Wednesday, December 22, 2021

What is class participation? Learning (and teaching) integrity

It's central to sustainability. We can't lead a social-ecological transformation without integrity. But if we weren't raised that way, how do we learn it?

by Kai Chan

Modern pedagogical (teaching) techniques centre around the process of learning, rather than the material. Thus the classroom experience is not substitutable with outside reading. The undergrad course I teach (ENVR 430, The Ecological Dimensions of Sustainability) therefore includes a grade for participation. But how to assess students' participation? And is there an opportunity for a deeper kind of learning?

I used to assess participation based on contributions in class. Especially in a COVID-hybrid mode (with simultaneous Zoom and in-person), and with students having very different norms of and comfort with speaking aloud, it was time for a change.

Now the core of participation is showing up and being present and engaged. (Active contributions can make up for an occasional absence.) But I didn't want to take attendance each day. I wanted to cultivate responsibility and integrity more deeply. So I told students that they would self-report their participation, and they were to cultivate honesty in each other by reporting this in groups. I then spot-checked twice, without warning.
The participation self-report template for ENVR 430.

At the end of the course, I was dismayed but unsurprised to see a minority of students who had marked themselves present when my notes had them absent. Mistakes happen, so I didn't want to shame people. So I wrote notes like this, "I took attendance in Week 9, and you weren't on my list. Not assuming motive here, but the protocol here is a 1 mark penalty for a discrepancy."

But my guts were still unsettled. The reported absences didn't add up to my own estimates (based on weekly rough-counts). The integrity gap made me queasy, physically. So I dug in deeper with the following email to the class.

Hi folks,


I hope you're all basking in the glow of a semester nicely wrapped, already enjoying your holidays. Just a few words about your participation self-reports.


I bet that the majority of you were honest in your reports. I know that there were a bunch of you who were there week in and week out. Excellent. A few others were not fully honest. For some, this was clear from the spot-checks. For others, I have my suspicions.


I had this interesting conversation with my brother-in-law last night about free will. He argued that we can't really have free will because—apart from subatomic stochasticity (randomness)—what each of us does is a function of chemical reactions that means it's effectively determined by your biology plus your experiences. His conclusion was that we basically can't fault people for their transgressions, because in a sense, people couldn't do differently.

Conspicuous decisions about honesty and integrity can be life-altering, like forks in the road,
or paths down a mountain ridge.


I don't agree wholly, and the full rebuttal would take too long. But point is, I've been in those situations where you can feel the knife edge sharpness of a decision like you face on a mountain ridge, that would take you one way or another. And which way you go determines what you encounter, and who you believe yourself to be. It can shape your whole life.


I do agree with my brother-in-law that we often can't blame people, because we don't know what led them to their choices. Absolutely. I'm not judging any of you. Many of you were raised very differently than me, for sure. So honesty has a different meaning to you. But here's a plug for integrity *going forward*.


I want to boost as many of you as I can, in your future careers. I would want to write letters of reference for those who really put effort into this course. But anyone who was dishonest in this exercise can't get a full vote of confidence from me. I just can't do it and be true to myself. In aiming for an extra percent or two, they lost a much bigger chance.


But they have a different kind of a chance. They have the chance to make this the moment where they learned that there is *nothing* more valuable than your integrity. When you have good people vouching that you're a good person, you wouldn't believe how far that can take you. Psychological research has shown that little dishonesties set up people to be dishonest in many future events. The same is true when people redefine themselves as being honest.


So for the few of you who were less than fully honest, make this the moment where you realized that integrity is key to the whole endeavour, and where you redefine yourself as someone who is honest with honest people. Exercise your free will, and show that your future is not simply determined by your past actions.

I've made plenty of mistakes. But I pride myself on owning up to them.


For those who were honest, thank you. You've already chosen one side of the mountain ridge. It's sunny on this side. ;)


I apologize for this last, unsolicited lecture. :) Every single one of you is poised to do great things (regardless of the choice just made)!


Happy holidays,

Kai



Three students wrote in earnest, having made honest mistakes (e.g., mixing up weeks 8 and 9 for a reported absence; having a stomach ache during break, when I did the spot check, but having evidence of their presence in the rest of class). I'd suspected a problem for all three, actually (as they all seemed engaged and earnest). They were dismayed at the thought that I would think of them as dishonest. I happily gave them credit for their presence. Mistakes happen!

Was this whole exercise too heavy-handed? Probably! I'll likely figure out a better way when I'm older and wiser. In the meantime, I've got to be true to who I am.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The joy of pairing academic and athletic exploration

By Harold Eyster, with thanks to Julia Craig, Roxanna Delima, and Kai Chan for comments on an earlier draft

 After spending four years running the streets in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, Vancouver was a shock.

The streets of Cambridge are laid out at odd angles and change names every few blocks. Getting from A to B never involves a straight line, and figuring out how to navigate the city took years of getting completely lost on a regular basis.

