food justice issue around the world wherever they were living because everyone went home during COVID and then they presented it not in the traditional essay format but through the story maps a free online website and then students toured each other's story maps kind of like a virtual tour and that's hyperlinked if we share the PowerPoints later okay almost done the last thing I want show is in-person community engaged learning so the following year I was emphasizing education as one of the social institutions that we were studying and how education can be linked in with social inequality both challenging inequality and but also reproducing inequality and so on that theme students had the option during reading week of spending three days supporting an instructor at a local elementary school so they were you know giving little mini lectures to the students and helping with group work and I made this optional for pedagogical and logistical reasons it was optional so that the students who went actually really wanted to be there and logistically we didn't have enough space for all the students so 30% of the class ended up going and this turned out to be students who didn't have travel plans either because they weren't international students so they weren't going home or because uh they I guess maybe they weren't they they didn't have the the money to book travel so maybe this actually was catered to lower SES students uh it's hard to say but this was also connected by the Center for Community Engaged Learning so they set up the placements they met the students in the morning at the school and gave them a little check-in session and I assessed it with a pre-reflection before during reading week and then after as well and I have the reflection prompts if anyone is interested so to sum up some of the challenges that I faced were student anxieties about the assessment pieces they wanted extreme clarity about how they were going to be assessed and what reflective writing or journaling is a lot of confusion around that I had students who were trying to give me the right answer that they thought I wanted them to put I had challenges with teaching assistants who weren't familiar with community engaged learning I had multiple TAs who were grading in different ways despite having a rubric and then challenges for an optional assignment how you make it fair for the students who don't pick the assignment on the faculty side if you have new community partners each year you're creating new assessments each year and rubrics and all of that stuff you have new meetings each year with all the offices and partners there's a lack of recognition for the work that you're doing and then on the student side I've made the error of not accounting for the time they spend in the field as part of the work that they've done and then they feel like there's an imbalance in the workload okay thank you very much I'll pass it off to Neil. Good afternoon everybody last but not least some of the ideas that I'll be presenting and some of the things I'll be talking about we'll kind of overlap with what Catherine said we both teach first year sociology and the same themes and the same ideas linking back to kind of the what we found in the first year or having done kind of extensive EE at third year and thinking how do we prepare students to get to that to scaffold kind of like first year experiences to the third year I've been doing kind of by size activities within my first year classes for a few years now prior to becoming a lecturer I was luckily open of had the fortune to work in the center of student involvement and careers and through that I found relationships and connections with campus facilitators but what do I do well I'm going to concentrate and focus on one activity and assignment which is alumni interviews so this really is just that students towards the end of term so I teach large courses large sections of social one or two towards the end of the term students being working in groups throughout their discussion groups I've got multiple discussion groups multiple TAs but towards the end then they self form their groups in form and they plan and conduct an interview with an arts alumni regarding the alumni's education and career and then obviously they go off they come they collaborate they analyze the data but the group assignment then connects into an individual assignment because then they produce an individual essay using sociological concepts to frame compact they learn my career story so it's kind of a means of an experiential education to come back towards a traditional assessment type of activity that students are familiar with so this slides move yes so the big why is similar to what Catherine says I think thinking around my own positionality and coming to how I came to the discipline I I wanted to make things relevant and how do things how do we get kind of sociology out of the textbook and out of the lecture hall to make it into a practice something that they do in their everyday lives so and how do we make cosmetical knowledge relevant to their lives so these are multiple reasons why I do it but also then how do we take them through an academic procedure and the skills that are involved in maybe developing and becoming a sociologist or a social scientist with large these types of activities irrespective of the becoming a sociologist a geographer a political scientist an economist or anything else that is going to help them for their further studies and also beyond in their future careers I also want students because they kind of like a collaborative project to see the value in that and to see the value in learning by doing not just as a kind of a them engaging with the text but them engaging with each other and learning from each other so really learning by doing with others this is also being picked up by and I was champion my facility facilitators and that's where I'll go to next so that's why I do it let's kind of bring in kind of sociology to life so on the how obviously I have facilitators and resources and from 2017 from working in the student center student involvement and careers I've been collaborating with arts alumni engagement since 2017 and I think the longevity of the project I've learned many mistakes that I've now long forgotten thankfully of how to do experiential education so what you're seeing here is a very kind of like six seven years of thinking about this and how to do this and how to develop this and how I've learned from some of my mistakes and I'll get to those maybe lots I'm talking but I just like to acknowledge the passion and support of my two colleagues