Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An introduction to a small but representative sample of basic questions and issues in education. Students will examine questions relating to: the concept or idea of education; learning and the learner; teaching and the teacher; and more generally, the broader contexts of education. This course also introduces students to different ways of exploring educational questions and issues from philosophical and critical analysis, to historical and cross-cultural studies, to empirical research. Cannot be taken for credit by students with credit for 300 and 400 level education courses. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course will be offered remotely.  Students are expected to be online and available during scheduled class times.

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Is there a connection between education and the desire to live a good and meaningful life? If so, what does that look like? And if not, should there be? What is education in the first place, and what does it mean to ‘get’ an education, or to ‘be’ educated? What is schooling? Are schooling and education the same thing? What do education and schooling look like when seen from an evolutionary, a cross-cultural, a historical, and a current perspective? And, what does all this have to do with the goals, or aims, or ‘ends’ of living a life?

This course is aimed at anyone interested in the idea of education, whether or not you are seeking to become a teacher, or whether you are simply curious about what education is in the contemporary world, and what it has been in other times and other places. And, frankly, this course is equally aimed at anyone who has been puzzled, or even frustrated, by their own educational experiences.

We will be applying three lenses to our study of education: an anthropological, an historical, and a personal one. Which is to say, we will be looking at what education has been in our evolution as humans on the planet, what education is or has been in other cultures and other periods, what it is, and has been, in the national context of Canada, as well as what education has been in your own life, and in light of your own experiences. This last aspect, you own experiences, and your own questions, will figure significantly in our explorations.

As this is a “W” course (writing-intensive), it will also involve an opportunity to develop and hone your writing skills. There will be various activities and exercises to support this.

Course Themes/Topics (subject to change in discussion with class):
Human Evolution and Learning; Learning and Schooling across Time and Culture; What is Education ‘for’?; Education and Identity; Education, Learning, Schooling: “Docile Bodies” or “The Practice of Freedom;” Learning and Emotions: What’s ‘love’ got to do with it?; The Indian Residential School System in Canada; Technologies of Learning; Teaching & Learning, or Learning & Teaching; On Psyche, Soul, & Education; Learning, Living & Life.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The primary aim is for students to develop an informed and critical perspective on education that draws on contemporary, historical, and anthropological understandings, and to be able to apply that perspective to one’s own life, hopes, and aspirations.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: