Tomaselli, Fernanda

I have an interdisciplinary background, with expertise in environmental communication, ecological economics, and conservation.  I have more than five years of experience teaching higher education courses related to forestry, climate change, and sustainability. I am also the Coordinator of UBC’s Land One program.  I have a BSc (2005) in Environmental Communication from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, and an MSc. (2011) and PhD (2017) from UBC’s Faculty of Forestry.

Teaching

My teaching and research interests revolve around generating awareness about global sustainability challenges and exploring effective ways of communicating sustainability concepts to the broader population. In my teaching, I believe it is essential to incentivize students to think critically and holistically about the complex challenges our world is facing. I aim to inspire students to become more engaged in conservation issues and in finding solutions to current sustainability dilemmas. I am keen on using interactive and dynamic methods of instruction during my lectures, and am a proponent of experiential learning.

The courses I currently teach at UBC are:

• FRST/LFS 110 – Land One Integrative Seminar
• CONS 200 – Foundations of Conservation
• CONS 210 – Visualizing Climate Change
• CONS 453 – Ecuador International Conservation and Forest Management Field Course

Educational Leadership

My areas of interest in Educational Leadership include sustainability and climate education, including the development of new curriculum as well as innovative and transformative pedagogies to motivate effective environmental and climate action. I am also interested in students’ sense of belonging and wellbeing, especially in light of recent studies that show high levels of anxiety among the youth given current ecological and social challenges (Galway and Field, 2023). A key goal in my Educational Leadership is to develop more effective teaching strategies and curriculum approaches to support students in tackling eco-anxiety and eco-grief while empowering them to create solutions based on concrete action.

Projects

Towards more effective climate pedagogies: Exploring the impact of playing a collaborative board game in a large undergraduate course. This project explores the impact of playing a collaborative board game about climate change on students’ systems thinking competence, climate emotions and sense of eco-agency. The outcomes of this research will add to existing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of using interactive tabletop games in classroom sustainability education.It is funded by BCcampus through the 2024-2025 BCcampus Research Fellows program.

Sustainability across first-year core curriculum: The Land One experience. The goal of this project is to enhance four Land One courses to fully integrate sustainability topics into the program. The aim is to create new content and pedagogical innovations that will be shared among courses including an open online textbook exploring real-world case studies related to sustainability; joint lesson plans using interactive pedagogies to co-teach sustainability topics; assignments and reading lists on sustainability; writing prompts that stimulate interdisciplinary and holistic thinking; and redevelopment of an existing field trip to create a sustainability-focused experiential retreat. This project is funded through the UBC Sustainability Fellows program.

Research

Although my fields of study have always been related to the environment and sustainability, I have changed my areas of focus slightly throughout my career. This has enabled me to have a holistic and comprehensive view of socio-ecological issues. For my MSc. I studied the opportunities and challenges facing small-scale and community forest enterprises in The Gambia (West Africa), with a particular focus on access to microfinance.  For my PhD, I circled back to my background interest in communication and studied the intersection of ecological economics, public perceptions and communication in the Canadian context. Among other aspects, I tested the effects of different message frames (focused on the transition to a post-growth economy) on people’s attitudes and perceptions. See Publications for the key findings of these research.

Currently, my research interests in pedagogy involve attitudinal and experimental studies to evaluate the impact of different pedagogies on students’ understanding of sustainability and climate issues.

Awards

Killam Teaching Prize in Forestry (University of British Columbia), 2023-2024

D2L (Desire 2 Learn) Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning (Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education – STLHE), 2024

Environmental Communication Alumni Award (Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador), 2017

Edward JC Hossie Leadership Award (University of British Columbia), 2011