Brian Masse speaking with reportersWindsor-West MP Brian Masse, who has proposed making Ojibway Shores an Urban National Park, will hear suggestions from UWindsor students about what it should feature on Friday.

Public invited to hear student proposals for Ojibway Shores

Project presentations for Tim Brunet’s class “Ways of Knowing - Capabilities Approach” will go online Friday in what the instructor is calling a feature, not a bug.

Groups will use an online meeting to pitch their ideas for the proposed Ojibway Shores Urban National Park to Windsor-West MP Brian Masse, and the public is invited to watch.

“All the students will chime in from their homes,” explains Brunet. “Even before the move to remote classes, we had planned to provide online access to the public. What changes now is that the students have to work in a dispersed collaboration, which is also a learning outcome for the class.”

Brunet says the course requires students to develop connections locally and globally, making the project a perfect fit. Masse has been calling for the 33-acre shoreline site to join neighbouring areas — the Ojibway complex, Spring Garden Natural Area, Black Oak Heritage Park — as a nature preserve.

“Each group will suggest features that could be included in this protected greenspace, which requires co-operation province to state, country to country,” says Brunet. “The idea of the course is to have them explore what they have learned in a social context.”

Student Deanna Davidson, a sociology major, says the course taught her the value of networking.

“Most assignments in my university career have had very strict guidelines, and are to be completed individually,” she says. “This assignment gave me and my group the ability to generate ideas as a collective and learn to work with others, a very important skill in the workforce.”

She encourages tuning in to Friday's teleconference to gain a true feel for what is going on in the local community.

“All of the students within our class, from Windsor Essex County or abroad, have taken a personal interest in our community and the proposed Ojibway Shores National Urban Park,” Davidson says. “We want to bring out the best in individuals within our community by bringing them closer to nature physically and intellectually.”

The nine presentations will run 10:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday, April 3. The livestream is available through the Zoom videoconferencing platform. Viewing is open to the public by registering in advance: https://uwindsor.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_erJvuatTYPnkpDv.