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Science Education for a Just and Sustainable World
Mon March 2, 2026 @ 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm GMT
March 2-6, 2026 marks Open Education Week and UN SDG Action and Awareness Week. Join BCcampus, the BC Open Education Librarians, University Canada West, and Langara College for a celebration of both of these events with keynote speaker Dr. Karen Cangialosi.
As global social and environmental problems grow ever more intractable, we need transformative pedagogies that support our students to become critical, creative social agents capable of building a more sustainable and just world.
Open Pedagogy has the potential to shift our traditional modes of teaching and learning towards practices that nurture students to be creators of knowledge focused on the global good. These hopes could be realized if we are responsive to the dual upheavals caused by AI and the attacks on higher education. We can educate our STEM students to become scientists, and all of our students, to become citizens that are cognizant of an uncertain and challenging future, and work from non-traditional frameworks–those that resist competitive, hierarchical, exploitative models of science.
Key to achieving this vision is teaching undergraduates how to center Open Science as the default for how science is practiced by deeply integrating Open Pedagogical practices that support students to address inherent inequities, problems with data-sharing, and other barriers to the adoption of Open Science. To that end, the OCTOPUS project was developed to support higher education faculty and staff to create openly licensed materials that may eventually constitute a comprehensive undergraduate Open Science-Open Pedagogy program.
Speaker bio
Dr. Karen Cangialosi is a passionate change agent, dedicated educator, and student advocate with national recognition in open education, STEM ed, and digital pedagogy. As a Professor of Biology at Keene State College (now emeritus), she brought open education into the biology curriculum and led campus-wide initiatives to make science education more affordable and inclusive. She now serves as Director of Open Education & Open Science at the RIOS Institute which promotes racial justice and openness in STEM education. Her work centers on transforming higher ed systems to better serve students, especially marginalized students. Her Educause article, An AI-Driven Optimism for Transforming Higher Education (It’s Not What You Think) considers the juxtaposition of AI in education. She continues to advocate for integrating Open Science and Open Education to reimagine how we teach, learn, and collaborate in STEM, always with a focus on transparency, justice, and meaningful change. To that end, she is project director for the OCTOPUS project (Open Collaboration for Transformative Open Pedagogy to support Undergraduate Open Science Education) a collaborative effort between the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium and the RIOS Institute.
