The Learning City

Next Steps

Partnering

Learning City education and research will be designed and carried out by the two research university partners, SFU and UBC, along with BCIT and ECIAD. Other civil society, government, and business groups will be added progressively to our community of inquirers

Serving

Our favoured pedagogical and research model is the approach of learning and developing through service to communities, and evaluation based on pragmatic effects.

Designing

Location at the Great Northern Way Campus, a former industrial site near downtown Vancouver, and ultimately in the new, green, Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability.

Teaching

New inter-institutional and transdisciplinary curriculum in urban sustainability education. Initial courses examine the regional Central Valley Greenway and the creation of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability.

Envisioning the Learning City at the Great Northern Way Campus (www.learningcity.gnwc.ca)

Written by Meg Holden, Janet Moore, and Rob VanWynsberghe

The Great Northern Way Campus 4 (GNWC) is a consortium of four public postsecondary institutions, sited on 7.5 hectares of gifted land in Vancouver's False Creek Flats neighbourhood. The former industrial inner-city site, along with its ownership by four large educational institutions, both invites and demands an orientation around the Learning City. The GNWC needs to address different approaches to learning, from technical to design-based to academic. The campus needs to develop new relationships with its surrounding communities. It also must accommodate the different habits, procedures and capacities of the four partner institutions and different local needs for education and urban policy and action.

To cope with and thrive in this new atmosphere, the GNWC has included a focus on urban sustainability in its inaugural academic vision. The strategic plan of the GNWC (2004, 7) is to create a centre of excellence focused on “the urban environment, within the context of a knowledge-based economy” and “a unique learning, research and entrepreneurial environment that will address sustainability issues, engage the larger community and create a dynamic setting for the ongoing implementation of solutions.” This plan is predicated on mobilizing a growing constituency of learners through innovative programming and research partners, public and private sector funding, and advisory partners, all of whom share an interest in urban sustainability. The Learning City initiative aims to provide a central focus to the many disparate forces for urban sustainability in the region, to develop the most suitable sustainability education and training, and a research program concurrent with this experimental teaching and learning project.

The Learning City at GNWC is guided by three related and encompassing themes: collaboration, transdisciplinarity, and community-based learning. The GNWC provides an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration among four major learning institutions: British Columbia Institute of Technology, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia. In a collaborative education model, knowledge is jointly constructed by instructors and students, favouring skills in facilitation, negotiation, mediation, and other group processes.

Bringing interested people from each institution and the local community at the Learning City will create a unique space for developing an inter-institutional as well as transdisciplinary approach to place-based problem solving. Rather than adhering to disciplinary boundaries, we envision working across, through and beyond these boundaries to merge teaching, student research, and community participation.

One pedagogical model supporting this integration is community-based learning , which combines service learning, experiential learning, lifelong learning and other related approaches in an effort to provide learners of all ages a means to identify and achieve what they wish to learn from any segment of the community (Owens 1994). While traditional community service learning pedagogy suggests that learning happens when students are engaged in serving their communities via projects, internships, or apprenticeships, we aim to experiment with this approach, asking students to engage in research on community-based problems, where the research becomes the community service (Savan and Sider 2004, Weinberg 2003).

Our pilot work toward the Learning City involves the formation of an organizational structure through which to pursue the creation of new collaborative, transdisciplinary, and community service learning-oriented educational opportunities in the field of urban sustainability. This curriculum committee will have undergraduate, graduate, continuing education, executive education, and teacher education sub-committees, each guided by leaders from different partner institutions. Each of the four partner institutions brings a different, complementary set of competencies to the Learning City:

