This course is designed for practising educators to develop and enhance their knowledge of how gender is produced in our educational system. It examines the different stages of the educational system: elementary, secondary, community college and university. The classroom is the focus because it is the central work setting of educational institutions. What happens in the classroom is not simply the result of what a teacher does but involves interactions between and among students and between teachers and students. The classroom has its own dynamic and is also interconnected to outside relationships with parents, friends, educational officials etc. The course has as its main objectives to examine the dynamics of inequality in the classroom and to discuss and develop strategies for change. While the primary focus is on gender inequality, course readings also draw on resources that make visible the intersections of gender with other inequalities based on race, class and sexual orientation.

This seminar examines how young people may be taught (and given opportunities), implicitly or explicitly, to handle interpersonal and social conflict. The course examines the ways conflict may be confronted, silenced, transformed, or resolved in school knowledge, pedagogy, hidden curriculum, peacemaking and peacebuilding programs, governance, discipline, restorative justice, and social relations, from Canadian and international/ comparative perspectives. The focus is to become aware of a range of choices and to analyze how various practices and lessons about conflict fit in (and challenge) the regular activities and assumptions of curriculum and schooling, and their implications for democracy, justice, and social exclusion/ inclusion. Participants will become skilled in analyzing the conflict and relational learning opportunities and dilemmas embedded in various institutional patterns or initiatives to teach or facilitate conflict resolution and transformation and to prevent violence.

This course presents and examines various international and comparative perspectives on religious education within and across Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish faith communities. We will critically and comparatively engage in the policies, practices, and research on religious education in public and faith-based schools Canada and internationally. No previous knowledge or coursework on religious education is necessary.

This course is designed as an introductory course for both Indigenous (FNMI) and non-Indigenous educators and professional practitioners focusing on issues related to teaching and learning in Indigenous contexts in both urban and rural communities in Canada and more generally across Turtle Island (North America). We will be examining Indigenous ways of knowing and consider the ways this knowledge may inform teaching and professional practices for the benefit of all. Historical, social, and political issues as well as cultural, spiritual and philosophical themes will be examined in relation to developing culturally relevant and responsive curricula, pedagogies and practices. There is a particular emphasis placed on understandings of land and culture as it relates to constructions of the self in relation to education. The course is constructed around three modules. The first module focuses on exploring historical, social and political contexts, background and related factors that have and continue to influence current realities of FNMI students in Canada. The second module of the course focuses on examining where we are now – here in this time – particularly with regard to educational considerations which includes constructions of the self and community engagement. The third module explores some of the ways we might all move forward together in respectful relationships.

This course is designed for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators and professional practitioners and examines Indigenous (FNMI) perspectives on language, culture, and identity while looking at how this knowledge can inform teacher and professional practices to the benefit of all learners. In relation to developing culturally relevant and responsive curriculum, pedagogies and professional practices we will explore some of the tangled historical, socio-cultural and - political issues. We will also develop an understanding of FNMI peoples as a complete civilization (a complete way of being in the world) that includes the complex interplay of various aspects of civilization such as culture, literacies, language, arts, architecture, spiritual practices, and philosophical themes. Educators and professional practitioners will come away with enhanced critical thinking skills and active engagement with the issues through discussions and hands-on learning opportunities in order to move forward and be able to create more inclusive, fulfilling learning environments in both urban and rural contexts.

This course is designed for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators and professional practitioners and examines Aboriginal (FNMI) perspectives on literacies grounded in understandings of Land (capital "L") while looking at how these literacies can inform teacher and professional practices to the benefit of all learners. In relation to developing culturally relevant and responsive curriculum, pedagogies and professional practices we will explore some of the various literacies and ways to support literacy success in classrooms. We will explore culturally aligned texts, stories, and oral narratives together with symbolically rich themes that support literacies of land as living and emergent. Educators and professional practitioners will come away with enhanced critical thinking skills and active engagement with the issues concerning literacies through discussions and hands-on learning opportunities in order to move forward and be able to create more inclusive, fulfilling learning environments in both urban and rural contexts.

This course is designed to explore and analyze evolving and contrasting characterizations of citizenship education in school communities, primarily in Canada. Particular attention is given to the ways in which teachers translate varying theoretical perspectives and curricular intentions into pedagogical practice as they address such themes as informed citizenship, civic identity, civic literacy, controversial public issues, and community engagement and activism. Instruction for this course includes a mixture of directed and interactive presentations, discussion, and inquiry modes. In doing so, candidates are provided with opportunities to deepen their language of conceptualization, their skills of analysis and critique, and their research abilities. Candidates will also be encouraged to take a personal stance on curricular and pedagogical perspectives in relation to citizenship education.

