The United Nation’s SDGs have been frequently mentioned lately as I prepare for the BIT 295 Biotechnology & Sustainability course in the spring. Tonight, we watched an Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Creating Faculty/Student Partnerships using the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) and Open Pedagogy” with Drs. Michael Mills and Shinita Hernandez as well as several other Montgomery College students. Mills did a land acknowledgment and also encouraged the audience to research the people mentioned for their land acknowledgments. Mills began by describing the cost savings at Montgomery College and student success, including zero-cost courses. They mentioned that students are doing the same or better in Z-courses than non-Z courses. Then, with a little brainstorming, they addressed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Open Pedagogy Fellowship to bring social justice into the program. They created a summer institute that featured teamwork and open pedagogy training for teams to address the SGDs. The summer institute also connected participants to team members from other institutions as they developed in teams renewable assignments. Faculty were encouraged to implement and refine their approaches and partner with students to showcase their work. The first year only Montgomery College participated in the institute, and then they expanded to six other institutions, several in Canada. Hernandez mentioned they created a Pressbooks resource. The summer institute they created started in 2018 with seven teams and has since expanded to 20 teams and 43 teams with six partners. Hernandez also mentioned they have expanded to twenty-six different fields and 29 different courses. There is a selective process for students to partner with faculty. OEGlobal awarded Montgomery College the Open Pedagogy Award for Excellence in 2020 for their UN Sustainable Development Goals. Professor Rebecca Razavi and student Juliza Majano spoke about the social and environmental justice goals of their semester-long course. The project extends throughout the semester, and students create an infographic about a business and how it supports the UN SGDs. By going thru all these experiences, the students obtain a “Change Maker” digital badge. How cool! We’ve been thinking about badges for a while, and this is a great way to reward student learning. Razavi mentioned they used Canva to create the infographics. This semester, Razavi explained, they will use Bookcreator to create a virtual digital book. I briefly looked into Bookcreator, a tool that is used by K-12 educators too. Juliza Majano spoke about the creativity that this project allowed. Professor Zev Cossin was paired with partners from KPU in Canada and combined the fields of horticulture and anthropology. The project included classification and research of weeds using iNaturalist. Students thought about the history of that plant and its sustainable uses. The ethnobotany project included reflections. Parveen Hussain was a student in the course and spoke about the assignment. Parveen’s love for roses became a resource they could share with others. This session provided several thought-provoking ideas for including open in courses and connecting people.
