This course examines in depth a topic of particular relevance not already covered in the regular course offerings in the department. The topics will be announced each spring in the Winter Session and Summer Session schedules.

An examination of the possibilities, promises, and problems with which sociological perspectives can enliven and enrich the understanding of the educational process. This course provides an introduction to and integration of theoretical and practical aspects of sociology in education.

An introduction to basic research methods appropriate for teachers and other students of sociology in education. General consideration will be given to technical problems with emphasis on the underlying research process and its practical implications for schools.

This course will serve as an introduction to the major concepts and issues in education from both a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, that values social justice education. Students will be introduced to major questions and debates in educational theory and praxis, focusing specifically on issues that define the areas of emphases in SJE: anti-racism, critical race theory and Indigenous studies; feminism, gender, and queer studies; cultural and philosophical contexts in education (including francophone studies); aesthetics, communication and media studies; and democracy, ethics, disability studies, and social class. The course, which is normally taken in the beginning of a master level program in SJE, will assist students to understand how a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach from the humanities/social sciences perspective that honors social justice education, contrasts with other disciplinary approaches and what this perspective contributes to the examination of major educational concepts and issues. Students will develop an understanding of the central questions, debates, and controversies from diverse intellectual traditions of the humanities and social sciences, and explore multi- and interdisciplinary studies in education, with a focus on history, philosophy, sociology and social justice education.

Qualitative research is a mode of systemic inquiry that utilizes various interpretive and critical genres to understand- and often change- complex social phenomena. This course examines the field of qualitative inquiry focusing on the epistemological and practical aspects of a plethora of data gathering techniques such as ethnography, phenomenology, oral history, participatory action research, focus groups, program evaluation and personal interviews. The course further introduces students to critical data interpretive approaches involving data coding and analyses rooted in social justice education: postcolonial, postmodern, and decolonizing frames, feminist theory and praxes, Indigenous knowledges, critical discourse analysis, critical race theory and queer analysis. This is a writing and data gathering intensive course.

The premise on which this course is based is that social equity and environmental sustainability are necessarily and inextricably intertwined. After clarifying key concepts such as environmental justice, we will analyze the current unsustainable way in which Canada as a society, as well as the world as a whole, are organized, including climate change, water and food access and quality, energy generation and consumption, BMO,s, population growth. We will also explore positive examples of how to deal with these issues.

This course will introduce students to central approaches, themes and questions in the work of Michel Foucault. We will discuss the relevance and utility of his work by examining how a number of researchers in education have made use of it. Students will also be able to explore the implications and usefulness of Foucault's work for their own research.

This course builds on the assumption that social justice and environmental sustainability are intertwined. It explores the interconnections among environmental problems and capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other forms of domination. Participants will be encouraged to analyze the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of (in)justice in diverse contexts within frameworks that recognize the salience of social identities, including but not limited to class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and ability. Participants critically examine contrasting theoretical perspectives, practices, and examples of environmental justice advocacy and action. These investigations will assist course participants to deepen their understandings and hone their practical abilities to respond to social, economic, and environmental issues in multiple institutional contexts -- schools, workplaces, unions, social service agencies, NGOs, and so on.

The first half of the course provides a theoretical analysis of anti-racism and anti-oppression education and issues for students, educators, and staff interested in the pursuit of anti-racism and anti-oppression education in the schools. The second half focuses on practical anti-racism strategies aimed at institutional change in schools, classrooms, and other organizational settings. The intention is to ground theoretical principles of anti-racism education in the actual school practices of promoting educational inclusion, social change and transformation.

This seminar reviews selected sociological theories and perspectives on race and ethnicity. The emphasis is on emerging debates and investigations on the interrelation and interstices of race, gender, sexuality, [dis]ability, and class in the construction of social and historical realities and identities. It explores the implications of these advances for curriculum and pedagogical practices.

This course explores the extent of racialized violence, provides a theoretical approach for understanding it, and considers appropriate anti-violence strategies. How should educators respond to the world post 911? Are we in a new age of empire? What is the connection between historical moments of extraordinary racial violence and our everyday world? How do individuals come to participate in, remain indifferent to or approve of violence? This course offers researchers and educators an opportunity to explore these broad questions through examining historical and contemporary examples of racial violence and the law.

