Master of Arts, Master of Education

This program is ideal for:

• Educators and administrators in formal K-12, post-secondary, ECE, and healthcare settings who wish to move into leadership roles with regards to curriculum development and pedagogical practice 
• Community-based organizers/leaders and city-planners that design educational experiences for formal and informal settings 
• Educators who wish to move into settings of public and informal education to engage in design of educational experiences in museums, science centres, art galleries, etc. 
• Educational activists promoting decolonial and equity-based curricular reform
• Educators interested in engaging in open and critical dialogue around important educational concerns

How the program is structured

• In-person classes
• Classes held in the late afternoon and/or early evening
• Complete an MEd or ladder to an MA (with faculty approval)

Intake Schedule

Next Start Term
Fall 2027

Program Design

This program provides a unique opportunity through it's MA/MEd streams with its explicit focus on critical engagement with curriculum through curriculum theory, scholarship of practice, and philosophy. This program also provides a pathway to doctoral studies in Education through the MA stream.

Curriculum is fundamental to educational systems and activities yet is often perceived as a set of ahistorical and neutral documents and policies authorized by educational authorities. Curriculum theory and philosophy provide a lens for critically examining curriculum documents and processes of curriculum development and reform, as well as the complex ways that curriculum becomes lived in public places, highlighting the socio-historical contexts from which these documents, policies, and practices emerge.

Through engaging curriculum in this way, you will become attuned to the political nature of curriculum. You will be able to see curriculum as diverse yet planned efforts to influence learning into desirable ends as determined within different social, political, cultural, and ideological contexts.

Curriculum can be seen as a lived engagement in formal schooling contexts such as K-12 schools, but also in places of public learning such as museums, public art installations, architecture, forests, etc. You will engage critically with research, theory, philosophy and community- and practitioner-based scholarship with the goal to:

• question what counts as knowledge in educational and societal systems engage the political and socio-historical events from which curriculum emerges;
• critically identify the positioning of knowledge holders within curricular design;
• understand the ways curriculum is produced in both formal and informal places of learning; and
• address the lived and embodied experience of engaging in curriculum.

You will discuss the ways that inequalities are reproduced within educational systems and places of learning, and how curriculum design and reform can disrupt those inequalities.