APBI265 introduction to Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems

Course Syllabus v010825                                      view offline here

Land Acknowledgement

UBC’s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the 

xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land it is situated on has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next on this site. As learners who study, as well as work, and play on the UBC campus, we carry responsibilities that emerge from past and ongoing relationships with host nations.

I am grateful to be instructing this course focused on better understanding a stewardship-focused, long-term relationship to agriculture and food systems from the land of the Musqueam people, and from the place where I also live and work as an uninvited guest and settler farmer that stands within the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group.

Course Information

Course Title: Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems

Course Code Number: APBI265 001

Course Credits Value: 3

There are no prerequisites for this course. Students from across academic disciplines with a strong interest in exploring contemporary debates in farming and food systems are welcome and encouraged to join the course. The mode of instruction is in-person with regularly scheduled classroom sessions where most of our course learning activities and assessments will take place. 

Contacts

Course Instructor: DeLisa Lewis, PhD, LLAg ,(she, her)

Contact Details: Reach out with questions or requests via Canvas APBI265 course email or talk to me during or after our classroom session.

In-person and one-on-one instructor meetings: Scheduled immediately following our scheduled Wednesday classroom sessions.

Virtual Zoom Meetings: Request via Canvas APBI265 course email.

I encourage you to reach out and schedule time with me to chat about anything related to the course that is personal or specific to your individual situation. If you are registered with the Centre for Accessibility, please send your letters of Accommodation and any follow-up questions or concerns you may have via Canvas email. 

At any time, I welcome your questions about how to approach an assignment that have not been asked or answered in class or on the FAQs discussion board, any questions or ideas you'd like feedback on for individual assignments prior to their due dates, concerns you have about your performance with assignments, or other.

General questions? If you have general questions about the course content or assignments, I will be inviting your questions before, during, and after our scheduled classroom sessions. If you miss any of those opportunities, please post this kind of question to the Canvas course Frequently Asked Questions/FAQS Discussion Board. On the FAQS discussion board, anyone in the course may helpfully respond—another student, the instructor, or your TA.

I will do my best to respond to your email request within 48 hours Monday-Friday. During the weekends and during Mid-term Break (February 17-21), no assignments will be due. Your instructor and TA will not be responding to incoming emails during weekends or the Mid-term Break.

Course Instructor Brief Biographical Statement

My background and experience in sustainable agriculture and food systems includes more than 25 years as a practicing farmer, and research and teaching within the Faculty of Land and Food Systems since 2006. Currently, I am an instructor in three courses within the Applied Biology Program (APBI265, APBI361, and LFS250 002), and I collaborate with the Sustainable Agriculture Landscapes Lab and Dr. Sean Smukler on regionally focused soil health and nutrient management research. Much of this research takes place on the working farm where I practice integrated crop-livestock farming and where my family and I live within the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group. My areas of research and farming practice are focused on soil health centered best practices with an agroecological lens.

This course emerged from my graduate research in Nuxalk traditional territory, from my experience as a practicing farmer, and from the years as lead instructor for the UBC Farm Practicum in Sustainable Agriculture. I have been teaching courses focused on Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in our faculty since 2009, and this course focused on key indicators of agroecosystem sustainability since 2014.

Course Teaching Assistant: Jasmine Bal (she, her)

Contact via Canvas course email and view his introduction on the Canvas course introductions page.

Course Description

The question: 'How do we feed the world' dominated the restructuring of agricultural policy and farming landscapes in the 20^th Century towards increasing production as a ‘solution’ for sustaining the business of agriculture and for satisfying global hunger. Despite ongoing hunger and financial crises continuing to challenge farmers, debates, and discussion of ‘how to feed the world’ persist.

This course is built on a foundation of the science, practice, and social movements of Agroecology. With student-centered and team-based learning, we explore emerging questions framed by contemporary Agroecologists, including: 'how do we feed ourselves' and 'how do we make meaningful change to farming and food systems' with a view towards a regional approach to application of possible solutions, and to greater equity, diversity, and inclusion with designing those solutions to food production challenges.

APBI265 introduces Agroecology as an approach to redesigning agriculture and food systems.

