Kia ora!
Come with us and embark on an intellectual journey to deepen your understanding of the preservation of our natural environment. Whilst also broadening your cultural awareness through learning about the indigenous tribes of southern New Zealand, Kai Tahu.
How does landscape inform who you are? How important is the natural environment for you? Do you understand the role people and culture have in preserving the environment and helping you understand your own identity? Join students and staff members online from around the world as we start to unpack these questions and critically reflect on what it means to be us, living in this world at this time.
Entry requirements
- You need to be studying at a local or international institution and meet the entry requirements for a Level 7 course.
Your workload
This is an intensive short course so please expect to be studying full-time for the three weeks.
Course content
For students
This course insightfully supports you to dive into your own and others’ perceptions. We aim to ensure you come away from this course feeling more connected to yourself, the land and to others. This can help you be more compassionate towards others and the Earth, more self-aware, and more self-assured. Ready to take action for what you believe in.
Students from around the world will come together to listen and learn from each other. Live and pre-recorded classes from locations in New Zealand will allow you to feel connected to land and people on the other side of the world!
Theme 1
First Nation peoples occupy a unique space in any global village as their cultural practices, knowledge and understanding of the world do not exist in any other place. Learn about the conditions that created contemporary New Zealand society and take advantage of this opportunity to examine and reflect on your own cultural context and the relationships in the places we share.
Theme 2
Nature as a foundation for our growth, safety and wellbeing will be explored through sustainability principles and tools provided to help you understand how you can take real-world action for positive change. Once we understand the two themes, we’ll look at how both sustainability and biculturalism inform, relate and intersect with one another and how this is relevant to your life.
For staff members
There will be a student cohort from around the world participating in this programme at the same time as staff members. Staff members and students will have time when they are together, and time apart to debrief and reflect on what they are learning. As a staff member, you’ll have additional classes to discuss your own personal perspective shift, to reflect on student learning and to discuss how to embed sustainability and biculturalism into your own teaching.
What makes this course even more unique?
You’ll be able to observe students in real-time engaging in these principles.
This is not just theory. We offer you the challenge to self-critique your own relationship with these transformative concepts, and the opportunity to observe award-winning teaching and learning.
For more information
Please email Sarah.Sellar@op.ac.nz
