By Amy Kipp
A First Year Seminar Course
Who cares? What do you care about? What counts as care? Is it enough to care about an issue or does care require some sort of action? From January to April 2023, Leah Govia (a fellow PhD candidate and research team member) and I had the privilege of teaching a first year seminar course at the University of Guelph. The first year seminar program allows instructors to design a course about any topic they wish to explore. When we applied to teach the course we were excited by the endless possibilities of what we could learn with students. We decided to focus on the topic of care and what it looks like across various scales. Combining our research interests, weekly topics included caring classrooms, caring communities, care and online activism, care and multispecies relationships and more.
The course was called "Who cares? Do you? Exploring what it means to care in a rapidly changing world." Through this course we learned alongside 21 first year undergraduate students as we explored what it means to care, and care well, in our rapidly changing world. As a seminar, the course involved many in-class activities that encouraged students to apply ideas about care to different contexts. This included activities like a word association game - asking students what comes to mind when you hear the word care; imagining in-person and digital initiatives that could make for a more caring university campus; and brainstorming how different objects - e.g. a cheese grater, a kitchen sink, a boot - could be used to create multispecies communities. Additionally, each week students posted an example of 'care in practice' to a digital group message board, which we discussed further in class.
Throughout the course we drew on the Care Collective's Care Manifesto (2020) to guide many of our discussions, often returning to their definition of care as "our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself.” Together with students we examined the various aspects of this definition and considered what else is involved in care (and caring well!).
care as "our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself.”
Student Blog Series
For the students' capstone assignment they each created a series of four blog posts exploring a topic they were interested in through the lens of care. As an interdisciplinary course, students came from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including international development studies, landscape architecture, nutrition, computer science, engineering, psychology, and more. Leah and I were amazed at the insights students shared in their blog posts - the blogs spanned topics such as care and grief, food systems, activism, fashion, multispecies relationships, and communities. We invited students to share their blog posts publicly, which we have compiled in this Student Blog Series called "Who cares?" With the exception of a few format changes and minor content edits (indicated with a [...]) the posts included in this series are the blogs that students submitted for their final assignments. We invite you to read these blogs on care while considering: Who cares? Do you? And what does it mean to care in a rapidly changing world?
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