in arts alumni engagement with Sharali and Christine Lee now their piece is on the back end where they actually allow me to kind of basically match the groups of students with alumni I have to collect the data to do this and put students in front of alumni to do the interviews I created a verb which I've basically renewed on multiple occasions and as a calling to the verb I get each student to kind of also attain the tcps to call online ethics so that they can go out and actually do interviews now this works as a two-way thing because a it's getting in there to do that straight away first year so therefore when it comes to doing experiential education in the second year third year they want to do a research associate position they have the tcps to to go and have already done it now some students come in having already done it from other courses so they don't need to do it they just basically present that but since 2017 now over a thousand students and probably around 400 alumni have participated in this activity now so it keeps on going and every year we kind of go through and we've got the logistics down and not say that it's easy we've got the logistics down after six or seven years of doing this now when it comes to the whole class the activity is very much kind of the whole class is to do the activity and to kind of think around the kind of time burden or time constraints often that are associated with experiential education I kind of a few years back took the decision to well interviews are always allocated to a two-week period towards the end of term so they're working towards this and then I suspend classes for two weeks and no classes are held during the two-week period and this frees up time for groups to plan conduct and analyze the interview and instead scheduled class time is given over two office hours so groups students can drop in get guidance and seek support on the whole process this is something I've only done in the past few years prior to that it was kind of on top of and I felt that the correspondence the panic the anxiety that students had to try to squeeze everything in was too much so with a two-week period given for them to conduct the interview when they matched with an alumni by arts alumni engagement they have the knowledge that they can use class time to schedule their interview and also come together because they know that they're not doing something else it's not outside of class time they can use class time because they all have that same schedule now obviously some students for unforeseen circumstances sometimes can't participate and because of the benefits of Zoom the last few years have been able to kind of suggest and students have been able to participate by analyzing prerecorded interviews so they don't go out and do actually the physical interview but they do have an interview to analyze and explore and talk about now when it comes to assessments having had kind of multiple ways of trying to do it and think about it the first year I did a group essay never again I kind of made that mistake the first time and really start to think about how to make this group into an individual so that they're all kind of fully engaged in the process because they have to have an individual output at the end of it so that they're all kind of contributing one thing I've done is also allocate roles within the group predefined roles what they do for the actual interview which also helps and facilitates group collaboration so a lot is spelled out and a lot has been learning by doing for myself learning from my mistakes but the activity acts similar to a capstone in that it accounts for 25 percent of the course grade so students know that this is not just a whilst it's by size and it's kind of in a towards the end of term it has a significant impact and is a value to their grade so really it has some stake to it now to help and kind of facilitate that stake I say if you get your matching in time we match you and you do your tcps2 as per the deadline prior to the start of the interviews then you get 100 percent for all of that so five percent you get a greater full hundred for that so it eases some anxiety and gets them and aids me in the logistics of planning this because I need that information by a certain time to send to arts for my engagement to start the matching process with the groups and the alumni and then really the kind of final part of is is assessed through just a traditional essay but the essay then is kind of graded on a few criteria declarative expression the writing well formulated use of the drawing on appropriate knowledge from the course concepts that they can build an analysis and discussion of the data but also I grade them even in their individual essays on collaboration I'll get to that in a second now with large courses obviously I have multiple TAs so I've actually taken the kind of logistics away from the TAs just to kind of ease the logistics and not make it too much of a pyramid structure and just cut them out and really get them to focus in on the grading now also our TAs in sociology tend to be undergraduates so towards the end of term two weeks off from discussion they're quite happy about this as well they get time to also dedicate to their courses and thinking about what they're doing and knowing that they get a break just also creating time and energy for them that they can take that they have to dedicate to other courses but obviously to get consistency I generally run a TA workshop with students looking through essays now when it comes to the individual essays analysis and discussion whilst they're encouraged to come together discuss and think through what they could apply they're still encouraged to develop their own and reflect on how their own positionality shapes their analysis insight so how does their position in the interview shape what they actually think is relevant so they don't have to discuss the whole kind of data from the interview but focus in on certain aspects which talks to them and allows them to use sociology and the sociological pieces that have talked to them now when it comes to collaboration what I get to do or what I've instructed the TAs to do is to grade all the same essays from the same group on the same alumni students just do one interview in one group and therefore for collaboration I get my TAs just to check that the factual information time when they went to they graduated the degrees they took the majors they took the careers they chose that there's kind of like a the factual information aligns across them and by that I know that they've come together they've discussed and