This seminar explores the significance and implication of education (as broadly defined) to the discourse of modernization and development in Africa. The course begins with the interrogation of 'African development' from an African-centred perspective. There is an examination of various theoretical conceptions of 'development' and the role of education and schooling in social change. A special emphasis is on the World Bank/IMF induced educational reform initiatives and the implications of 'authentic'/alternative development. The seminar will attempt to uncover the myriad interests and issues about Africa, including contemporary challenges and possibilities. The course critically engages the multiple ways of presenting current challenges of 'development', the interplay of tradition and modernity, contestations over knowledge production in 'post-colonial' Africa, and the roles and significance of Indigenous/local cultural resource knowledges, science, culture, gender, ethnicity, language, and religion for understanding African development. Other related questions for discussion include social stratification and cultural pluralism, formulation of national identity, political ideology and the growth of nationalism, and the search for peace, cooperation and social justice. Although the course basically uses African case material, it is hoped our discussions will be placed in global/transnational contexts, particularly in looking at themes common to many Southern peoples contending with, and resisting, the effects of [neo] colonial and imperial knowledge.

This seminar will examine Indigenous and marginalized knowledge forms in global and transnational contexts and the pedagogical implications for decolonized education. It begins with a brief overview of processes of knowledge production, interrogation, validation and dissemination in diverse educational settings. There is a critique of theoretical conceptions of what constitutes 'valid' knowledge and how such knowledge is produced and disseminated locally and externally. A particular emphasis is on the validation of non-Western epistemologies and their contributions in terms of offering multiple and collective readings of the world. Among the specific topics to be covered are the principles of Indigenous knowledge forms; questions of power, social difference, identity, and representation in Indigenous knowledge production; cultural appropriation and the political economy of knowledge production; Indigenous knowledges and science education; Indigenous knowledges and globalization; change, modernity, and Indigenous knowledges. The course uses case material from diverse social settings to understand different epistemologies and their pedagogical implications. Indigenous knowledge is thus defined broadly to local cultural resource knowledge and the Indigenous philosophies of colonized/oppressed peoples. The focus on local Indigenousness, that is, a knowledge consciousness that emerges from an understanding of the society-nature-culture nexus or interface.

How do we come to know who we are and how is this knowledge emplaced, raced and gendered? For educators, these questions underpin pedagogy. In focusing on the formation of racial subjects and the symbolic and material processes that sustain racial hierarchies, educators can consider how dominance is taught and how it might be undermined. Drawing on recent scholarship in critical race theory, critical geography, history and cultural studies, the course examines how we learn who we are and how these pedagogies of citizenship (who is to count and who is not) operate in concrete spaces--bodies, nations, cities, institutions. This course is about the production of identities--dominant ones and subordinate ones in specific spaces. It is taught from an educator's and a researcher's viewpoint. As an educator, the compelling question is how we might interrupt the production of dominant subjects. As a researcher, the question is how to document and understand racial formations, and the production of identities in specific spaces. The course begins by exploring the racial violence of colonialism, of periods of racial terror (lynching, the Holocaust), and of the New World Order (in particular, the post 911 environment, and the violence of peacekeeping and occupations) as well as state violence. In all these instances, law often has a central role to play in producing and sustaining violence. It is through law, for example, that nations are able to legally authorize acts of racial violence and legal narratives often operate to secure social consent to acts of racial terror. Through a feminist and anti-racist framework, we explore how racial violence is sexualized and gendered, and how it operates as a defining feature of relations between dominant and subordinate groups. The course examines how racial violence is linked to empire and nation building, and how individuals come to participate in these racial and gendered social arrangements.

This course will tackle three broad themes: (1) migration, nation, and subjectivity; (2) globalization and its discontents; (3) empire and subalternity. It will engage with theoretical and empirical studies of discourses and structures that constitute the formations and relations of subjects, cultures, spaces, institutions, and practices. The analytical and methodological approach will be both disciplinary and inter-disciplinary, drawing from the fields of sociology, history, geography, anthropology, and education, while mobilizing insights from ethnic, feminist, queer, cultural, and postcolonial studies. The interpretive lens will be simultaneously panoramic, comparative, and focused that will attend to the shared and unique conditions of local-global, north-south transactions.

