Five courses selected for Principal’s Impact Courses

Five courses have been selected as the Principal’s Impact Courses this year. The successful applicants will receive grants providing up to $10,000 in one-time funding to develop their proposed courses.

The Principal’s Impact Courses program is part of a long-term commitment to transform curricula and enhance already-existing undergraduate courses or develop new courses that support the Queen’s Strategy.

Proposed courses are meant to boost student learning for impact, promote student research, integrate I-EDIAA principles and practices, strengthen local and global connections, and focus on significant and urgent challenges.

“It was inspiring to receive so many imaginative and enthusiastic proposals,” says Principal and Vice-Chancellor Patrick Deane. “These extraordinary courses enhance the student learning experience, promote collaboration by bringing together different communities and approaches, and align with Queen’s vision for the future to effect real, positive change.”

Students who take these courses will build capacity for inquiry-based learning and respond to questions and dilemmas, while fostering reciprocal and respectful relationships with peers, instructors, and communities.

“Meaningful curricula and varied learning environments provide students with unique opportunities to really immerse themselves in discovery processes to solve pressing issues and societal challenges,” says Klodiana Kolomitro, Special Advisor to the Principal, Strategic Development. “By supporting instructors to enhance the student learning experience with these transformative courses, students are being set up to have a greater impact.”

The next call for proposals will begin in January 2024.

2023 Grant Recipients

Allyship and Community Engagement: Creating change through appropriate and meaningful partnerships for health equity
Applicant Team: Colleen Davison, Department of Public Health Sciences and Eva Purkey, Department of Family Medicine

In GLPH490/GLPH493 students will learn about appropriate models of allyship, partnership, and community engagement through a review of critical scholarship and practical examples; critically examine their own positionality, power, privilege, and potential roles in allyship and community engagement; and examine ‘models of change’ to consider in relation to allyship and community engagement approaches for improving equity and social justice. An international placement site for students to engage in service learning that is community-based and directed by groups directly facing inequities will also be developed in the city of Mae Sot, Thailand, on the Thailand-Burma (Myanmar) border. Students will actively engage with diverse disciplinary and sector partners from health, child protection, law, education, social services, disability services, and more. These two offerings will be at the undergraduate level and embedded in the Bachelor of Health Sciences program (Global and Population Health Learning Track) and potentially made available to students from other programs.

Global Health Policies and Practice: Community Impact
Applicant Team: Samantha Belbin and Beth Richan, Health Sciences and Health Studies at Bader College, Kim Sears, School of Nursing, and Anita Goldschmied, Interdisciplinary Studies in Global Health and Disability at Bader College

This enhancement to HLTH 305 will take classroom theory and apply it to real-world scenarios so students can build an understanding of the purpose and mission of global health organizations and how they influence national and international decisions. Learners will determine the effects of health outcome statistics and analyze non-health related goals set forth by global organizations by drawing connections to the World Health Organization’s framework of ‘Health in all Policies.’ They will examine grassroots initiatives and governmental power structures in the Global North and South to determine previous influences on change and uncover areas for improvement and suggest reform through a global health policy lens.

Field Course in Kinesiology and Health Studies; 2023-2024 topic: Food as Fuel, Justice, and Revolution
Applicant: Courtney Szto, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies

KNPE 338 seeks to explore the power of food by critically engaging students around issues of health, food justice, intersectionality, anti-colonialism, and global issues through the mediums of food, gardening, farming, and cooking. Food and beverages will serve as cultural texts for exploration because their ubiquity and universality also demonstrate interconnected histories and futures. The first half of the course will take place in the community and the second half will be based out of Loving Spoonful’s kitchen facility in Kingston. Thus, students will get to see where their food comes from, learn how to prepare food, and understand how certain dishes and ingredients are situated within broader histories of colonialism, resistance, and identity.

In Health and Sickness: How Pandemics Shaped the History of the World
Applicant: Arditi Sen, Department of History

This course will bring together global historical analyses on pandemics, community engagement in the Kingston area, and experiential learning opportunities in local museums and archives, to weave an innovative and insightful understanding of the role the pandemics have played in shaping contemporary society and our understanding of Social Determinants of Health. Drawing from the local history of long-term global processes shaped by past pandemics including the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, malaria, polio, the Spanish flu, tuberculosis, and syphilis, students will learn about: the history of the evolution of hospitals, sanitation movements, the rise of patent medicines and the opiates industry, the growth of tropical medicine, legal apparatuses on controlling poverty, attempts to solve childhood mortality, the story of politicizing nutrition, and the nuances of governmental control over bodies.  

Indigenous Law in Context
Applicant: Lindsay Borrows, Faculty of Law

LAW 398 will take place over four immersive days, from Sept. 7-10, 2023, in partnership with the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation whose reserve is located along the shores of Georgian Bay. Students will travel together via charter bus across Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territories from Kingston to Neyaashiinigmiing, ON, and be introduced to Anishinaabe legal principles, pedagogies, processes, obligations, rights, and ethics. Students will learn from community-based scholars whose voices are so rarely heard within the academy, and the land itself as it is an Anishinaabe “casebook” full of legal precedent for how we might make decisions, resolve disputes, create community safety, and pattern our lives together as Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Students will begin to learn how to read this living casebook and learn how to harmonize and productively identify tensions between Indigenous laws and the current core law school curriculum in this intensive community-based course.