I first met Aman in January 2018 when I was a Visiting Professor at Siksha Bhavana's Environmental Studies, Visva Bharati University in West Bengal, India, on the other side of the Digital Divide. Aman was in the second year of his M.Sc. in Environmental Studies, which at Visva Bharati, places more of an emphasis on environmental […]
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Lab People: Jenna Leblanc studies prairie grassland restoration in Alberta
My favourite plant family is the grasses. So, I was delighted when Jenna Leblanc contacted me about doing a PhD at York, for which the field work in restoration ecology of prairie plant communities would be done in Alberta at Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park in Calgary, where Jenna had been a member of the park […]
Lab People: Nyssa van Vierssen Trip studies how people think about biodiversity in Toronto and globally
In 2015, I received an email from a newly arrived doctoral student in the Faculty of Environmental Students (now the Faculty of Environment and Urban Change), Ms. Nyssa van Vierssen Trip. Nyssa invited me to join her PhD supervisory committee, explaining that her two previous degrees were straight up Biology, but that she wanted to […]
Use Your Health Benefits for the Sake of the Students!
I have a great health benefits package that I have used during the pandemic more than I ever have over thirty years, except when I got a back injury in 2015. Caring for my own mental and physical health has been essential in maintaining my capacity for supporting the more vulnerable members of the YorkU […]
My 2021 monthly Lab Blog Posts packed into twelve days of Fall Term December
Post one of twelve, Covering My Final Chair's Remarks at Faculty of Graduate Studies Council in June 2021 Come January 2022, I will be teaching, in-person, BIOL 4095: Applied Plant Ecology. It's the same course I was teaching in Winter Term 2020, when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit. From mid-January 2020 I covered the emerging […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 10: 2020 brought home the importance of Open Access
One of the silver linings among the many dark clouds of 2020 was the large number of newspapers and magazines that made their pandemic-related content freely available to all readers. Their excellent, fact-checked, professionally-written content is usually behind a paywall. Some newspapers and magazines give readers access to a few free articles each month, with […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles Part 4: Addressing Black Lives Matter in our Courses
The day that in-person classes were cancelled at York University, was the same day that Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by policemen. They erroneously entered her apartment looking for someone who didn't live there. The police have still not been charged for the murder. I read a newspaper article about Ms. Taylor's death the […]
My pandemic pedagogy planning began in January 2020
It's August 2nd. I haven't yet posted on this lab blog in 2020. I did write some posts for my Applied Plant Ecology course blog. BIOL 4095 ran from January to April 2020. One of its 11 topics is invasive, non-indigenous organisms, which meant that I began including the spread of the novel virus, SARS-CoV-2 […]
Google Doodles for Reflecting on Science Communication and History
I will always have a soft spot for Google, hailing back to 1999 when I used to recommend it to my ecology students, as a cool up-and-coming internet search engine. This continues, despite my fairly strong opinions about the need for tech giants to be regulated, and for large portions of their staff, including the […]
COP25 saw more of the same rhetoric and policies as at COP15
Members of the York University delegation to COP25 on Madrid will be reporting back to the community on January 14th, 2020 (details left). I've been teaching undergraduate and graduate students about the greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change since 1992, when I taught my first applied plant ecology course at York University. I couldn't […]
