Some very innovative community activism takes place through creative forms of embodied learning, including theatre, dance, slam poetry, hip hop, and various other art forms. In addition, many of these art forms offer alternatives to western Eurocentric frameworks of objectification, subjugation and alienation, emphasizing, instead, relationality and connectedness. The two alternative embodied arts explored in this course include Qigong and Mindfulness Meditation, with a view to examining how these can augment Marxist Feminist dialectics, and inform social justice movements, through deep personal and social transformation. Students will develop a community development proposal involving embodied learning and social movement building, and will participate in a group-based art-as-public pedagogy project.

This course discusses critical issues facing nonprofits, co-operatives, and the social economy, which is a bridging concept for organizations pursuing a social purpose. The course examines the differing organizational forms and accountability structures and the challenges faced by these organizations. Issues to be considered are: social enterprises and their increasing prominence in an age of government retrenchment; community economic development in low-income communities; and civil society organizations and their functions in encouraging social engagement and challenging social norms. The course views the social economy in relation to the government and business sectors, and attempts to understand the multiple roles of organizations in the social economy as they interact with the rest of society. The course materials include innovative case studies and adult education materials with regular guest lectures from social economy practitioners.

This seminar is designed to support Master's students in the process of writing a thesis or a substantial research paper. Issues to be discussed will include: choosing a topic, writing a proposal, developing an argument, selecting a supervisor, and organizing the writing process. The class will be participatory, and weekly readings will be assigned on the various parts of the thesis-writing journey. Class members will also receive instruction on effective library research techniques. In addition, students will have the opportunity to read completed theses and proposals. The course is required for all MA students. Full-time MA students are encouraged to take this course at the start of their program. Part-time MA students should ideally take this course when they are ready to start working on their thesis proposals. If you have difficulty fitting this into your schedule, please contact the instructor.

The course is also open to MEd students who are interested in gaining research experience by writing a substantial research paper equivalent to a thesis.

This course will explore Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge systems and how this knowledge might inform the work of teaching, learning and research. Course content may include indigenous research protocols, decolonizing methodologies, ethics and politics of researching and teaching in Aboriginal communities, indigenous knowledges in the academy, intellectual property rights, curriculum development and innovations in Aboriginal education. Traditional teachings from respected Elders may be incorporated into learning. For learners with a research focus, this course enables inquiry into the production of knowledge, from both western and indigenous perspectives. For those interested in education implications, the course provides a footing in the workings and characteristics of indigenous knowing which will aid their pedagogical practices in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal contexts.

This course provides you with opportunities to examine current principles, practices, trends and issues related to organizational leadership, and apply these concepts to your own professional practice. You will explore leadership styles, practices, tasks and models, and are encouraged to reflect on and analyze your own leadership experiences in light of theories examined.

This course explores concepts, practices and processes in organizations, with specific emphasis on the challenges and strategies for addressing the human aspects of change. The course combines an experimental approach and critical analysis to examine issues in organizational change. Students will gain understanding of theories, practices and the importance of Human Resources Development, Human Resources Management and Labour Relations principles in planning and implementing effective organizational change.

This course will examine issues faced by individuals, groups and communities trapped in ongoing cycles of violence due to historic and current traumas, and systemic injustice. The course will focus on healing and peacebuilding initiatives at the community level and will draw on diverse cultural traditions. The course will acquaint students with current theoretical concepts of community healing and peacebuilding. Participants will also develop skills, values and attitudes that will enable them to work towards healing, reconciliation, and comprehensive, viable peace. The notion of praxis is key, and students will be given the opportunity to reflect on their own practice.

This course will introduce students to the emerging field of adult education for sustainability. As a form of critical pedagogy, it concentrates on the interface between the education of adults and the question of sustainability. The task of adult education for sustainability involves helping us to learn our way out of unsustainable modes of thinking, feeling and acting about ourselves, our communities and the wider world, and to learn our way in to more sustainable ways of life. This course will cover issues such as globalization, sustainable development, community, environmental integrity, social justice, gender, energy and ecological literacy. It will also examine the role of adult education in exploring alternative models to our current unsustainable direction.

