OISE Courses
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 course will be offered as the final and culminating course for Masters of Education students in SJE who wish to complete a project synthesizing their educational experience with their professional, intellectual, and/or community goals. The students will design, develop and conduct individual or group projects in social justice education. Depending on students' goals and aspirations, projects may include (but are not limited to): a research project similar in form & scope to a Major Research Paper; a substantial literature review; a portfolio; a curriculum unit; a website, blog or digital media project; a policy intervention; a documentation of alternative educational programs or practices; the organization of a media, community or school event; an artistic representation; or a project of the student's design.
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.
Ce séminaire a pour but d'explorer, d'un point de vue sociologique et historique, et grâce à un ensemble de données théoriques provenant aussi bien de France, d'Angleterre que du Canada, la mise en place de l'éducation inclusive. Cette forme d'éducation, constituée dans le but de répondre aux ''besoins'' d'élèves désignés comme ''spéciaux'', eut son heure de gloire à une époque donnée, soit avant qu'émergent les courants d'intégration et d'inclusion scolaire. La situation des écoles de langue française en Ontario sera également analysée au regard de cette question.
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.
Learning not only takes place within the institutions of formal education, but through a myriad of practices of popular culture. Considering popular culture as inherently pedagogical, this course will address the learning that takes place through various everyday cultural practices and consider its implications for the work of educators. Practices to be considered include television, film, radio, digital media, musical performance, as well as aspects of material culture such as forms of dress, games, and toys.
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.