This course examines education's role in exacerbating, mitigating, or transforming direct and indirect (systemic) violence, and in building sustainable democratic justice and peace, in different kinds of conflict zones around the world (such as divided and post-colonial societies, post-war reconstruction, refugee education, and societies suffering escalated gang criminality). We address conflict, justice, relational and peace-building learning opportunities and dilemmas embedded in various curricula and local/international initiatives. Themes include: education in 'emergency' and 'fragile state' contexts; securitization and colonization vs. humanization and restorative/transformative justice in education; history education for violence or peace; education for human rights and social cohesion; inter-group contact and integrated schooling; conflict resolution capability development; and teacher development for democratic peacebuilding. Participants will gain competence and confidence in conflict (transformation) analysis and in applying contrasting theories to contrasting examples of practice.

Indigenous research is a dynamic, collaborative and rapidly expanding field of study and practice. This course invites students to explore and apply their growing understandings of the relationship between Indigenous research and community engagement through an in-depth review of relevant literature, independent study and group work, critical engagement, and experiential learning. This course a theoretical, conceptual and applied exploration of Indigenous approaches to conducting research and engages in topics dealing with ideological, socio-cultural -political, and ethical issues that inform Indigenous Land-centered (capital “L”) research and community engagement across various landscapes, community, and educational contexts including but not limited to philosophies, frameworks, protocols, and practices. This course also examines specific topics such as research ownership, process and outcomes framed around the 5 R’s (relationship, respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility) in relation to Indigenous research from Land-centred and place-specific philosophical contexts. The course also includes an exploration of the governance by Indigenous communities of their own research and ethical review processes. In relation to developing culturally relevant, responsive and emergent research processes we will explore some of the various ways to do research and engage respectfully and meaningful with Indigenous communities. Educators, researchers, and professional practitioners will come away with enhanced critical thinking skills and active engagement with the issues concerning emergent, responsive, and respectful Indigenous research and community engagement through discussions and hands-on learning opportunities in both urban and rural contexts. There is a particular emphasis placed on philosophical nature of Land in relation to Indigenous research and community engagement together with constructions of the self in relationship to diverse research contexts. This course uses relevant research articles, activities, and various forms of media to foster an understanding of the pertinent literature and to assist students in engaging with some of the realities that face both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across Turtle Island as they endeavour to engage in respectful and meaningful research. The course brings together a variety of decolonizing and anti-oppressive approaches to understanding the contexts of doing research so that educators, researchers and professional practitioners will come away with a better understanding of Indigenous research and the issues affecting insider/outsider researchers, as well as some better tools that can help develop and implement more inclusive, meaningful, fulfilling, and culturally relevant research in both urban and rural contexts and places both within Turtle Island and across the great waters. The course will explore understandings of what it means to conduct research with Indigenous peoples on the issues of pressing concern to communities across diverse contexts and asks what it means to decolonize research. It will also apply socio-cultural and socio-political frameworks to both theoretical and applied issues.

The purpose of this course is to introduce concepts and ideas related to processes of colonization and struggles for decolonization. The course seeks to engage in a reflection process of what it means to decolonize and to teach for decolonization, particularly when doing educational work within a settler colonial context. The course will focus on introducing selected foundational texts from decolonial thinkers and considering specific decolonization movements from different parts of the world. The course will gravitate around what Edward Said might call a “contrapuntal” reading of key texts from scholars of color about the topic of colonization and decolonization, which will weave around a process of reflection on how we are all impacted in and affected by ongoing colonization. This will involve a consideration of what we mean by colonization, and what are different colonial modes to impose particular knowledge frameworks in order to secure control over land as well as human and natural resources. The aim of the course is to begin to develop an initial understanding of what education for decolonization might mean by engaging “classic” texts while reflecting on how we are implicated in and/or impacted by colonization.

The course allows students to learn about schools, pedagogy and education through the lens of settler colonial studies. Settler colonialism is the process by which colonial nations and populations seek to displace Indigenous people from the Land in order to establish, and maintain, modern nations such as Canada. The course takes a critical approach to ways that settler colonialism persists through a matrix of oppressive pedagogies of knowledge, subjectivity, state and land theft/occupation. The course offers pathways for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to deepen their understandings, to challenge and to delink from pedagogies and practices that support settler colonialism. Indigenous knowledge and scholarship will guide how we approach un/learning settler colonialism in ways that are accountable to Indigenous resurgence. Topics covered include Land theft/occupation (privatization, containment, dispossession); knowledge (reason, positivism, Western Enlightenment); schooling (residential schools, school to prison pipeline, multiculturalism); school subjects (social studies, physical education, environmental education, peace education); subjectivity (racism, gendered violence, heteropatriarchy, homonationalism); and public pedagogies (sport, popular culture, media). Students will be encouraged to make connections between local, everyday practices and wider historical contexts and critically analyze settler colonialism across Turtle Island (Canada/US) and other settler colonial contexts, such as Aotearoa/New Zealand, Palestine/Israel, South Americas and South Africa.