Drawing from several disciplinary perspectives, this course provides an opportunity to interrogate the relationship of the Internet to adult education. The main objectives of this course are: to engage participants in an examination of the influence of contemporary information and communication technology, including social media and other platform-mediated activity, on key adult education praxis areas such as community development, literacy, employment and services. The course provides participants with a critical framework for analyzing Internet mediated environments; and encourages students to explore Internet resources that may be used in conjunction with traditional community development and adult education practice. The course is conducted using a seminar format where discussion is informed by weekly readings.

This course examines a moving target, the interface between emerging technologies, primarily information and communication technologies, and the workplace. Drawing from various disciplinary perspectives, including education, sociology, social psychology and communication studies; the course provides an opportunity for students to interrogate the ways in which technology is embedded in the work place. Some topics that will be covered include the knowledge economy, virtual teamwork, surveillance and the future of authority. The course is designed as a hybrid or blended course, which means that it is taught through face-to-face and online sessions and activities. A mixed course format allows participants to experience diverse technology platforms and applications and illustrates course content.

Humans are fundamentally social creatures, depending on good relationships with those around us for optimal functioning. When harm is done in these relationships people suffer. If restoration does not occur and the underlying structural and cultural issues are not addressed, suffering and violence will likely continue, whether acted out inwardly within the individual or group, or outwardly, directed to others. Reconciliation, the complex, dynamic, long-term process of restoring relationships, structures and identities after violent conflict, is a concept that is becoming increasingly relevant. This course has been developed to study reconciliation in accordance with the following principles: reconciliation is necessary; reconciliation is complex; reconciliation is praxis; and reconciliation has implications for adult education and community development.

Following the lead of American essayist Wendell Berry, who has argued that eating is an agricultural act, this course will focus on the idea that eating is also a pedagogical act. What do we learn, and unlearn, from the food we eat? How is the food on our plate connected to such issues as food systems, food politics, food justice, food security, food sovereignty and food movements? Can we consume our way into a more sustainable future, or does this simply reinforce our current unsustainable way of life? This course will explore these and other questions, keeping in mind that food can be a catalyst for learning, resistance and change.

An examination of some of the many issues that have been characteristic of postsecondary education in the past and are likely to continue to be faced in the future.

This course provides an overview of the history, philosophy and evolution of community colleges. While the focus will largely be on the Ontario college system, students will also engage in exploration of wider issues, controversies, challenges and opportunities that community colleges face more broadly in Canada, the United States and in other countries, particularly Anglophone countries with similar systems. The themes of social justice, access and equity run through all topics, as a key purpose of community colleges is to promote these objectives.

A comparative description and analysis of tertiary-level systems of education with special attention to their structure and governance and the relevant features of the societies in which they operate.

This course is about system-wide policy and planning in higher education. The primary goal of this course is to help students understand how to conduct sound analyses of major policy issues at the system level, and make well-grounded recommendations on how to address them. This course is organized around a realistic planning assignment to address a policy issue, following a problem-based approach.

This course explores how administration, management, and leadership are conceptualized, studied, and practiced in higher education institutions. The course will contrast mainstream and critical perspectives on administration, management, and leadership and examine the specificity of academic settings in shaping both the practice and the investigation of administration in colleges and universities.

This course examines multiple theories and concepts that will help learners better understand colleges and universities as complex organizations and how they change. The aim is to help learners acquire a strong conceptual foundation for their analysis of organizational issues faced by colleges and universities, and to familiarize themselves with useful theoretical tools for interpreting and explaining organizational change in higher education.

This course reviews theoretical debates regarding the nature of professions and professional education, placing them within their historical context in western societies. Contemporary issues that are addressed include the implications of globalization of the professions, diversity in the professions and the ''entrepreneurial university'' and the professions. Perspectives of practitioners as well as faculty teaching in the professions are considered.

This course on lifelong learning and professional and vocational education has four broad aims: First, it explores debates about: the learning society and lifelong learning; globalisation, the ‘risk’ society and reflexive modernisation; and, the knowledge society and the knowledge economy. Second, it explores the nature of, and debates concerning, professional and vocational education. Third, it explores different ways in which post-secondary education systems can be structured and organised, the relationships between universities and colleges and how this helps to structure relationships between professional and vocational education. Fourth, it explores regulation of post-secondary education through qualifications frameworks, and considers debates about the Ontario Qualifications Framework. It explores debates about skills, employability skills, generic skills, learning outcomes and competency-based education/training. It considers the contrasting theoretical frameworks that underpin various positions in these debates.

