EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN ARTS AND SCIENCE
Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry offers all honours and all specialization students the opportunity to carry out research in an active research lab within the department under the supervision of a full-time faculty member. These undergraduates act as full members of the research group and are trained in the preparation and planning of experiments, proper experimentation and safety protocols, data collection, data analysis and interpretation and scientific communication. Some of these students co-author publications while others present their work externally at major regional and national conferences. Many of these students go on to graduate studies where this training and exposure to research serves them very well.
Work-integrated learning
Steve Bonspiel, the 2018 Journalist-in-Residence in the Department of Journalism, and Editor/Publisher of the Eastern Door, offered students the opportunity to work on "Living the Language: The Mohawk Revival" to cover indigenous communities with care and positive impact. The students created a variety of media – print, video and radio – for mainstream and Indigenous news organizations. “Internships like this are good because then you produce journalists like our assistant editor Daniel J. Rowe, or people like Christopher Curtis who covers Indigenous issues for the Montreal Gazette. You produce people who challenge themselves to be better journalists and better people,” says Steve.
Steve Bonspiel (top right) and journalism students
Geography, Planning and Environment
Course-integrated learning
"I use experiential learning in GEOG 498 (Indigenous and Environmental History of Americas),” said Jeannine St-Jacques, Assistant Professor, Geography, Planning and Environment. Students are assigned a mission to find samples of (usually) lesser-known tropical crops or agricultural products of the Columbian Exchange, most of which were domesticated in the New World. With globalization’s current vast expansion of planetary trade networks, yet another wave of the Columbian Exchange is taking place as these less known agricultural products become available in Montreal and elsewhere in the global North. “They love it, they do well, and it teaches them how the Indigenous crops of the Americas have been spread far and wide.”
Community-based learning
AHSC 350, Leisure Education -The Community Connections: Developing Leisure Education for Youth project is a unique collaboration between the Department of Applied Human Sciences, the Department of Recreation and Athletics, and the Before and After School Enriched Daycare Program of the English Montreal School Board. The goal of the project is to immerse leisure and therapeutic recreation students in a real-world teaching and learning experience with elementary aged children. Students acquire first-hand knowledge of leisure education lesson preparation, elementary teaching, and child development. Knowledge acquired through this experience may help to design a framework for implementing leisure education into after-school programs at the elementary level across Quebec and beyond.