This course draws from the field of Maternal Pedagogies and Womanist Praxis, areas of inquiry that examine the relationship between mothering, teaching, and learning, and promotes various forms of agency, advocacy, and activism. Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies include women-centred Indigenous epistemologies that embrace the “whole student” within educational contexts and draw from an Indigenous women-centred worldview to establish a teaching and learning environment that can speak to the hearts and minds of students. This course provides a unique pedagogical framework that encourages anti-racist and ethical dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners. Through scholarly material along with Indigenous narratives and storywork, topics will include: colonial histories, moving beyond empathy to teach about residential schools, ongoing structural violence, and the overrepresentation of children in care. Contemporary resistance movements and resilience frameworks will also be discussed along with ongoing conversations of current community experiences. Students will consider this praxis as a starting for Indigenizing classroom spaces; one that is rooted in localized community knowledges.

This graduate seminar examines how people engage in literacies with and through digital technologies. More specifically, we will explore how children’s and youth’s literacies continue to change along with increasingly networked local and global communities. Grounded in an understanding of digital literacies as culturally, historically, and socially situated meaning-making practices, students will also critically investigate how power and privilege are (re)constructed and negotiated with digitally mediated technologies. Throughout this seminar, students will read deeply into contemporary theories of digital literacies. In turn, students will also review recent empirical research and be afforded opportunities to problematize the ethics of digital literacies in teaching and learning.

In today's heterogeneous classrooms, teachers diversify their techniques of teaching, the content of lessons and their systems for evaluating student progress. The greater pupil diversity, the more teachers must adapt instruction. In this course, we will examine adaptive instruction at a macro(teaching methods) and micro-level (student-teacher interaction). Questions to be examined: What are the teacher's responsibilities for adapting instruction? What is an adapted or modified program? Is differential instruction of students discriminatory or essential? How might modified outcomes be evaluated and reported.

Why is the North American school system as it is? What were the options for change and what are the options for change? Drawing chiefly on North American scholarly literature, this course explores the origins of the state mandated educational systems in the context of traditional patterns of socialization and formal schooling, and changing social, political, and economic conditions.

This course is directed at those students interested in exploring the deep connections between education and social change in Canadian history. Before 1941, the majority of Canadian families lived outside of cities. This course will examine institutional structures, popular responses, and community involvement, and the ways that these factors interacted as state-run compulsory schooling was slowly accepted. It invites students to explore the vital, but relatively unknown, relationship that existed between education, social protest, and the search for reform in rural Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings in this course will allow students to explore the ways that various people, kinds of people, and organizations, both rural and urban – First Peoples; recent British, African, and eastern European immigrants; educational bureaucrats and revolutionaries; social reformers; settled farm families and itinerant miners – used various kinds of education to encourage, resist and direct social reform in rural Canada.

This course provides an examination of how faith groups, often at odds with one another or the state, have shaped and continue to shape the Canadian school system, its organization, curriculum, and culture.

This course explores the changing dimensions of gender relations in Canada from the late 18th to the 20th century. It will examine selected social, cultural, economic, and political developments, shifting meanings of femininity and masculinity in these developments, and their effect on formal and informal forms of education.

This course will examine historical literature that looks at the different ways in which historical commemorations and historical memory have been forged, the hegemonic meanings of the past created by elites, and the contestation of those meanings by those often formally excluded from these processes: women, members of ethnic and racialized groups, and the working classes. We will look at areas such as state commemorations and the creation of 'tradition', the development of museums, historical tourism, and the designation of monuments and battlefields as sites of national memory. The course will conclude with an exploration of current debates over the place of 'history' in the schools and universities.

This course explores how immigration and immigration policy have shaped and continue to shape the Canadian social, economic, political, and linguistic reality with special reference to education. As schools are a primary place of encounter between immigrants and the Canadian receiving society, the class will examine the often-differing agenda of immigrants and educators hoping to meet the needs of immigrants and their children.

This course explores issues of ethnic and racial identity as factors influencing Canadian civic culture and the educational system in particular. Special attention will be paid to the changing nature of ethnicity in Canada and the social, linguistic, economic and political challenges ethnic and racial identity represent to keepers of the Canadian gate and educators in particular.