Agroecology offers a set of practices, built on a foundation of science, energized by social movements that can move us towards sustainable agriculture and food systems in the 21st century.

The course goal is to facilitate a broad introduction to Agroecology as a model for transforming agriculture and food systems for the 21^st century.

Course Structure

APBI265 is designed to deliver in person learning experiences with an emphasis on interactive discussion and team-based learning. Attendance, engagement, and participation during scheduled classroom sessions are important to success in the course.

Classroom sessions are structured to include brief lecture/plenary discussion focused on the weekly course materials and upcoming assignments, small team-based discussions, presentations, project work, other hands-on learning activities and in-class assessments of learning.

Building communication skills and formulating strategies for collaborative and social learning are important learning outcomes of the course. You will be asked to regularly contribute to discussions, to respectfully engage, provide peer review and feedback.

Learning Materials

All learning materials for this course will be provided on the Canvas course website. No additional textbook or other purchases required. Students will need to bring their own laptop to facilitate several in-classroom learning activities and online submissions. The instructor will provide the paper in class for any on paper assignment submissions (e.g. brief write-up assignments).

Course readings and assignments instructions will be located within the APBI265 Canvas course website. Students will need to familiarize themselves with how to navigate the site, where and how to submit each assignment, and take responsibility for communicating regularly with classmates and the instructor.

Course Schedule

We will meet in the West Mall Swing Space Floor 1 Room 109 from 1 pm - 4 pm Wednesdays unless otherwise notified.

Weather disruptions have forced a few sessions to a virtual/Zoom session mode in recent years. Any necessary change to the in-person classroom meeting place (i.e., SWNG-Floor 1-Room 109 or Zoom classroom) will be posted in a Canvas announcement.

A detailed course schedule can be found on the APBI265 home page in Canvas.

Any changes to due dates within the course schedule (e.g., assignments, readings) will be communicated with Canvas Course Announcements.

Learning Activities

To meet the course learning outcomes detailed below, the activities and assessments for this course will consist of the following:

• Weekly required reading and viewing of guiding course materials in Canvas.
• Regularly scheduled in-class quizzes and brief write-ups of lessons learned through reading, discussion, research, and collaborative activities.
• Attendance, engagement, and contributions to in-class discussions and learning activities with your peers and the instructor.
• Team discussion and brainstorming, collaborative team project work, and in-class oral presentations.
• Written research + reflections and online oral presentations

Learning Outcomes and the Activities, Assignments linked with them.

Assignments Schedule and Marking Overview

See the Course Schedule linked on the Canvas home page and the Assignments tab link on left side navigation in Canvas for more detailed assignments instructions as they become available in 2025.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

What is academic integrity? The academic enterprise is founded on honesty, civility, and integrity. As members of this enterprise, all students are expected to know, understand, and follow the codes of conduct regarding academic integrity. At the most basic level, this means submitting only original work done by you and acknowledging all sources of information or ideas and attributing them to others as required. This working definition of ‘academic integrity’ was created by Dr. Catherine Rawn, was suggested by the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UBC and carries a Creative Commons license.

To help you learn your responsibilities as a student in this course, please read and understand UBC’s expectations for academic honesty in the UBC Calendar: “Academic Honesty,”.

Where can I find support to meet these expectations?

For written assignments and help with plagiarism and citation, see the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication.

Additional resources for learning with integrity can be found on the UBC Academic Integrity Website.

All students are subject to the University's rules on Academic Misconduct 

Academic misconduct includes any conduct by which a student gains or attempts to gain an unfair academic advantage or benefit thereby compromising the integrity of the academic process or helping or attempting to help another person commit an act of academic misconduct or gain, or attempt to gain, an unfair academic advantage.

The Academic Calendars (Vancouver and Okanagan) provides details about the different types of academic misconduct, and it is important that everyone understands these.

Plagiarism is a serious offence, and any student caught plagiarizing will be subject to penalties set out in the UBC calendar. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

• Copying or paraphrasing from another author or source without proper citation
• Copying work from another student
• Copying your own work used for another course without clear acknowledgement and
• The use of Chat GPT and similar online resources that generate text responses or research papers in substitution for your own reflections and original
• https://www.calendar.ubc.ca/Vancouver/index.cfm?tree=3,54,111,0
• Broadly, any form of intellectual theft where ‘another's’(inclusive of AI) work or ideas are presented as another individual's assignment.