The course offers interdisciplinary approaches to critical inquiries into the historical, socio-cultural, and political forces that shape our knowledge about peoples of Asian heritage in Canada and in the diaspora. It foregrounds the intersections of race and ethnicity with other indices of difference, such as gender, class, migration, sexuality, ability, language, and spirituality in local, national, and global contexts. It engages with theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues related to inquiries on Asian Canadians, and draws out implications for intellectual, educational, and policy arenas.

This course explores histories of racism, displacement and legal disenfranchisement that create citizenship injustices for Indigenous peoples in Canada. It aims to highlight a set of decolonizing perspectives on belonging and identity, to contest existing case law and policy, and to deconstruct the normative discourses of law, liberalism and cultural representation that govern and shape current nation-to-nation relationships between Ongwehoweh (real people) and colonial-settler governments. The course is centered on exploring the possibilities, challenges and contradictions raised by resurgence strategies and reparation involving citizenship injustice from an anti-racist, anti-colonial and indigenous-centered perspective.

What sets of intellectual and intercultural relationships exist between settler, diasporic, and Indigenous populations in Canada, and what possibilities, challenges, and limitations surround the building of these alliances in both theory and research? This course will examine these questions by exploring scholarly, theoretical, and research-based frameworks centred on the creation, maintenance, and rejuvenation of Indigenous-settler relationships and organizing. The objective is to engage with and assess these frameworks from a critical, Indigenous, and anticolonial perspective, and to understand the strengths, divergences and interconnections surrounding each of them. Through films, readings, group discussions, and guest speakers, emphasis will be placed on current and future research and mobilizing, considering in turn the implications for political, historical, and educational change.

This course examines settler colonialism and antiblackness as entwined historical and contemporary social structures. Appraises lived consequences for Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, European settlers, and other arrivals. Considers theories of decolonization and abolition within settler colonial contexts.

This course engages participatory research approaches as an important intervention to the politics of knowledge and knowing that otherwise typify academic knowledge production. It considers the settler colonial harms of research alongside the resistance and refusals by communities to allow such harms to continue. Course readings and assignments are designed to support students in crafting meaningful forms of participation in a wide array of social science and humanities approaches to inquiry.

This course investigates changing relations within and between schools and communities (however defined). We will review sociological and historical studies of community and discuss the ways in which different notions of ''community'' and forms of diversity have been employed by parents, teachers, administrators, trustees and others in struggles over the form, content, and outcomes of schooling. Students are encouraged to draw on their own experiences as parents, teachers, students, trustees and/or community activists.

This course examines the processes through which certain groups are marginalized and explores some strategies for resistance. The first section explores: the meaning of subjectivity and its relationship to political practice, experience, knowledge, and power. Section two looks more closely at gender, sexuality and race, exploring here both the concepts we have used to understand domination and the practices of marginalization themselves. Section three considers three strategies of resistance: writing, cultural production, and politics.

This course will analyse how cultural meanings are produced, interpreted, legitimated, and accepted and/or rejected in educational settings, including but not limited to schools. Critical perspectives from feminism, Marxism, and poststructuralism will be explored to consider how culture has been investigated and taken up in/through sociology, cultural studies, and studies of education and schooling.

''Doing Disability'' brings us to a central premise of disability studies--disability is a space of cultural practices done by and to people. From this premise, it follows that we are never alone in our bodies and so disability represents the material fact that bodies, minds, and senses always appear in the midst of people. Assuming that disability is done and re-done through everyday discursive practices, disability studies turns to a range of interdisciplinary work that enriches the potential to challenge our taken-for-granted understandings of social and political life. Theorizing how we do disability, even in the everyday of the (our) classroom, provides the occasion to critically engage contexts, such as education, mass media, and the built environment, as they intersect with issues of identity and difference; embodiment; narrative; the constitutive structuring of ordinary, agentive, viable, life at their opposites. Orienting to disability as a social accomplishment of everyday life is a way to examine how versions of what counts as human are culturally organized and governed. Made by culture, disability is a key space of practices where we might theorize culture's makings. In this course, we explore social models and theories of disability, so as to develop a critical understanding of disability's appearance in everyday life and to work to open ourselves to question how these new non-medicalized ways of knowing disability might influence pedagogical structures and practices.

