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 […]
Dawn's Blog and General News Items
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 11: who knew that Tik Tok would become the social media star of 2020?
Last January, before in-person undergraduate classes were cancelled in March 2020, my 8:30am Winter Semester Applied Plant Ecology lecture covered media literacy and science communication. We discussed where people get their news from, who is behind different media platforms, and the role of social media in public science education. I'm pretty sure it was […]
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 9: 2020's science-policy-politics-lessons
It's a year since scientists sounded the alarm about a novel, rapidly spreading coronavirus centred in Wuhan, China. Today, the New York Times published a review of the early events, in which politics over-rode the science, and some of the key doctors who first encountered what we now call SARS-CoV-2 virus, died as they warned […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 8: #AdventBotany VLOGs & BLOGs
I've been touting the benefits of blogging for developing student writing skills, ever since 2006, when I learned how to write posts for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability website, after I became its director. On my return to full-time teaching in 2014, I immediately added Blog writing assignments to all my Biology […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles 7: How Humanizing Science Helps with Hallowe'en at Home
My favourite book by Charles Darwin is the one about worms (The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms: with observations on their habits: 1881). Today, Darwin is still a larger than life iconic figure, but thanks to his habit of writing in books, known as marginalia, we have insights into him as […]
Pandemic Pedagogy Chronicles Part 6: Returning to my lab. feels like finding the Marie Celeste
Canadian higher education has mainly functioned virtually since March 2020, when campus buildings were closed. The residential population of York University during this pandemic has consisted of students and their families, for whom their campus apartments are their main homes, and international students who could not get home at the end of April, due to […]
