Liberalism is a crucial influence on the Western philosophical and political traditions, and a framework for understanding many contemporary debates about education. This course will engage with selected foundational texts in liberal thought, with a focus on Rawls' Theory of Justice, as well as some of the critiques (e.g. communitarian, feminist) that have shaped political discourse in recent years.

There are many versions of liberalism, and countless unsettled debates within the liberal tradition. What intellectual and political developments are central to contemporary liberalism? What is the liberal vision of a socially just state? Can the state be neutral with respect to views about the good life? How should individual rights be conceptualized in a diverse society? What is the value of community membership? Does liberalism place too much importance on autonomy or reason? How should liberal societies deal with illiberal views? How does our present society embody, and fail to embody, various theories of liberal justice? What is the relationship between liberalism and neoliberalism?

We will engage with these questions via close readings of liberal theorists and their critics, and by examining the formidable influence of liberal ideas on contemporary schooling. We will also examine specific debates about liberalism in education, including the importance of educating for autonomy and the legitimacy of state-initiated educational policies.

This course considers, in part comparatively and internationally, the content and implications of Truth Commissions, especially Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in terms of delivering colonial reparations and redress. In June 2015, following six years of investigation and hearings across Canada, the TRC released its findings to the public. The findings were based largely on testimonies of over 6000 witnesses, mostly adult survivors of residential schools. The TRC concluded that the residential schools were based on a policy of "cultural genocide", enforced as part of the very foundation of the Canadian state and sustained for over a century. Canada's TRC documented crimes exclusively targeting children, and an attack on Indigenous sovereignty. It also identified education as an avenue for reconciliation.

The course in general addresses histories of settler colonialism in Canada, historically and at present. It also works in particular to make comparisons with other Truth Commissions and cases of apology and redress. Attention is paid to recommendations for social justice related, political, and educational reform and practice; as well as their implications for settler/indigenous relationships-building and -rejuvenation.

The readings in this course are drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, History, as well as other disciplines. Films, guest speakers, and other source materials are used.

This course names and considers the role of Canadian educators in transforming classroom-based, pedagogical, research-oriented, and programmatic initiatives aimed at settler, arrivant, and migrant/ Indigenous relationships-building and -rejuvenation. It invites teachers and administrators in particular to mobilize recent calls by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (2010) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) to address the possibilities of colonial reparations and reconciliation. Issues addressed include: the 'Non-Indigenous Learner and Indigeneity,' and how to 'build student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect.'

The course addresses scholarly criticisms regarding the invitation to 'cultural competence' and 'sensitivity training' in services delivery and educational contexts. It also addresses current and past histories of settler colonialism, multiculturalism, and Indigenous education in Canada. Attention is paid to anticolonial pedagogy and practice, as well as Indigenous perspectives on sovereignty, relationships and governance.

The readings in this course are drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, Critical Pedagogy, as well as other disciplines. Films, guest speakers, and other source materials are used.

This course positions students for successful teaching and curriculum design in the area of critical media literacy education. The course introduces students to major theoretical paradigms in the field, illuminating shifting debates, changing pedagogical and political objectives, and the growth of the field over time. The course explores important concepts and theories related to media usage and media production in relation to teaching and pedagogical practice. These include media psychology in the classroom, the links between media-based creativity, education and social forms, the politics of media production, and the role of decolonization, internationalization and globality in this field. The course will introduce multiple and diverse approaches used by media literacy educators and teachers and engage students in critical media literacy curriculum design, as well as anti-hegemonic media productions that could support transformative media-based education across the humanities and social sciences.

The intent of this course is to develop and understand the philosophical basis of Indigenous Health and Healing Practices: Implication for Education by reviewing educational and research initiatives in this area. The course will also broaden students' understanding of holistic methods of health and healing practices in the context of education and schooling. Given the impacts of globalization, different communities are faced with a myriad of physical/economic, psychological, mental and community distresses. A course on Sociology of Indigenous Health and Healing Practices and its Implication for Education create a space for dialogue and critical evaluation of the importance of good health (physical, mental and emotional) for learning, researching and teaching. The resurgence of alternative health and healing practices is crucial at this time when different communities both from mainstream and Indigenous communities are searching for holistic methods of health and healing. Indigenous healing practices are unique because all physical, mental and spiritual phenomena are studied, understood, and practiced and taught to its whole community (Afrika, 2004, Battiste, 2000; Dei, Hall & Rosenburg, 2000; Waterfall, 2002; Wane, 2005). Some of the questions that will be addressed through discussion, readings and guest speakers are: What is healing? What are the different modes of healing outside contemporary healing practices and what are their implication to knowledge production and dissemination? Why do we deal with inbuilt tensions between and among different modes of healing and their implication to education? Healing is more than just keeping and restoring one's health. It is also about the relationship with others, other creatures (animate/inanimate, visible/invisible), and the universe; what has this got to do with sociology of education?

