Vanier College
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

The Global Challenge course offered in the Winter requires students to organize a kiosk during the College's Earth Week. The kiosks can be an interactive activity such as a thrift shop, vermicomposting & soil care, eco-packaging, eco-DIYs etc. Kiosks can also have informative displays with themes such as TEK & Indigenous views, land grabbing & landrights etc.

I.D.E.A.S. Studio (Integrating Design Education and Action for Sustainability) is an ongoing extracurricular initiative that offers unique, project-based, community engagement and career development opportunities for Vanier students. In 2018-2019, an I.D.E.A.S. Studio student assisted parents of a local elemenatry school to develop visualisations for a proposed outdoor learning space.

The Vanier Collective gardens team organizes workshops for a local daycare, including 3 workshops in the fall of 2022.

The Campus Biodiversity Network that Vanier coordinates runs annual campaigns as part of the City Nature Walk each April to encourage nature observation and tracking wildlife sightings through its application.

Biology project currently in progress for the year 2022. Students will be conducting a research project to determine the impacts plants have on CO2 concentrations in a classroom setting. Students will also be conducting a literature review to determine the plant quantity and species to use in the project.

Working under the supervision of teacher Michael Lancione, a student from the architectural technology department was hired to draft plans for a new outdoor pedagogical and storage space to be associated with the collective gardens, what we are calling the 'ped shed'.

In the Gardens, participants are able to gain experience in organic agriculture and sustainable food systems as the Gardens do not use chemical fertilizers, and have never sprayed pesticides or insecticides on campus. Instead, techniques focus on permaculture, natural farming, and no-till agriculture to allow participants to gain firsthand experience about sustainable food and herbal medicine production.
Since the fall of 2019, the Gardens have offered at least one food-related workshop per semester. The themes of the workshops range from how to make your own herbal tea mix with herbs grown on campus, to food transformation and preservation, such as how to make different variants of pesto and how to pickle using foods grown in the gardens. Other workshop we offer look at wild food sources, what to eat if lost in nature, and how to create a small permaculture space in your backyard using local plants to provide an edible yield.

Tree Planting and Documentation Projects
An Environmental Wildlife Management student updated the content of the campus tree survey and a former student has been preparing version 2 of the mobile app, TreeTag. Due to poor weather conditions and scheduling problems with student volunteers and the Service Dept, no new trees were planted in 2018-19. However, a major planting is being scheduled for the 2019 autumn session with the usual partners.

In an Urban Geography class, students had to observe the transport dynamics on campus. The college's sustainability coordinator presented the dynamics, complexities and problem zones to the students. Afterwards, in small groups, students used site plans to draw their recommendations for improvements or solutions to problem zones and had to present these to the rest of the class.
A discussion of possible solutions was then had by the whole group.
The project proved worthwhile for the course objectives (better understand spatial dynamics of a city), for the college (putting discussion of the landscape on the table) and especially for the students themselves (developing an appreciation of the complexities of meeting sustainability objectives in a limited space amongst competing stake and vision holders within our community).

In the summer of 2022, students were involved for the first time in collecting, sorting and quantifying the college's waste as part of Vanier's waste characterization.

-Students are given the opportunity to participate in Vanier's collective gardens through various means: through the integration of the gardens into classroom pedagogy; as volunteers; as paid interns. One of the themes touched on in the gardens is the use of plants as medicine, and students were involved in producing over 500 bags of dried tea from the garden, which were then distributed to various departments in the college;

-Staff and faculty are invited to participate in a Sustainable happiness course. As part of the course, participants are asked to think of a project to incorporate the themes of sustainability and positive psychology into their work, much of which ends up happening through the classroom.

-As part of the Vanier Keys Society's 'Sustainability Stream', students come up with their own projects for peer-to-peer outreach. The fall 2022 cohort chose to organize an awareness campaign about healthy cell-phone usage.