City showcases students work at City Idea Lab
The City of Oshawa and each of its three post-secondary institutions recently partnered to celebrate the inaugural City Idea Lab.
City Idea Lab is a curriculm-based program meant to draw on the knowledge and creativity of post-secondary students who work with faculty and city staff to co-design solutions through active community research and involvement.
Each course is designed to focus on a city-identified problem statement that is embedded in the teaching of the academic curriculum.
The event was in partnership with TeachingCity, a joint venture between Oshawa and Durham College, UOIT, Trent University Durham Greater Toronto Area, and the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering aimed at addressing Oshawa’s urban issues.
“City Idea Lab is another remarkable example of how the City of Oshawa is collaborating with our TeachingCity partners to actively engage, learn from and work with young minds to find innovative solutions for a better future for all in our city,” Oshawa Mayor Dan Carter.
To begin the showcase, TeachingCity was presented with a donation of $322,000 from the RBC Foundation as part of the company’s Future Launch program.
“The driving factor for the RBC Foundation’s support of the UOIT is really around making sure there are strong experiential learning opportunities for young Canadians,” said Marjolaine Hudon, the regional president of RBC’s Ontario North and East Region.
“We need to help youth explore their interests, test their limits and inspire them to do more than they themselves thought they could,” Hudon adds. “There is a need to invest in solid experiential learning, inspire an innovation mindset and to think beyond traditional models of learning. This is precisely what the City Idea Lab achieves.”
For the fall term, students were asked to address the issue of how the City of Oshawa might better engage youth in priority neighbourhoods.
With a showcase that ran from Dec. 7 to Dec. 14, students from UOIT put their projects on display to helped to illustrate their active research on engaging youth in priority neighbourhoods.
“[UOIT] is proud to be a partner in the City Idea Lab,” said Dr. Steven Murphy, UOIT presdient. “The City Idea Lab is an example of how the power of partnerships among higher education, local industry and governments is turning our community into a living lab for applied research. We are unleashing the collective knowledge and capacity of our networks for economic gain and social good.”
For the winter term, students will be participating in a few different courses, including Durham College Media, Art and Design’s community collaborations and service learning course.
Trent will have a child and youth studies course on career development through community service learning and a sociology course that is on key concepts in sociological analysis.
UOIT will have their faculty of social science and humanities, community development policy course, a course on race, ethnicity, and the criminal justice system, and a course for social science and humanities practicum students.
For more information, visit https://www.oshawa.ca/teaching-city.asp or follow the hashtag #OshTeachingCity on Twitter and Instagram.