Wising Up

Wising Up is an online educational resource being developed by the UBC Polar Club with funding from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Wising-Up is meant to raise awareness of northern issues and priorities and to incorporate these into educational curriculum at the post-secondary level. We hope to direct students and instructors in both southern and northern Canada to educational resources being produced in and by northern communities and to focus on issues deemed important by northerners.

Learning Modules

As a first step to develop constructive dialogue on sharing knowledge between northern and southern communities, Wising Up has developed a set of two learning modules. These modules focus on Caribou Co-management and Language Loss and Revitalization in the Canadian Arctic and are designed to be suitable for a range of courses and programs at UBC.

Each module consists of introductory sections that provide an initial context and learning objectives. The modules then open up into the subject matter providing textual, photographic and video content to build students’ knowledge. Discussion questions and group activities are provided for the students to think about and work on in class assignments.

The online modules will be complementary to classroom instruction related to the subject. Students are encouraged to use the online modules to enhance their learning in the classroom.

Future Modules

After piloting the original two modules, work will be done to expand the Wising Project and include participation with northerners. Future modules will be developed about other important issues concerning life in the Arctic.

Acknowledgements

Wising Up was developed by Patricia Johnston, Jonathan Luedee, Mark Stoller, Ezra Anton Greene, Martina Volfova and Krista Zawadski, graduate student members of the UBC Polar Club, with the help of many other colleagues, academics, northern community members and friends. Our work would not have been possible without these people. We have learned much in our conversations and interactions and look forward to continued knowledge sharing in the future.

We would like to thank in no particular order Maggie Putulik and Lorna Panigoniak at the Kivalliq Educational Resource Centre, Piita Irniq, Suzie Napayok-Short, Angela Lam and Leanna Chow and the whole team at UBC Arts ISIT, Greg Henry, Frank Tester, Mark Vessey, Patrick Moore, Allison Cassidy and Mark Turin.