Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Kendra Strauss, Labour Studies Program

Project team: John Calvert and Malcolm Steinberg, Health Sciences, Michael Friesen, research assistant

Timeframe: September 2019 to February 2021

Funding: $5920

Description: This project is intended to provide the groundwork for the design of a course that will be offered to upper division Labour Studies and Health Sciences students, and students in the Masters of Public Health (MPH) program. These students (in Labour Studies and the MPH Program) do not currently have access to a course in occupational health and safety.

One output of this project is a sample course outline; if we can make progress on a model for this type of course, we will aim to pilot it as a LBST 400-level selected topics course that could be cross-listed related graduate programs in Health Sciences. It will be organized as a lecture/seminar with 20 students. It could be piloted in Spring 2019.

Questions addressed:

• Is the proposed modular design feasible and desirable?
• Is the proposed structure for team teaching feasible and desirable?
• Is the course content appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students?
• Is the flipped classroom model desirable and appropriate for this course?
• Does the course outline present any other issues in terms of approach, mode of delivery of methods of assessment?
• Is the course content and structure of interest to students?

Knowledge sharing: Project findings will be disseminated or presented to the Deans office in FASS and Health Sciences. We will also offer to present our report to our relevant Departments (for example, Sociology & Anthropology in the case of Dr. Strauss).

We believe that this project can help both faculties address the question of how to encourage and facilitate multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching that involve modular course design, team teaching and flipped classrooms (if appropriate). The goal is to create a model for developing courses of this nature that can be used by faculty members and units beyond Labour Studies. FASS has identified interdisciplinary team teaching and courses as an area for possible future development at the Faculty level, so we believe that this project will be highly relevant to units with FASS, as well as to other Faculties such as Health Sciences.