All Posts Tagged With: "geography"
Waterloo survives goose nesting season
Students and staff embrace an unofficial mascot
Harris and Molson patrol the Waterloo campus
It’s Canada Goose nesting season at the University of Waterloo and that means students and staff are tiptoeing across campus avoiding sharp black beaks and mucky grey puddles.
“You don’t need to antagonize or even get near the nest for the alpha male to get aggressive,” says geography and environmental management student Alex Harris, who spent the past year studying the five-to-seven kilogram beasts.
Those alpha males and their pregnant partners take up residence in dozens of places at the sprawling Ontario campus every year where grassy lawns provide food, buildings offer shelter and there are few coyotes, foxes or wolves to keep them in check.
This professor teaches geography outside
Colin Laroque earns a 3M National Teaching Fellowship
Laroque (Daniel St. Louis)
Colin Laroque, a Geography and Environment professor at Mount Allison University, is a 3M National Teaching Fellowship recipient for 2013. Maclean’s On Campus is profiling all 10.
Growing up in inner-city Saskatoon, the outdoors was always a refuge for Colin Laroque. While he witnessed substance abuse and tensions between the First Nations community and police in his day-to-day life, the weekends were an escape. Out on the family farm, Laroque, a Métis, and his elders would track a fox through the snow, go fishing and explore the forest. “That’s how they taught me and that’s how I learned the sights, the smells, the feel for things,” he says.
U of T sex club, viral feminist art & geography skills
What students are talking about today (January 15th)
Screenshot of Rosey Posey's "Judgments"
1. An 18-year-old Capilano University student named Rosea Lake (a.k.a. Rosea Posey) has received 275,000 notes on her Tumblr site after posting her feminist artwork “Judgments.” The photo shows a woman with a skirt hiked up and a series of words written on her leg that begin at her ankle with “matronly” and end at her buttocks with “whore.” She told The Province her message is for people to stop judging women unfairly by how they dress, a.k.a.”slut shaming.”
2. U of T students are being accused of planning an orgy. “The University of Toronto Sexual Education Centre is kicking off its annual Sexual Awareness Week next Monday at Oasis Aqua Lounge, a downtown club that bills itself as a water-themed adult playground, where swingers are welcome and sex is allowed everywhere but the hot tub,” reports The Toronto Star. “We’re not funding an orgy,” external education and outreach coordinator Dylan Tower, 22, told The Star. “People are allowed to have sex [but] there is not any type of ‘You should be having sex when you’re here.” So, in other words, students can have an orgy if they want to, but it’s totally optional. The SEC is affiliated with the University of Toronto Students’ Union and is funded by undergraduate student fees. Tower told The Star the event is a safe way to introduce curious students to the sex club scene.
Continue reading U of T sex club, viral feminist art & geography skills
How Canadian schools stack up in QS rankings (part two)
Subject rankings for psychology, law, economics…
Here are the top five highest ranked universities in the QS World University Rankings by Subject and the rankings of all Canadian schools for arts, humanities, and business. For science, engineering, and health disciplines click here. For the full rankings, visit TopUniversities.com.
Sociology
1. Harvard University (United States)
2. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (United States)
3. University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
4. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (United Kingdom)
5. University of Chicago (United States)
16. University of Toronto
33. McGill University
40. University of British Columbia
45. Queen’s University
51-100. Université de Montréal, University of Alberta
101-150. McMaster University, Western University, Université du Québec, University of Waterloo, York University
151-200. Carleton University, Concordia University, Dalhousie University, Laval University, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria
Psychology
Continue reading How Canadian schools stack up in QS rankings (part two)
An experiential learning evangelist
3M Teaching Fellow Sue Vajoczki shares her philosophy
Susan Vajoczki, McMaster
Sue Vajoczki, Director of the Centre for Leadership in Learning at McMaster University, was an evangelist for experiential learning long before it became a buzzword.
Her field, geography and earth sciences, lends itself particularly well. “You can’t teach earth science without seeing and feeling the landforms,” she explains.
But Vajoczki thinks opportunities to learn outside of the classroom are too often squandered. ”Many people can think of the field trip where they got in a school bus, went to a site, were told about a monument, got on the bus, went to the next monument—and then forgot,” she says, “because there was no active learning taking place.”
Active learning takes place, for example, when students not only see a landscape and hear a speech, but measure it, draw it, discuss the processes that might have shaped it, and then consider the implications for human beings.
Vajoczki is one of 10 new 3M National Teaching Fellows who have agreed to share their teaching philosophies with Maclean’s On Campus. She believes that experiential learning—with appropriate preparation and reflection—can help all learners.