This course explores socio-cultural theories of the self and subjectivity. Turning to interpretive sociology, informed by cultural and disability studies, we will theorize the self as social and as located in educational scenes of its appearance, including its appearance in empirical studies that regard the self as a problem. Through lecture and seminar discussions, we will uncover taken-for-granted conceptions of the self-as-a-problem in education. The course aims to reveal the complex version of self as a cultural production while questioning individualized versions of self currently produced by dominant fields' of inquiry in education such as developmental and epigenetic psychology.

This course examines a range of arguments concerning the ways in which theories of culture, communication and education impact our understanding of the everyday world. The course attempts to survey literature which place discussions of culture, communication and education in the foreground. The course will attend to the ways in which culture, communication and education are not settled terms but are terms deeply implicated in how we maneuver the everyday social world.

Exploring spirituality within the context of education will create new pathways of understanding for educators and students. By weaving spirituality into learning and knowledge creation discourse, educators and learners can foster spiritual growth while strengthening the connections between knowledge and the process of schooling. The main objective of this course, therefore, will be to create an educational space that develops students' spiritual interconnectedness in relation to learning, schooling and the community at large. Spirituality is very important in many people's lives, and valuing the spirituality of students means valuing their uniqueness as individuals, regardless of race, gender, creed, sexuality or ability. Spirituality has been silenced and marginalized as a discourse or embodied knowledge in the academy. The course will survey the literature that examines spirituality and knowledge production from a wide range of perspectives, such as from various Eastern, African, indigenous traditions, and from both religious and secular traditions. The course will examine the intersections between issues of spirituality and environment, health, colonialism, gender, sexuality, the body and so on.

Applied ethics is the study of questions that result from real-life moral situations, usually in specific domains such as medicine, business, and education. The institution of higher education (primarily universities) has always raised applied ethical questions, such as those regarding freedom of speech and research, compensation for intellectual work, choices in student admissions, obligations to the larger society, and academic integrity. Contemporary influences on higher education are also introducing a raft of new ethical quandaries: changes to the conduct and dissemination of research, free massive online courses, distance education, corporate university partnerships, restructuring of academic positions, rising tuition, and the dilution of degree integrity due to such phenomena as for-profit universities, just to name a few. How do we address these ethical questions? What concepts of value and morality can be brought to bear on higher education? This course will examine these ethical issues using a blend of empirical and theoretical, academic and non-academic literature. No background in philosophy is necessary to take this course.

This course is about identity and its relationship to education. We all have beliefs about identity – our own, and others' as well – but when we start to investigate these beliefs, many questions arise. What is essential to one's identity? How much could you change about yourself and still be the same person? Were you born with an identity? How do children develop their identities? Where are the lines between individual identity and group identity?

These questions have major implications for education. On one level, we may assume implicitly that education should accord in some way with one's identity. One should not be educated to have an identity that is vastly different from one's own family or culture, or worse, to alienate one from these identities. Many types of schooling are explicitly concerned with instilling or nurturing certain identities in children - most commonly religious, ethnic, or national – so that they grow up with a sense of heritage and belonging. Yet we also think of education as liberating, as feeding the autonomy that allows individuals to "come into their own" identities, whatever these may be. Sometimes these purposes may seem to be at odds.

Teachers have identities, too, and who a teacher is affects how she will teach, and consequently what the students may come to understand of their own identities. Teachers can subtly reinforce or subvert dominant narratives about individual and group identities, shaping the way in which students come to see themselves in an educational setting and beyond. Teacher identities, student identities, and the identities of the wider community in which they learn are all very much entangled.

The readings in this course are drawn from philosophy and other disciplines. We will consider some of the contributions made to our understanding of identity by Western liberal thought, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, anti-racist education, and more. Film and other source materials will also be used.

The course offers an opportunity to inquire ethically into timely, controversial educational issues, focusing on K-12 schooling in Ontario. We will be guided by questions about the purpose of education, the responsibilities of the state, the rights of parent, children, and minority groups, and the functions of teachers. Each week will focus on one general topic, such as ethnocentric segregated schools, standardization and standardized testing, sexual minorities in religious schools, and so on.

No background in philosophy is required, but we will continually reinforce the methods of ethical inquiry and steer away from other approaches. We will use a variety of sources, including scholarly articles, various news media, and policy documents.

This course is open to Master of Teaching students.