This course addresses manifestations of sexual, gender-based and racial violence against participants in higher education on university and college campuses as global, historical and interlocked occurrences in high, low and middle-income countries in the global North and South. The course explores root causes, modes, prevalence of such forms of violence impacting disproportionally women, transgender, queer, Indigenous, racialized and disabled students from the perspective of transnational and feminist theories relating violence to 'gender' and 'sex' constructs, power inequalities, patriarchal structures, state ideologies, colonization, organization of institutions, and socialization of individuals and social groups. The course connects feminist knowledges pertaining to violence to the material and cultural realities of higher education in countries around the world, including Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia, Russia, Nigeria, Chile, South Africa, and Spain. The course examines further the cultural, political and ideological properties of widely-implemented violence prevention programs on college and university campuses worldwide, inviting students to assess critically the successes and limitations of these programs against student and faculty needs and in relation to the root causes of sexual, racial and gender-based violence. The course further introduces students to under-studied and undertheorized forms of institutional violence in higher education such as lack of supports for mothers, emotional labour of social workers investigating incidents of violence and supporting survivors, as well as the debated issue
of universities' responsibility for students subjected to domestic violence.

Along the way, the course explores positive practices in research on sexual and gender-based violence in education linking research on prevalence and prevention to international bodies and practices such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

The course readings and assignments will position graduate students specializing in social justice education for successful research and writing in this area of study, encouraging especially studies of novel and evidence-based violence prevention paradigms that support safe higher education where all learners prosper.

How have former and present socialist countries treated women, Indigenous groups and ethnic, racial and sexual minorities within their borders? How have socialist economies shaped culture, education and social relations in these countries? The course explores these questions historically in former socialist countries in the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as socialist political formations in Africa and Latin America, and contemporary socialist states such as China and Cuba. The course readings chart a heterogeneous globalized milieu of socialist ideologies, state instrumentalities, social relations, cultural productions, and individual and group identities underlining the failures and/or prosperity of socialist societies and states.

The course will position students for historical, critical and comparative research and theorizing of the realities, limitations and possibilities of both state socialism(s) and capitalism(s). It introduces students to these formations from the perspective of the emerging international field of Postsocialist Studies, focusing especially on race, gender, (post)coloniality, education, global capitalism, culture, and nation-building in former and current socialist states and societies.

This course is open to master-level students enrolled in course-based programs. The course is designed to provide these students with practical skills in research design and quantitative and qualitative data collection methods focusing especially on interviews, focus groups and surveys. Considering the diverse professional trajectories of MEd students, the course highlights these three methods because they are widely used across disciplines such as educational studies, health care, business, social work, community services, media and communication studies and other professional fields that MEd students pursue. The course will further introduce students to the ethical implications of research, including relationship-building between researcher and study participants, differentiating between institutions who sponsor research and institutions as sites of research, and continually reflecting on the role of the researcher in relation to the research questions being asked.

This course examines the impact of the changing situation of women in society on educational processes and curriculum. Gender is understood to operate together with a range of other 'diverse' identities such as race, class and age. Among topics covered are gender, biography, and educational experience; patterns of educational access and achievement; gender as an organizing principle in school and classroom practices and peer relations; teachers' careers; feminist pedagogies and strategies for change.

Various discourses, theoretical frameworks and ideological proclamations have been employed to analyze, criticize and interrogate everyday lived experiences of black peoples. This course examines the multiple oppressions and social representations of black women using a black feminist theoretical framework. Part of the course will be devoted to black feminist theory -- a theory developed out of black women's experiences and rooted in their communities. The course will also examine the following issues among others: strands of feminisms with particular emphasis on feminisms as advocated by the visible minorities; the divergences and similarities of black feminisms; and the heterogeneous nature of black women's experiences. The course will be sociological and historical in nature and will examine the intersections of race, class, gender and homophobia.

Militarism is and has been an ongoing part of civilization and state formation throughout much of recorded history. The devastating effects of war on the environment, individual human and group life, and the disruption of any sense of normal lawful or civil society are well documented. It is difficult to find any political group who advocates or see war as a preferred means of conflict or social resolution. Yet war, militarism, and the quest for dispute resolution and ordination of one group over another is a central part of human history. In many accounts of history and what G. H. Mead called human group life war and militarism is all but a code word for what we label as history.

