IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A
Abstract
In 1895, the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory marked the birth of cinema and the mass dissemination of visual communication. The power of screen-based images allowed ordinary people to see their world and their place in it in a new way, with the light of a new unifying force, spoken in silence. Art, entertainment and propaganda, these images and the way they were created in many ways foretold the impacts they would have on their environment, such as in the first documentary, Nanook of the North, shot in the Canadian Arctic about an Inuit man named Allakariallak (1922). The Lumière workers’ factory also marked the industrialisation of cultural storytelling, contributing to the symbolic annihilation of marginalised communities, including Indigenous people and nature, relegated to the backdrop in film studies, rather than character. Moreover, the deregulation of communications industries would lead to a global climate crisis in our media ecology. More than a century since the silent spring of cinema, nature is being granted legal status and has become the central character in determining the outcome of our human story. The Bachelor Degrees of Environment and Society at Capilano University, Canada, endeavour to remediate these education ‘hotspots’ by integrating Indigenous land- and water-based knowledge with environmental studies, science and slow cinema praxis in a sensitive, multi-jurisdictional biosphere region, Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere, Canada, under the unifying concepts of consilience, decolonization and sustainability. These educational models attempt to offset the impacts of colonialism and corporatism, creating a balance between humans, industry and the environment, modelling reconciliation as a way forward.
Michelle Mason (BA Literature; MA International Journalism) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and a founder and instructor of the Documentary Program at Capilano University (2006) in North Vancouver, Canada. Michelle began her career in international journalism with the CBC in London and Washington, D.C. Inspired by her news experience, she went on to make the documentaries The Friendship Village (2002) and Breaking Ranks (2006). Her recent co-authorship: Environment and society in Átl’ḵa7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere explores integrated media ecology.
Greg Coyes has worked in the Indigenous media community over the last three decades as an award- winning documentary film-maker, and as an educator and writer. He has produced and directed with the National Film Board, and consulted and written for the Smithsonian at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. A graduate of Yale University, Greg is currently teaching, and coordinating the Independent Indigenous Digital Filmmaking program at Capilano University in North Vancouver. His Master’s thesis focused on the SLOW MEDIA Community, which creates and promotes decolonized media, and an Indigenous sense of cinematic time and space. Greg is Metis/Cree from St. Albert, Alberta.
Cheryl Schreader (MSc, Geography) has been an instructor in the Geography Department at Capilano University since 1997. Cheryl grew up exploring the rivers and forests of the Ottawa Valley region of Ontario on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Algonquin peoples. She specializes in environmental geography, natural hazards, climate change, earth sciences, cartography, and meteorology. A founder of EarthWorks collective, she is also the co-developer of the Bachelor of Environment and Society program and co-chair of the Canadian College and University Environmental Network. Her pedagogical approaches are focused on learner engagement through experiential, place-based and decolonizing approaches to education.
Marja DeJong Westman’s (MSc., Biology) passion for the natural world informs her diverse scholarship. She has worked as a biologist, researcher and writer for the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre, specializing in habitat research. Marja combines academic, lab, field, and 40-years of teaching experience with her years “underwater” at the Aquarium, and environmental stewardship and citizen science projects, to share her field skills and knowledge of local species and ecology through a number of conservation initiatives. Bachelor of Environment and Society
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Wednesday 24th June, 2026