This course explores the ways in which gender relations have been an integral part of colonial and imperial expansion and national identities, from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries. We examine both how gender relations helped structure these historical developments and how gender relations were subject to change in various colonial contexts (including 'settler societies' such as Canada). The course readings explore the uneven and historically contingent ways in which processes of colonial and national expansion created new forms of gender asymmetry in both colony and metropole.

This course examines a range of themes in the history of education and popular culture, drawn primarily from nineteenth and twentieth-century Canadian history. Topics that will be covered include the impact of popular forms of amusement and education: theatre, tourism, public parades and festivals, and commercial exhibitions and museums. We also will explore the relationship of various levels of the state and of capitalism to popular culture and the relation of "high" culture to mass culture. This course will pay attention to the influences of gender, race and ethnicity, class, and sexuality in shaping and, at times, challenging, particular forms of popular culture.

Canadians, like other peoples around the world, have witnessed a breakdown in consensus about what history should be taught in schools, and a heightened awareness of the political nature of deciding whose history is, or should be, taught. Debates about what to teach, and how, are appearing as strands within larger discussions about the social and political meaning and purposes of history, and 'historical consciousness' is emerging in a wide range of cultural activities, from visiting museums to watching the History Channel. Adults and children alike seem to be seeking answers to questions of identity, meaning, community and nation in their study of the past. Students in this course will explore through readings and seminar discussions some of the complex meanings that our society gives to historical knowledge, with particular emphasis on the current debates about history teaching in Canadian schools, and the political and ethical issues involved. This course was previously listed under TPS1461 - "Special Topics in History: History Wars: Issues in Canadian History Education".

An overview of the uses of computers in education and consideration of critical issues of those uses; recommended as a first course in this area. Current practice and research in the use of computers to guide instruction are examined. Includes aspects of computer-aided learning: computers in the schools, computer-managed instruction, computer assisted instruction, internet resources, computer mediated communication, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence applications. Specific topics change each year. It is strongly recommended that this course be taken early in the student's program.

This course examines the role that knowledge building can play in school and work settings. We will review the distinction between knowledge building and learning, analyze recent knowledge building literature, and discuss socio-cultural, logistical and design considerations when constructing an online Knowledge Building community. Students will visit and study existing Knowledge Building communities as one of the course assignments.

This course deals with the use of computers in schools as tools for students in curricula other than computer studies. The role that technology can play in school restructuring is examined. Also included is a discussion of issues related to teacher training and classroom implementation, and the ways in which technology applications can influence the curriculum content and process. The major emphasis is on determining the specific educational needs (of students, teachers, etc.) that computers can meet.

This course will examine the theory and research underlying key learning theories that have informed online design, including constructivist learning and its historical and philosophical roots. We will consider various learning approaches that have informed these ideas, like problem based learning, collaborative learning and knowledge building, as well as more recent perspectives, including Universal Design for Learning and equity and inclusion considerations for creating safe online experiences for all students.  We will examine how such concepts can inform and enhance the design and pedagogy of online environments. 

A review of the history and purposes of computer-based communication for educational purposes, including the transition from text-based distance learning, the rise of internet based applications and the range of educational strategies and designs used in different learning contexts: e.g. self-paced learning; collaborative learning, and the use of micro learning. We will also look at the shift away from older access-focused purposes for online learning to its recent use as a more mainstream educational tool. Applications and issues of teaching and learning in online environments, related to all levels of education, are examined.

While many recognize that forms of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly infused in our everyday lives, AI’s role in education (K-12, higher education and corporate) is less clear. Some are predicting that AI will enhance teaching and learning by complimenting instructional and assessment practices through big data collection, machine learning and sophisticated prediction. Some see the promise of AI through the fulfillment of support roles such as through the use of chat-bots and intelligent tutors. Others are concerned about the impact of AI on educators and learners, particularly related to security/privacy and data collection, ambiguous decision making/inherent bias, job loss and loss of control. AI is showing promise in the area of research tools, too. In this course, we explore the implications of AI in education (AEID).

Included in the course is a discussion of related terminology and core concepts, the history and current state of AIED, practical considerations, current applications and future predictions about the impact of AI on the educational field.

The readings will focus on a variety of theoretical concepts and will explore the integration of and implications of AIED.

The key, overarching questions we’ll be considering in this course are: What definitions, terminology and core concepts of AI are important to understand as they relate to education? How do we stay current with AI developments in education? What are the implications of AI integration in education today and in the future?