This course theorizes the meaning of “human.” It does so by developing conversations between disability studies and key theorists who have raised the question of the human imaginary, herein regarded as culturally structured images that govern people’s interactions. As a way to guide our understanding of the restricted character of the human imaginary resulting from colonial/settler power, we turn to various scholars (including Sylvia Wynter, Thomas King, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. DuBois, Audre Lorde, Paul Gilroy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Harold Vizenor, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Ralph Ellison, Austin Clarke, Octavia Butler). Bringing disability studies praxis into conversation with these writers, the course will trace the meaning made of the human through two questions. First, what consequences has a restricted human imaginary imposed on the practices and institutions enacting disability in everyday life? Second, what place does disability occupy in the work of those who have theorized a restricted human imaginary? Working with these two questions, the overall aim of the course is to consider how social justice education might better attune itself to Fanon’s (1967) provocation, “Oh my body, make of me always a [hu]man who questions!”

This course explores the question: What relations between disability and disability studies are possible within social justice education? We will encounter disability and disability studies in universities and schools, government policy, workplaces including hospitals and policing, as well as in street life, personal and political relations. The course will consider disability in relation to injury, illness, healing, as well as life and death. Through these various encounters, we will learn to attend to the distinct ways that aspects of disability are interpreted and made to appear and disappear, especially when a call for social justice arises. There will be seminar discussions, presentations, and guest lectures where we will explore the place, production, and meaning of disability and disability studies in relation to social justice education.

Making use of narrative inquiry as a disability studies orientation, this seminar course will examine the life of disability as it is written and narrated in contemporary Western culture. We will explore the narratives of disability found in various professions such as medicine, rehabilitation, special education and disability studies itself. These professional narratives act as the dominant cultural background upon which personal, political and other stories of disability emerge. Ironically, these dominant narratives provide the ground through, and against which, radical and critical disability stories become possible. This course will address stories written and narrated by disabled people. The overall aim of this course is to demonstrate that disability appears to all of us, disabled and non-disabled people, as a story to be told and lived. Thus, this course demonstrates and exemplifies, through seminar discussions, presentations, and guest lectures, Thomas King’s (2003) “insight” that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 2) as a way to orient narrative inquiry to disability studies.

The social act of interpretation is the abiding concern of this course. It pursues methods of examining the material fact of interpretation as it forms the meaning of disability in contemporary times. We will learn phenomenologically oriented methods from Black, Indigenous, Queer, Feminist and Disability Studies scholars. The purpose of this course is to learn how to engage interpretations of physical, sensory, mental, emotional variations to critical inquiry. We will pursue interpretive methods of reading and writing that explore the complex social significance of embodied diversity within various social arenas, such as medicine and education. The course will pursue interpretive methods while engaging the question. “How is studying the act of interpretation important to social change?”

This course provides a theoretical examination of how social inequities are being (re)produced in everyday life, namely through education. It will focus on the work and influence of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It will also introduce students to scholars who have since used his concepts and methodology and/or have critiqued Bourdieu. Questions of inequities are being in vivo, unveiling complex processes of inequalities taking shape through the structuring of formal education as well as through race, class, gender and other interlocking systems of oppression.

Specialized study, under the direction of a staff member, focusing on topics of particular interest to the student that are not included in available courses. This study may take the form of a reading course combined with fieldwork in community groups and organizations, or independent study of any type. While credit is not given for a thesis investigation proper, the study may be closely related to a thesis topic.

Courses that will examine in depth topics of particular relevance not already covered in regular course offerings in the department. The topics will be announced and described in the schedule of courses.

This course provides an overview of contemporary and historical debates about diverse social justice and radical pedagogies including “feminist” and “critical” pedagogies. Students will become familiar with the different theoretical and philosophical conceptions that shape diverse educational aims, philosophies, practices and visions of education. The focus on liberatory educational theory and praxis will specifically center debates regarding gender, class, and racial equity and justice, engaging the work of such thinkers as Paolo Freire and bell hooks. Seminar readings, lectures, and discussions will raise questions such as: Who decides what counts as “progressive” or “radical” educational aims? Can pedagogy ever be neutral? What theoretical notions support such educational aims as growth, social justice, transformation, or critical consciousness? Who evaluates “liberation” and “growth” of students given progressive educational aims? How have new social movements and historical debates surrounding feminism, critical race, and identity politics influenced social justice education?