Map of the streets in Cambridge, MA showing how they are all at odd angles, and change direction often.
The chaotic streets of Cambridge, MA. Source: Cambridge Geographical Information Systems https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/GIS/allmapsandatlases/CambridgeBaseMap18x24.pdf

In contrast,  Vancouver’s streets are laid out in a well-organized grid, complete with numbered avenues that always face East/West to make it easy to know where you are, what direction you’re facing, and how to get home. 


Map of Vancouver, BC streets showing how they are all in a neat grid

Source: Jens von Bergmann https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2018/06/04/vancouver-streets-and-lanes/

While some might appreciate the order of Vancouver’s streets, I found them boring and uninteresting. The order and regularity of the streets failed to pique my curiosity. I had enjoyed the challenge of navigating Boston’s streets. Indeed, of 100 global cities analyzed by Geoff Boeing, Vancouver showed the fourth-highest spatial orderliness. Meanwhile, Boston sits near the bottom of the list.

I needed a new plan for motivating my running and exercise, which was essential to my well-being. I remembered how years ago, while living in Boston, I accompanied my friend Philip Kreycik on a run around Cambridge, Massachusetts. This wasn't just any run though—it was a run around the borders of the city, and his final run on his quest to run every road in Cambridge. During our run, Phillip explained how running every street had really brought the city alive for him and brought new understanding of how the city worked.

Strava screencapture showing a 19.4 mile run around the border of Cambridge, MA
Map of our perimeter run of Cambridge, MA

 

Inspired by Philip, perhaps I could do the same in Vancouver?

So I drew on my GIS experience and found some Vancouver street shapefiles, printed out a map of Vancouver's streets, and started my quest to run all of them. This new quest encouraged me to explore, and made each of my runs deliberate, producing new scenery, smells, and adventure—even if all the streets were on a grid.

Each night, I would return to my apartment and use a highlighter to mark the new streets I’d run.


Grayscale map of Vancouver, with streets highlighted in different colors
Closeup of the highlighted map that hung on my bedroom wall

These runs revealed hidden treasures: ripe blackberries, blooming trees, a delicious apple tree, sightings of Black Oystercatchers, or unexpected parks and history.

While I was filling in my map, I was in the midst of working on a review of theories about why people do what they do.  Many of these theories posit the importance of psychological and cognitive needs. One such need that cropped up in many papers was the need for exploration. Though it goes by many names—promotion focus, pleasure promotion, mental mapping—researchers tend to agree on one thing, that it is important to people to explore, to become familiar with the unknown, to chart new territory and connect disjunct sets of knowledge.

Big Leaf maple flowers, showing unfurling red and green leaves and pale yellow flowers
Big Leaf Maple flowers are easy to miss, but worth a second look.

Why was I doing these runs? Satisfying this need for exploration seems to be part of the answer: the excitement of finding what surprises lay on the road ahead or around the next corner, and fitting this new piece of knowledge into my mental jigsaw puzzle of the city. It was fun to see my academic work beginning to explain what I had at first viewed as an entirely orthogonal pursuit.

Just as my academic work was informing my runs, my runs often provided opportunities for academic breakthroughs. What would start out as a break (that I sometimes did not feel like I had time for), turned into an opportunity for deep thinking and reflection. Sometimes, taking a step back—or a sprint forward, as the case may be—was all I needed to bypass a cognitive bottleneck.

Once, while running along Bailie street, I suddenly realized that I had parametrized a beta distribution entirely wrong. Another time, after spending a few hours struggling to write the conclusion for my dissertation, I went out for a run. My dissertation chapters were wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, and finding the higher level contribution that transcended all five chapters was proving difficult. But out on my run, it all suddenly became clear. As I ran, I started writing the conclusion in my head. When I got back to my apartment, all I had to do was transcribe it to my computer.

As 2021 approached, I had run most of the streets near my apartment. Those remaining were quite far away—getting to them was requiring longer and longer runs. As COVID-19 pandemic kept me away from my family’s usual New Year celebration, I decided to kick off 2021 by completing a longstanding personal goal—my first 100 miler. I started at 4pm,  it started raining at 9pm, and by 12:00 AM, it was pouring—a quintessential Vancouver run. Though I was thousands of kilometers away from my family, I felt a sense of belonging as I jogged through these increasingly-familiar streets. Wet, cold, and tired, but home for the holidays.


Map showing 100 mile route
The route of my New Year run

Image shows screen capture of Zoom meeting, showing a slide and a picture of Harold.
A slide from my Zoom dissertation defense. Photo credit: Sophia Winkler-Schor

 

  On a warm July morning this past summer, I defended my dissertation.  Directly afterward and still filled with elation,  my housemate and fellow runner, Krishanu Sankar, and I dashed out the door and ran south to a road that I had missed in the previous years—the last that I had yet to run: Minto Crescent.