organized themselves and are talking coherently and then they can take their analysis and discussion in which way they would like to now in terms of reflection and I sometimes have felt and from my feedback from our online engagement that the inflection actually comes a lot later and sometimes it's hard sometimes to get them to reflect in the moment I do and having the past asked students through a survey two weeks three weeks later at the end of the end of the course to reflect through a survey and some of the feedback I've got has tended to be very kind of encouraging and supportive of the activity so obviously some students talk about the actual learning of how they use concepts and actually make it something that actually makes it important so learning about the strength of week ties is something I heard talk about but networking this assignment gave context as to why it's important to bring in things to life also kind of thinking around how they can use their time at UBC to take the opportunities that are there for them we should look around what is available to us so we can make our own path so that learn from the path so the alumni for education to work and now they're starting to think oh what did they do when they were at UBC which activities did get involved obviously we can think about who can then get involved or who can get involved but then they can start bringing in their own positionality well I would like to do this but I can't do this and part there so and then we also have kind of people thinking increasingly with the alumni the alumni becoming more a diverse group and therefore we are bringing in a lot more diverse alumni to be interviewed and that gives opportunities for students to us to meet people and become face to face with people that have had the same kind of social positions of some same kind of challenges that they may have faced going through their education and here says here he changed my point of view when it comes to my education and academia because I was able to relate to that person as not Canadian and it gave me some ideas about my own future and never stop looking for what might be better so he kind of very much kind of like knowledge the actual activity developed skills in research skills that they have to plan and conduct an interview but also the values and the ideas of what it can facilitate and their attitude towards their education my challenges every year I do it every year I've got it down every year I get stressed out every year I'm kind of dreading this kind of moment where I have to kind of receive all these kind of like excel templates which have created perfectly got it down system but it's still bombards and students still make mistakes and students still kind of like ask questions and it's just the 101 questions that students come with that makes it still very stressful and exhausting and I think since post online instruction and with COVID that is when I made the decision to actually kind of turn over class time to the actual activity and release some of the time because they're just the burden was becoming too much and I felt it and I could see it and I could see the exhaustion students faces towards the end of term so for this to work I made that switch similar to what Catherine was saying when it comes to equity and recognition for faculty I think while the work is recognized and celebrated by campus partners out on my engagement with great relationship with them and also our corporate very supportive of the activity sometimes the workload is not specifically recognized by the department and maybe the faculty in terms of merit and other things and recognition and people are not aware or it's not valued in some sense the elevation it needs to be elevated in the sense of this is what absolutely creating a good student experience I think in the last year and a half what I've also found is kind of some growing resistance I think there's a I don't know I have no evidence for this it's anecdotal but this kind of greater resistance to student collaboration or group work and a bit of COVID like which I sometimes think that it's harder harder to convince students of the benefit of doing this together and actually learning together and I'm struggling sometimes with kind of having to always justify and give meaning and reason to why they need to do this and that they don't see the intrinsic meaning in it directly I think a lot of them enjoy it and do it and really reflect on it afterwards but get into that stage to actually plunge themselves into this experience sometimes it's really difficult and I appreciate the anxiety that they have around maybe something completely new therefore the instructions that I have are very detailed are very guided and I offer myself throughout office hours throughout these two weeks so all the support is there but I still feel that there's like maybe a growing resistance among the student body to group work especially when they think the group work will affect their grades and even though I've tried to kind of make the assignment an individual assignment in the kind of essay I still have some resistance and I'm often thinking that some students are waiting for me to release the alternative assignment to see if they're going to bail out of doing the activity and do that instead and try to edge their bets and in fact deny themselves of the opportunity to have an experiential education opportunity because of the fear or the fact that they don't see the benefit in collaboration with others that's it so those of you who hung through thank you we are now willing to take questions not only to the panelists but also to the research team because the research team have done so much great work and they can talk a lot more to the kind of the ideas the pedagogical benefits of EE I think the panelists can talk to the practicalities but if anyone has any questions my suggestion would be is to raise your hand or mute yourself if you're confident and just ask your question and maybe to who you'd like to ask your question to. Hi Melville. Hi Neil. Hi everybody. Thank you. I have a question so I'm glad to get the chance to ask it. I was really interesting and inspiring and I have lots of great ideas as some of you know I teach in the coordinator's program which is a first year program and so we're often thinking about we're working a lot on program wide community engaged learning and I've heard sort of over the years of working with CSOL and talking to people that like the challenges that were raised at the beginning like you know it's hard it's hard or it's not recommended to do this kind of work in first