2023 | Canvas Course about the Intersection of Social & Environmental Issues

IGC Capstone Project | Interfaces of Global Change

Creation of a Canvas Course on Social & Environmental Issues Affecting American Indian and Indigenous Communities

Student Members:

• Amir Mortazavigazar, Public Health Sciences
• Sarah Juster, Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation
• Dexter Howard, Biological Sciences

Faculty Mentors:

• Dr. Julia Gohlke, Public Health Sciences
• Melissa Faircloth, American Indian and Indigenous Community Center

Adequate training related to Indigenous experiences and identities in the realm of higher education is sorely needed. At Virginia Tech (VT), such resources are spread out across different platforms and may be difficult to locate and access. Melissa Faircloth, Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Community Center at VT, has initiated trainings within the VT community that provide attendees with an in-depth overview of racial justice and equity issues impacting Native communities, the complexities of defining Indigenous and Native identities, and an introduction to the common myths an microaggressions faced by Indigenous people within society.

For this capstone project, we collaborated with Melissa Faircloth to help adapt her presentation into a centralized, self-paced Canvas course centered on these very topics. We integrated visual and audio features—including recorded lectures by Faircloth—into five course modules. The primary deliverable for this project was a Canvas course that is open to anyone at VT. VT Canvas members can sign up for the course on its own, or link to it from other relevant courses. The centralized and accessible nature of this course makes it possible for professors at VT from a variety of disciplines to add these modules to their Canvas courses.

Canvas Course: https://canvas.vt.edu/courses/181876

Read the full summary report about this project here.