The course is about the resources — public and private — that support schools, colleges, and universities: how the resources are raised, how they are allocated, how they are budgeted for, how they are economically justified, and how they are accounted for. The course is also about the connections: connections between investments in education and the larger economy, between the organization of systems and the way funding is allocated and accounted for, between forms of budgets and the efficiency with which funding is deployed, and between funding and educational quality. Although the ideas of classical economists – Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Becker, Rostow – about the formation of human capital will be discussed, the course does not require a background in economic theory.

This course applies key sociological theories and concepts to issues in higher education. The course examines both how society affects access to and outcomes of higher education, and conversely, how higher education has played a role in forming modern societies. Topics include: the role that higher education plays in social mobility, social reproduction, and the production of elites; faculty labor, knowledge production and dissemination; and, student campus life and identity formation. The course draws on various sub-fields in Sociology, including Social Stratification, the Sociology of Education, Sociology of Organizations and the Sociology of Knowledge.

This course examines the field of higher education through a political lens and covers relations between higher education institutions and states, between institutions, and within institutions. The aim is to introduce students to the fundamental assumptions and applications of political theories as they relate to international, national, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. Topics covered during this course include political theory, political dynamics, sources of power, and political behaviour. These are in turn used to analyze current debates and events in higher education such as higher education as a public or a private good, academic freedom, accountability, internal governance, leadership and administration, and labour relations.

This course addresses the arrangements for governance in higher education. It examines formal models and theories of governance; the legal and institutional framework of higher education governance; the role and characteristics of higher education intermediary bodies, governing boards, and academic senates and their relationships to one another; and current challenges and issues pertaining to university and community college governance.

This course develops an understanding of the principles of teaching and learning in higher education, and it develops skills in the practice of teaching in higher education.

This course introduces the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education with a particular focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning in professional education. The scholarship of teaching and learning engages teachers in scholarly inquiry into teaching and learning with the aim of improving student learning, and advancing curriculum and pedagogy. The emphasis is on undertaking systematic scholarly inquiry into one’s teaching either individually or collegially, and sharing the outcomes of this inquiry in a variety of ways, including in practitioner seminars and conferences, journals and websites, as well as in refereed conferences and journals so that knowledge about how to improve learning in one's field is advanced.

This course provides an overview of the evolution of comparative education as a field of study, covering historical-philosophical, positivistic, phenomenological and neo-Marxist approaches to the field. It also looks at how comparative education scholars have responded to the literature of postmodernism and globalization. Central themes of the course are the purpose of comparative education, the impact of diverse views of social change, and the idea of scientific method. The role of such international organizations as the International Bureau of Education, UNESCO, and the World Bank in comparative education is discussed.

This course provides an overview of the field of comparative higher education, beginning with perspectives from the different civilizations which fostered higher learning in the pre-modern era. It considers theories from comparative education and disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology as they apply to understanding higher education in global context. It also takes both a regional and a thematic approach in looking at higher education across different societies. Themes covered in the course include gender in higher education, curricular patterns across different societies, student issues and the relation of higher education to the state.

This course investigates the theory and practice of evaluation in higher education, including admissions processes, assessment of student learning, student evaluation of teaching, and program and institutional evaluation. By the end of the course, students should be able to explain purposes and principles of evaluation; critique uses of evaluation in higher education; apply evaluation principles in higher education; create and critique logic models, change models, and action models for higher education programs; plan evaluations of higher education programs; and discuss ethical issues in evaluation.

This course is designed for students who are planning, collecting data, analyzing or writing up thesis or other qualitative research. Classes will involve reading about the theoretical paradigms (e.g. interactionish, phenomenological, critical feminist, postcolonial/emancipatory) and research methodologies and types of analysis and interpretations being used by students (e.g. participant observation, thematic analysis, focus groups, individual interviews, ethnography, autoethnography, grounded theory, critical ethnography, participatory action research, life histories/narratives, institutional ethnography, textual analysis, policy or program analysis). Selected ethical issues that are often encountered in the process of doing research will also be covered. Special attention will be paid to analysis and interpretation of the data, with students presenting their changing views of their chosen topic for feedback and referral to relevant literature.