year and I think that the sort of more salient argument against it is the reciprocity piece and sort of equipping how do we equip these our first year students to reciprocate with various partners but I'm just wondering if anybody on the panel has I don't know any citations or any other items that they've heard like I guess I'm asking for like almost like the straw man like what is it that that people are are warning us against like it seems like you're doing it we're doing it it's happening are there other warnings or other articles that you've read that have been uh warning against some of the pitfalls or um risks uh in doing this in first year I'm trying to get my head around that sort of basically so I can refute it. I don't know where to think particularly why we wouldn't do it I think if you're coming from a community engaged learning aspect I think that the pitfalls become relevant and reciprocity and that's why I would tend to shy away from those types of experiential activities and go more towards the bite size and think that the kind of community engaged learning which I've done in third year about the fourth year I prefer to kind of like I generally do see a scaffolding in the sense of I whilst yeah just to kind of do something else just to kind of expose students to and I probably would not do community engaged learning myself uh because I even find it difficult in third year and sometimes I don't find students are well enough prepared at the third year to do sometimes those activities and that's why I do bite size and one of the reasons why I'm doing bite size is to hopefully to get them a bit further along so that when they come to the third and fourth year like the researchers indicated scaffolds and prepares them for those activities but that's my opinion I sorry sorry to jump in I can you hear me clearly my head phone is not working properly yeah so I don't have any research to show that people are against this but my feeling is that a lot of instructors not a lot some of our instructors in our program don't want to do this not because of the workload but they are against the idea of letting students do experiential learning especially at the beginning because they ask for a strong foundation that's what they use in knowledge so apparently to be able to memorize and the things the facts and put them on a piece of paper are more important for some of our instructors than for students to experience things which I say they will forget about the things that they put on their exam paper um two months after but if we ask them to chat with a native speaker they will never forget that experience I guarantee you for at least 10 years thank you yeah that sorry Brie go ahead I was gonna say that that is a concrete one yeah that sense of like no they need the foundations first so okay I will I got that Brie yeah I was just gonna say um I think the because community engagement tends to be the the sort of star among the experiential options that are available I think the workload alone and just finding the partners having sustainable practices recognizing the work that goes into it and even the just the logistical things that happen when you're running a class and that has a curriculum in our case most of the experiential learning in the form of community engagement takes place in courses that are required for our majors and minors so that they get that experience but at the same time not everybody wants to do it from the student perspective either so if that's the only option they have I find you know sometimes the students are like but I don't want to do that you know so I think what really helped me understand was actually sitting down and thinking about all of the things that we're doing and we had a meeting recently where I was sort of walking our our faculty through like all the things that we're already doing and there was this sort of misconception that you can't do experiential learning in a literature course and then I was like yeah but you're doing podcasts and you do videos and blogging and like how isn't this a little bit of learning by doing so I think just building a definition that works for each unit is really the key so that our students and faculty understand from our disciplinary lens um in our institutional capacity what this looks like and what the potential is and then that that sort of steers them like it's kind of like oh well I am doing this and then it's like a point of pride which is really cute and fun so anyway that's that's kind of what I think thanks I don't I will shut up I don't need to hog all the discussion but I think you raised a point there about I think often in first year courses we have students who aren't necessarily buying in yet to you know like it's not as much of a selective group certainly that's the case in our program so that's why but I heard a lot of you had like options or you know you you it's not required some of those things so anyway that's another good one so thank you thanks everybody Shannon I'd like to ask you how do you can I mean obviously you talked quite a lot about the different things you do between heritage non-heritage how do you do you have any looping effect of how you use kind of like fourth years third years to kind of you do mention that obviously a lot of people whilst they take a 400 class they are first years um is there anything kind of specifically by size that you do for first years yeah so the the for the non-heritage everything that I mentioned is for specific for 100 first year students um and the when I said the 400 helping first year second year the court I wanted to emphasize again that the course code is 400 but we chat our student enrollment we actually have a lot of first year students taking that course and we'd like to think our 400 level literature courses as an entry course for international students to get familiar with UBC learning community um so we do things like going through the course syllabus really carefully to help them understand this um and we ask them to we emphasize things like what does plagiarism mean how to find resources those really entry-level UBC students um tools um we would teach them at the 400 level and then students gave us the feedback of you know when they when they went on to take a history class or a sociology class of course they actually understand the course syllabus better and they know how to do their writing without um stepping into the dangerous field of plagiarism so yeah I hope that kind of answers your questions okay thank you very much unless anyone else got any final comments cheers guys thank you for coming thank you thank you