This course will provide students with an introduction to diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to conducting educational research in the humanities and social sciences. The course will simultaneously examine 1) methodological issues in disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, 2) content that is of common interest to multiple disciplines and reflects the scholarship of the SJE faculty, and 3) the relationship between research and praxis in various disciplines. The individual disciplines reflected in the course will include sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, geography, and political science. Some of the topics to be examined may include the sociology of knowledge, the politics of truth claims, the impact of technology and media, and debates regarding knowledge production and authority. We will approach these questions through different lenses and frameworks that transcend individual disciplines, such as critical race, postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern theories. While engaging with the methods and assumptions of various fields of research, the overriding inquiry in this course will be epistemological, derived from the philosophical study of how knowledge is acquired, verified, produced, and transmitted.

With the advent of colonialism, non-European traditional societies were disrupted. A starting point is an appreciation of the vast array of cultural diversity in the world. The course interrogates how various media have taken up these knowledge systems, presented to the world in the form of texts, films, and educational practices, and examines how colonial education sustains the process of cultural knowledges fragmentation. Our analysis will serve to deepen insights and to develop intellectual skills to cultivate a greater understanding of the dynamics generated through representations and the role of colonial education in sustaining and delineating particular cultural knowledge. We will also explore the various forms of resistance encountered in the process of fragmentation and examine how certain groups of people in various parts of the world have maintained their cultural base, and how this has been commodified, commercialized and romanticized. The course makes use of forms of cultural expressions such as films and critical theories on race, gender, sexuality, and class.

As a qualitative research course for masters and doctoral students who already possess some familiarity with postmodern, feminist and critical race theories, the course will consist of readings that explore the following question: how is knowledge production racialized? A related question is: how can we understand the operation of multiple systems of domination in the production of racialized knowledge? How can intellectuals challenge imperialist and racist systems through their research and writing? This course is built around the idea that responsible research and writing begins with a critical examination of how relations of power shape knowledge production. What explanatory frameworks do we as scholars rely on when we undertake research? How do we go about critically examining our own explanations and others when the issue is race? To examine these themes in depth, historically as well as in the present, the course will focus on colonialism, imperialism, racism and knowledge production. Specifically, the course explores three defining imperial constructs: indianism, orientalism and africanism. We consider how the legacy of imperial ideas shaped racial knowledge and the disciplines, positioning us as scholars as active participants in the imperial enterprise. In part two of the course, we explore interlocking systems of oppression: how imperial knowledge simultaneously upholds and is upheld by capitalism and patriarchy. For the third part of the course, we examine how we understand the immigrant's body, the citizen, the migrant and what it means to produce knowledge as a post-colonial scholar.

This advanced seminar will examine the anti-colonial framework as an approach to theorizing issues emerging from colonial and colonized relations. It will use radical/subversive pedagogy and instruction as important entry points to critical social praxis. Focussing on the writings and commentaries of revolutionary/radical thinkers like Memmi, Fanon, Cesaire, Cabral, Gandhi, Machel, Che Guevera, Mao Tse-Tung, Nyerere, Toure and Nkrumah, the course will interrogate the theoretical distinctions and connections between anti-colonial thought and post-colonial theory, and identify the particular implications/lessons for critical educational practice. Among the issues explored will be: the challenge of articulating anti-colonial theory as an epistemology of the colonized anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and common colonial consciousness; the conceptualization of power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures and histories of marginalized communities; the understanding of Indigeneity as pedagogical practice; the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics through anti-colonial learning; the investigation of the power and meaning of local social practice/action in surviving colonial and colonized encounters; and the identification of the historical and institutional structures and contexts which sustain intellectual pursuits. Students and instructor will engage in critical dialogues around intellectual assertions that the anti-colonial is intimately connected to decolonization, and by extension, decolonization cannot happen solely through Western scholarship. We will ask: How can educators provide anti-colonial education that develop in learners a strong sense of identity, self and collective respect, agency, and the kind of individual empowerment that is accountable to community empowerment? How do we subvert colonial hierarchies embedded in conventional schooling? And, how do we re-envision schooling and education to espouse at its centre such values as social justice, equity, fairness, resistance and decolonial responsibility?

What accounts for the ''Fanon Renaissance''? Why and how is Fanon important to schooling and education today? This upper level graduate seminar will examine the intellectual contributions of Franz Fanon as a leading anti-colonial theorist to the search for genuine educational options and transformative change in contemporary society. The complexity, richness and implications of his ideas for critical learners pursuing a subversive pedagogy for social change are discussed. The course begins with a critical look at Fanon as a philosopher, pedagogue and anti-colonial practitioner. We draw on his myriad intellectual contributions to understanding colonialism and imperial power relations, social movements and the politics of social liberation. Our interest in Fanon will also engage how his ideas about colonialism and its impact on the human psyche help us to understand the process of liberation within the context of contestations over questions of identity and difference, and our pursuit of race, gender, class and sexual politics today. Class discussions will broach such issues as the contexts in which Fanon developed his ideas and thoughts and how these developments subsequently came to shape anti-colonial theory and practice, the limits and possibilities of political ideologies, as well as the theorization of imperialism and spiritual 'dis-embodiment', particularly in Southern contexts. Specific subject matters include Fanon's understanding of violence, nationalism and politics of identity, national liberation and resistance, the 'dialectic of experience', the psychiatry of racism and the psychology of oppression, the limits of revolutionary class politics, and the power of 'dramaturgical vocabulary', and how his ideas continue to make him a major scholarly figure. The course will also situate Fanon in such intellectual currents as Marxism and Neo-marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis, Negritude, African philosophy and anti-colonialism, drawing out the specific implications for education and schooling.

