No one enjoys being left on read, but the Grade 10s overcame this challenge and more in their recent Individuals & Societies project on Sustainability. This assignment had students putting their professional communication skills and research techniques to the test to see how BC measures up to Canada’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The Challenge
Students started by selecting a sustainability issue impacting Vancouver, with topics ranging from transportation, energy, local business, urbanization and biodiversity. They utilized both secondary and primary research through fieldwork to determine BC’s effectiveness in their area, with the goal of producing a letter of concern to a relevant policy expert with an outline of their findings and suggestions for future sustainable development.
The project offered real-world experience with research and communication. Some groups struggled to reach organizations while others had to get creative in their processes to find the needed information. These hurdles were a great way for the students to strengthen their Approaches to Learning (ATL) skills.
SJS News sat down with two of the groups to learn more about their process and their takeaways from the project.
The Student Perspective
Urban Growth and Biodiversity — Andrew, Alex, Claire and Nadi
In our brainstorming, our group talked a lot about biodiversity and this led us toward urban growth, since it’s such a big issue in Vancouver right now. We decided to investigate to what extent urban growth affects biodiversity in Vancouver ecosystems and how it connects to BC’s contribution to Canada’s sustainability goals. To manage the project we split the work among our group to research the overall positives and negatives, socioeconomic impact, Indigenous perspectives and the ecological impacts.
An effective strategy when conducting our fieldwork was leveraging our community in addition to external organizations. We sent out a survey as well as talked to a biology teacher and a business student to fill in gaps in our understanding. The project definitely pushed us to be strong communicators. Emailing is one thing but having to actually interview someone on the phone or on a video call is a different experience.
We found overall that economic interest has overridden environmental protection for many years, contributing to ecological harm. Our conclusion is that urban growth has negatively impacted biodiversity and the ecosystems in Vancouver and that the BC Government has significant room for improvement to meet federal expectations. We’ll be addressing policy suggestions in our letter to a government official.
Energy Consumption — Amy, Nicole, Rohan and Remi
Our group chose energy as the focus for our research because it felt that it was an important component for building a sustainable city. We investigated how residential energy in Vancouver aligns with Canadian sustainability goals. The biggest challenge was finding specific, up-to-date consumption data, which wasn’t publicly available. We also reached out to many organizations that we never heard back from, including BC Hydro, initially because our phone calls and emails to their general inquiry lines went unanswered.
Through some creative research we managed to figure out the emails for some of their executive team and reached out to them directly. They kindly connected us with a representative from BC Hydro, who provided us with an interview and that was hugely helpful. While we’re still waiting to finalize the data component of our project, overall we have found that BC has made steps forward in terms of energy efficiency through improved technologies and new policies requiring energy-conscience building practices.
This project was really interesting as there were several perspectives we hadn’t considered, like how having an older building or living in a lower socioeconomic level would influence energy consumption for families. Throughout the project, we strengthened our communication, critical-thinking and research skills, especially as we solved problems around limited data access, and learned how to conduct professional outreach under time pressure.
Well done to all the students for their persistence on their projects. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this other article to see what sustainable actions the Junior School is up to.
