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Background

This blog was compiled by Madeline Donald for submission as a comprehensive examination on the topic of the education of attention, a phrase coined and refined in the field of ecological psychology to refer to the process of coming to be in relation and learning to attend to sensory input from the environment of which we are a part. Constructed as a course that could be taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan, “Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” this exam builds off Madeline’s ongoing photo-journaling project, Educating Riparian Attention.

Both this course and its seed project are grounded in the understanding that diverse and thoughtful attentiveness to Land, the systems, beings, and relationships that support our lives and livelihoods, as humans and as researchers is fundamentally important. This course curriculum exhibits the education of attention as a helpful tool through which to draw attentiveness to Land into practices of research. It responds to the assertion made by Bang et al. (2015) that “observing and creating human–nature relations … is a routine, though deeply underexplored, part of human learning, and activity that impacts both what is learned and how learning happens” (304).

Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness is an open educational resource (OER) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. OER are publicly available educational tools that come in many forms. Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness exists on this blog as a curriculum described and supported by the philosophical and pedagogical reasoning of the author. While it does have a UBC-specific software, Collaborative Learning Annotation System (CLAS), embedded as a platform for participant interaction in the class “logosphere,” the principles of that logosphere are detailed for those who wish to engage with the OER from outside of UBC. The course material presented here is written for a second year undergraduate student audience, with the exception of the page “Pedagogical Approach,” which addresses those who might be interested in instructing this course.

Curriculum content

Main menu items are listed and linked below to help the reader orient to the content of this blog. The blog houses 57 pages in total. These pages provide significantly more detail than a course outline or syllabus would. This is both due to the nature of the comprehensive exam taking place and to the author’s commitment to transparent pedagogy, “being explicit about the process, purpose, and rationale of instructional activities” (Li, 2018). Foregrounding and explaining what will be done in the class also makes the curriculum more accessible (Chandler, in Maloley and Jones, 2018).

About the course

A general overview, intention, and list of learning outcomes for the course.

Schedule

This course offers 6 instructional Units, 2 Interludes for participant presentations, and 1 Outro to wrap up the semester, totaling 25 class periods or “Days” (24 in semester, 1 during the exam period). Unit pages introduce an organizing question and guiding quote for the Days contained within. Day pages describe each class period. All organizing pages, Units, Interludes, Outro, and Days can be found in the Schedule sub-menu by hovering a cursor, first over Schedule, then over each section listed in the drop down menu. Days and Units are also linked to each other and throughout the course material.

All Day pages provide an outline of the lesson plan, with some being more detailed than others. See for example: Day 1, Day 6, Day 8, Day 16, Day 19, and Day 22. Teaching with slides is not a method I gravitate to, so a slide deck has been provided only for Day 1 as a welcoming class discussion and to ease students into what will likely be a very different class than any they have taken previously. Activities listed on the Day pages link out to the Activities page, where they are described in detail.

Readings

The texts, podcasts, and videos used as supporting material for this course are listed as three separate bibliographies: required, recommended, and works cited. Due to the intensive out-of-class work required from the Attentive Repetition and Log assignments, only one reading per instructional class day has been assigned and those “readings” may be videos, podcasts, popular or academic texts. Annotations are provided for the readings listed on the required and recommended pages.

Activities

This page describes in detail the in-class activities that appear throughout the course schedule. References to these activities on specific Day pages link out to the Activities page so as to not repeat the descriptions multiple times and clarify that some of these are reoccurring activities that will be revisited multiple times during the semester. It may help all participants, students and instructor(s) alike, to know that the procedure for a given activity will remain the same; this consistency links practice throughout the course. This repetition though is iterative, as the content engaged in each iteration of an activity, given the time that has passed and the additional materials interwoven into classroom discussion, will differ.

Assignments

The assignments page provides an overview of the four main assignments that students will complete over the course of the semester. A table lists assignments, their components, the timing for each assessment item, the grade weighting that each component will represent, and the assessment method that will be used. Detailed explanations of what each component entails, why it is being included in the curriculum, when students are asked to complete the component, and what the assessment procedure will be are listed on individual assignment and assignment component pages.

CLAS

CLAS is an acronym for UBC’s Collaborative Learning Annotation System, a media player used to share and comment on photographs, audio, videos, and pdfs. This is a UBC proprietary software, though if used by an instructor at UBC, participants from outside the university are welcome to use CLAS as a guest. It is in this software that the course participants will build their individual Logs and the class logosphere.

Terminology

This is a glossary of terms foundational to and used throughout the course material, some of which were compiled by the author. Much of the glossary is written in the first person, for the author’s understandings of these terms are just that, her understandings.

Pedagogical approach

This is a compilation of supplemental notes to a potential future instructor of this course. There the author’s approach to Land acknowledgements, assessment procedures, and accessible and Land-centered pedagogy are laid out in detail.

About the author(s)

A story never holds a single author (Armstrong, 1998). “[S]tories are rarely autochthonous; they usually begin in many places at once, with many unspoken debts” (Neimanis, 2017, 8). So while the course content was developed and distributed by Madeline Donald (the author), there are many voices speaking here. This page provides an introduction to Madeline’s influences, politics, philosophy, and geography at the time of writing, May to August 2021.