Exploring women in leadership positions within the context of education will create new pathways of understanding intersectionalities and leadership practices. By weaving women’s leadership practices into learning, knowledge creation discourse, educators as well as learners will have a better understanding of how gender plays out in leadership. The main objective of this course will be to explore different leadership models from a feminist & anti-colonial thought framework in order to create an educational space that develops learners and educators' consciousness in relation to: What is leadership? Does one need to be in a position of authority to be a leader? What does it mean to be a leader from marginalized communities? We shall also examine strategies that different women employ when they find themselves in positions of leadership. In this course, we will explore the questions and issues of women and leadership and how that intersects with schooling from diverse perspectives. Ngunjiri (2010), suggests that women can transform their communities and organizations from within by choosing to work with all stakeholders by navigating through the cultural and organizational challenges, in order to bring a shift of consciousness in communities or organizations. This course seeks to further these analyses and offers insights into how spiritual discourse informs women educators’ everyday leadership practices. The course will concentrate on literature that examines women & leadership; gender and leadership; women in positions of authority etc and knowledge production from historical and contemporary perspectives as well as from a local and global perspective.

This course attends to research approaches coming out of two distinct literatures: Indigenous land education or pedagogy, and Black feminist geographies. Texts and assignments will focus on empirical and conceptual research projects which can be informed by critical Indigenous studies and Black studies engaging place and land.

This course seeks to critically interrogate notions of the transnational found in recent feminist theorizing. 'Transnational' has been invested with a variety of meanings and political attributes, from descriptions of global capital to the politics of alliance and coalition-building, from the creation of subjectivities through to the reconfiguration of imperialist ideologies and practices in the contemporary conjuncture. It is about linkages and unequal connections. By engaging a broad and necessarily interdisciplinary spectrum of work, this course seeks to trace the variety of methods and investments that feminists have brought to bear on their engagement with transnationality. What are some of the implications for theory, for activism, for imaginative and pedagogical practices?

This course engages Indigenous feminist approaches to research, and the application of theories of refusal to academic knowledge production.

The continent of Africa has a fundamentally rich and dynamic history, dating at least as far back as the Nubian civilization, pre-dynastic Egyptian systems of thought through to the many diverse philosophical traditions found around the continent today. Contemporarily, many Pan-Africanist thought scholars have made the argument that the West’s exclusive claims on knowledge have complicated the rationality of non-Western peoples, most especially those of African descent. “African Classics: Decolonial Thought in Education” will engage students in critically examining the relevance and importance of comprehending the African Philosophy, gender, economics, governance, politics, spirituality, phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology. This course involves the development of a framework to map the geographical beginnings in the context of African decolonial thought in education. These connections are aimed at providing context for students’ engagement in the philosophical foundations of African ways of theorizing and practise. Through this, students will be able to engage in critical self-reflection. Students in this course will make sense of the role played by discourses around the construction and reconstruction of African decolonial systems of thought.

Practical experience in an area of the humanities, social sciences and/or social justice education fieldwork is a vital element of the development of skills in the application of knowledge from theory and research. In consultation with the SJE departmental Practicum Liaison person, the student shall establish a practicum supervisor and a suitable placement in consultation with her/his practicum supervisor, signaled by completion of an EdD 'Practicum Agreement Form' (SJE website, 'Students', 'Dept. Specific Forms'). For successful completion of this course, the student is required to: a) spend 72 hours in active educational fieldwork; b) have regular contact with their individual practicum supervisor; c) submit an interim report of approximately 1500 words to the Practicum Supervisor; and submit a final paper of approximately 8000 words to the Practicum Supervisor offering a final synthesis of specific field experiences & their relationship to a relevant body of academic and sociological literature which shall be graded on a Pass/Fail basis. Examples of relevant educational placements include but are not limited to school boards, community organizations, social service organizations, unions, cultural organizations and other organizations with relevant educational functions, broadly conceived.