UVic’s School of Environmental Studies turns fifty
Graphic by Elise Saatchi.
The School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (UVic) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. At the time of this milestone, the school’s focus is on community engagement, and helping to solve environmental problems.
The school fosters community partnerships and impacts policies in communities, said Kara Shaw, a professor in the faculty of Environmental Studies at UVic.
Students and faculty have a commitment to supporting research-based initiatives brought to them by members of the Greater Victoria area, allowing the school to partake in hands-on research.
“We’re very outward-focused,” said Shaw, a professor in the faculty of Environmental Studies at UVic. Faculty members and students at UVic collaborate with communities and engage with partners to share their research skills and combat the effects of climate change.
UVic as an institution has the capacity to conduct projects that can help solve environmental problems. Through the School of Environmental Studies, the university has gained research opportunities to use their resources within communities trying to solve climate problems. Shaw stated that, for students and staff, the school has always been a space of experiential learning.
Shaw shared that the teaching aspect of the school is not just for understanding the environment and the issues within it, but also for learning to carefully navigate those issues through real life scenarios. The school often finds research-based learning through communities approaching faculty, graduate students, or the school.
“We really focus on having communities tell us what they need,” said Shaw.
As the program has a required double-major component, the classrooms are filled with interdisciplinary skills which are further assets to community projects. This also enhances the students’ learning experiences and hands-on working skills.
Almost every graduate student in the program is using their knowledge outside of the classroom, working on problems that communities bring forth. By doing so, the graduate students are learning not only from their professors and peers but also from members of the communities they go and work in. “Communities, they’ve trained us, they’ve taught us how to do our own work,” said Shaw about the impact of working with people outside of the university.
The research conducted by graduate students and faculty members is just one way the school has positively impacted the community in the past 50 years. Students and staff in environmental studies are also invited by various groups to share research that could further change the field of environmental studies.
“It’s fairly common for us to be doing research … that gets the attention of somebody who is doing policy,” said Shaw. “They have us come in and talk with them about what kind of research we’re doing.”
Recently, Shaw has conducted research on climate action priorities in remote communities. This has led to an invite from the climate action secretariat to present the results from Shaw’s research. This is just one way the School of Environmental Studies has interacted with policy processes.
According to Shaw, since her start at the school in 2003, the faculty has grown from five to 14 members. It currently supports 60 graduate students and hundreds of undergraduate students.
Through the school’s growth, one thing has stayed consistent: the school’s commitment to incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the land into their teachings, research, and applied skills.
The interdisciplinary approach has also required its faculty members to have an interdisciplinary way of thinking. “Recognizing that environmental problems are problems with society, they’re not problems with the natural world,” said Shaw. “We need science, but we also really need to always ground that science in the social world and political world.”
The school’s interdisciplinary approach sets it apart from similar programs at other Canadian universities — and it’s clearly working. The School of Environmental Studies has been thriving for fifty years and counting.