British Columbia Institute of Technology offers cutting-edge education in technical realms of sustainable development including green building and alternative fuels development, through its School of Construction and the Environment and Centre for Energy Systems Application. BCIT is supporting the development of the Learning City in kind, through the dedication of an instructional development specialist as well as a specialist in green building.
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design offers design education for the sustainability sector along with outreach programming, such as the “Signals of Intent: Sustainability and Design” conference that took place in summer 2004. ECIAD, the smallest of the four institutions, has additionally dedicated a faculty member specializing in continuing education to Learning City programming.
Simon Fraser University has a wide range of research and educational programming related to sustainable development, offered out of the Urban Studies Program, the Centre for Sustainable Community Development, the Learning Strategies Group, the Centre for Coastal Studies, and others. The SFU Vice-President Academic Office and Dean of Arts Office have substantiated their support for the Learning City through fifteen months of financial support. This includes support for a postdoctoral researcher, graduate research assistants, and the incremental costs of inter-institutional course offerings, evaluation, and research development.
The University of British Columbia, already a leader in sustainable development research and education, is also leading the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. Among the many on-going sustainability projects are the Campus Sustainability Office, the Interfaculty Program in Sustainability Studies, and the Sustainable Development Research Institute. Further support from UBC for the Learning City is expected.

A ction and Awareness 2004. View the 2004 course video at www.basinfutures.net/urbancourse/action/video.htm . Credit:

Janet Moore and the students of Action and Awareness 2004

Pilot courses have already been planned for the pilot phase of the Learning City. The first course, our flagship course, will be offered for the third summer in a row beginning June, 2005. The course, entitled “Action and Awareness: Focus on Urban Sustainability,” will be offered at the undergraduate level as an intensive 30 hour per week course, open to students at all four institutions. In summer 2005, this course will enter its third iterative intervention into the design, partnership and outreach strategy, and policy and popular links to urban sustainability themes of the Central Valley Greenway. The Central Valley Greenway is an urban multi-modal transportation and recreation corridor that runs near the GNWC, from downtown Vancouver through Burnaby to New Westminster.

Architect's drawing of the planned Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability.
Credit: Busby & Associates

The second course, to be offered for the first time during the fall semester 2005, will be a graduate seminar in the theory, design, and construction of green buildings. The course will focus on the case of designing, planning, and making best use of the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, scheduled for substantial completion in early 2007. Both of these courses will set the bar for future educational offerings of the Learning City through their collaborative design and offering by a team of instructors with complementary qualifications; openness to students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, and to the learning outcome expectations they bring with them; and situatedness in the real policy and action needs of the surrounding community.

The Learning City does more than provide a lasting public space and opportunity for skills- and capacity-building around critical issues of urban sustainability in Vancouver. The program of work also presents an important research moment for advancing our knowledge about the synergistic properties of an urban sustainability orientation in higher education. The Learning City research program can be distinguished, but not separated, from the Learning City curriculum. The research revolves around tracking, assessing, and contextualizing in theory and practice the impact of the Learning City approach to urban sustainability education at three scales: the classroom, the inter-institutional campus, and urban sustainability policy development. These can be considered as three complementary research projects.

At the scale of the classroom, we will seek to determine the difference the Learning City approach makes to student learning outcomes. We will assess and compare student understanding of major urban sustainable development concepts, satisfaction with the experimental courses, and commitment to personal and professional change against baseline groups at the partner institutions. At the scale of the inter-institutional education experiment, we will examine the impact of the Learning City approach on instructors and curriculum development team members who take the opportunity to expand the scope and reach of their teaching via GNWC. At the urban sustainability policy scale, we will investigate the Learning City approach as a novel partnership model for policy issue engagement and process development. Despite the turn by planning and policy researchers to learning as the only sure way toward lasting change in city management and function, learning through higher education is a relatively untrodden path in planning and policy research (Watson 2002, Friedmann 2000). We will help develop the theory of learning as a means to urban policy change by tracking and evaluating the effects of Learning City classrooms on the real world problems and projects they address, and on the planning and policy professionals who contribute projects to the classrooms.

This research will be done through the iterative design of group and individual evaluations aimed at students, both in the Learning City and baseline groups at the four partner institutions; at educational professionals who take up the opportunity offered by the Learning City at the GNWC; and at local policy actors engaged in urban sustainability policy processes as well as in our curriculum. This tool will be implemented in a variety of ways, through a process that features convening Learning City evaluation forums three to four times per year. The result will be, on the one hand, hard results about the value of the Learning City approach to urban sustainability education from the perspective of different types of students, educators, and policy professionals, and the concomitant establishment of a local network of people and groups interested in iterative, collaborative, and engaged work in creating sustainability curricula.

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