A Quick Background and Note on How to Use These Faculty Training Modules
These Faculty Training Modules were collaboratively developed by education specialists, trades instructors, decolonizing and uncolonizing experts, and climate and building experts that are members and supporting partners of Colleges and Institutes of Canada. These Open Education Resources (OERs) were specifically designed for instructors to support their teaching students on greening and integrating Indigenous perspectives, with the overall goal to support a workforce ready for an economic/ energy shift and support further strides in Truth and Reconciliation. However, we encourage anyone to read these modules who wants to learn how to green their building trade, know more about climate change, and read about first steps to uncolonizing work and supporting Indigenous perspectives in the building trades.
These modules took more than 2 years to fully develop from incubation to launch. The process was difficult, required a lot of guidance, collaboration, and sometimes suffered growing pains. In deepening your knowledge with these modules, you may also share some of these experiences in your own process and we welcome you to embrace any difficult feelings and challenges you may encounter – this may not feel like a familiar learning space to you. Overall, thanks to the guidance of many, and the openness to learn on the part of the content developers, we are happy with what we believe to be training modules that don’t just teach how to green and integrate Indigenous approaches in the trades, but greening and integrating Indigenous perspectives in pedagogy and teaching approaches as well.
Please use these modules as a starting point in your greening and uncolonizing/ decolonizing journey in the building trades.
Please first read the introductions on climate science written by CICan and Red Deer Polytechnic, on Indigenizing and Decolonizing written by Grey and Ivy, and on Greening Construction Trades in Canada by ECO Canada and CICan. Once you have finished your introductions and have the foundational knowledge to move ahead, please click on the trade you’d like to learn more about in the dropdown menu in the left-hand contents.
You will click on the plus sign for the “I. The Faculty Training Modules for Greening the Construction Trades”, and select your trade. When you are on the page of your choice, you will need to click again on the embedded link to access your trade’s OER. You will be taken out of this original Pressbook and either brought to a new Pressbook or a Rise360 site.
We recommend that you complete all readings, learning engagements, and multi-media. Please refer back to the introductions for foundational terms and concepts if you cannot find them in your trade’s module – these modules are meant to be used together, but the trades also each can stand alone. If you are a course instructor, please feel free to take any components or all components of these modules and introductions and integrate them into your course(s).
Happy learning!