Academic Integrity and written acknowledgement of learning resources in APBI265

The accepted citation-acknowledgement format for all written assignments in APBI265 is the American Psychological Association (APA) format. You are expected to follow this format for all written assignments.

In brief, the APA writing style aims to promote objectivity in communicating science, and the APA format is a means to standardize reports across the scientific community (Schwartz, Landrum, & Guring, 2013). More detailed information about this format, including how to cite references correctly can be found here https://guides.library.ubc.ca/apacitationstyle and here https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_style_introduction.htmlLinks to an external site.

Specifically for this course and assignments:

1. The unacknowledged or unattributed use of the Chat GPT or other AI platform for generating written assignments is not acceptable for APBI265, doing so does not meet standard for academic integrity outlined
2. The use of UBC Library or other online tools that help to generate the APA in-text citations and references sections is encouraged and is not considered a breach of academic integrity for APBI265.Note that the use of these tools does require a basic understanding of the APA style and standards to accurately apply and format the citations you are generating for use in your assignments.
3. All quizzes for this course are timed and 'open book'. To be clear, 'open book' in this course is limited to the APBI265 Canvas course pages. No consultation or collaboration with your peers or other online resources or devices are permitted during the time you are taking your quiz while in the APBI265 classroom.

Please reach out to me with any questions you may have about this, either with a request for scheduling a meeting time in our virtual office, or with questions and responses that can be shared with all students on our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) discussion board.

Due Dates and Late Assignments

All assignments are due at the times and dates listed in the course calendar. All times listed are set to Vancouver campus time (PST/PDT, UTC-7 hours).

APBI265 Policies on requests for assignment due date extensions or missed in class assignments

• Following university-wide policies on accessibility and accommodation, students with letters of accommodations will be granted assignment extension requests based on their documentation.
• With proactive communication (48-hours minimum), alternative assignment arrangements (e.g. waived assignment or quiz) will be made on a case-by-case basis for a missed quiz and/or brief write-ups.
• Similarly, with 48-hours notice prior to an individual assignment due date, all students are eligible for a 24-hour extension with no questions asked.
• To incentivize attendance and participation in classroom learning activities-assignments, all students who are present for each in class quiz and brief write up assignments will be eligible to drop the lowest marks of either their quizzes or write-ups.
• If you are absent without prior or pro-active communication or medical documentation for a scheduled in-class quiz, in-class assignment or oral presentation, you will not be able to make up the missed work.
• Download the 'Student declaration of illness' form here and provide that completed form when communicating to the instructor about an unexpected absence, late, or missed assignment due to illness.

Student Resources and Mental Health

If you are having issues with stress, anxiety, or other mental health problems, please do not hesitate to contact the instructor and to reach out to the wide range of UBC resource persons who are focused on providing support in this arena.

• https://www.landfood.ubc.ca/student-services/medical-emotional-difficulties/
• https://facultystaff.students.ubc.ca/assisting-students-distress
• https://students.ubc.ca/campus-life/diversity-campus/sexual-diversity
• https://students.ubc.ca/health-wellness/student-health-service
• https://students.ubc.ca/health-wellness/mental-health-support-counselling-services

Additional Learning Resources and technical support

Chapman Learning Commons

Resources for a wide range of learning support including Online learning, writing support, academic integrity, tutoring and advice.

https://learningcommons.ubc.ca/

Faculty of Land and Food Systems Learning Centre: Technical issues with Canvas

https://lc.landfood.ubc.ca/support/

Copyright All materials of this course (course contents, lecture slides, assessments, course readings, etc.) are the intellectual property of the Course Instructor or licensed to be used in this course by the copyright owner. Redistribution of these materials by any means without permission of the copyright holder(s) constitutes a breach of copyright and may lead to academic discipline.

 Version: January 8, 2025

 Schwartz, B. M., Landrum, R. E., Gurung, R. A. R. (2013). An easy guide to APA style (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Sage.