As a qualitative research course for masters and doctoral students who already possess some familiarity with postmodern, feminist and critical race theories, the course will consist of readings that explore the following question: how is knowledge production racialized? A related question is: how can we understand the operation of multiple systems of domination in the production of racialized knowledge? How can intellectuals challenge imperialist and racist systems through their research and writing? This course is built around the idea that responsible research and writing begins with a critical examination of how relations of power shape knowledge production. What explanatory frameworks do we as scholars rely on when we undertake research? How do we go about critically examining our own explanations and others when the issue is race? To examine these themes in depth, historically as well as in the present, the course will focus on colonialism, imperialism, racism and knowledge production. Specifically, the course explores three defining imperial constructs: indianism, orientalism and africanism. We consider how the legacy of imperial ideas shaped racial knowledge and the disciplines, positioning us as scholars as active participants in the imperial enterprise. In part two of the course, we explore interlocking systems of oppression: how imperial knowledge simultaneously upholds and is upheld by capitalism and patriarchy. For the third part of the course, we examine how we understand the immigrant's body, the citizen, the migrant and what it means to produce knowledge as a post-colonial scholar.

This advanced seminar will examine the anti-colonial framework as an approach to theorizing issues emerging from colonial and colonized relations. It will use radical/subversive pedagogy and instruction as important entry points to critical social praxis. Focussing on the writings and commentaries of revolutionary/radical thinkers like Memmi, Fanon, Cesaire, Cabral, Gandhi, Machel, Che Guevera, Mao Tse-Tung, Nyerere, Toure and Nkrumah, the course will interrogate the theoretical distinctions and connections between anti-colonial thought and post-colonial theory, and identify the particular implications/lessons for critical educational practice. Among the issues explored will be: the challenge of articulating anti-colonial theory as an epistemology of the colonized anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and common colonial consciousness; the conceptualization of power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures and histories of marginalized communities; the understanding of Indigeneity as pedagogical practice; the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics through anti-colonial learning; the investigation of the power and meaning of local social practice/action in surviving colonial and colonized encounters; and the identification of the historical and institutional structures and contexts which sustain intellectual pursuits. Students and instructor will engage in critical dialogues around intellectual assertions that the anti-colonial is intimately connected to decolonization, and by extension, decolonization cannot happen solely through Western scholarship. We will ask: How can educators provide anti-colonial education that develop in learners a strong sense of identity, self and collective respect, agency, and the kind of individual empowerment that is accountable to community empowerment? How do we subvert colonial hierarchies embedded in conventional schooling? And, how do we re-envision schooling and education to espouse at its centre such values as social justice, equity, fairness, resistance and decolonial responsibility?

What accounts for the ''Fanon Renaissance''? Why and how is Fanon important to schooling and education today? This upper level graduate seminar will examine the intellectual contributions of Franz Fanon as a leading anti-colonial theorist to the search for genuine educational options and transformative change in contemporary society. The complexity, richness and implications of his ideas for critical learners pursuing a subversive pedagogy for social change are discussed. The course begins with a critical look at Fanon as a philosopher, pedagogue and anti-colonial practitioner. We draw on his myriad intellectual contributions to understanding colonialism and imperial power relations, social movements and the politics of social liberation. Our interest in Fanon will also engage how his ideas about colonialism and its impact on the human psyche help us to understand the process of liberation within the context of contestations over questions of identity and difference, and our pursuit of race, gender, class and sexual politics today. Class discussions will broach such issues as the contexts in which Fanon developed his ideas and thoughts and how these developments subsequently came to shape anti-colonial theory and practice, the limits and possibilities of political ideologies, as well as the theorization of imperialism and spiritual 'dis-embodiment', particularly in Southern contexts. Specific subject matters include Fanon's understanding of violence, nationalism and politics of identity, national liberation and resistance, the 'dialectic of experience', the psychiatry of racism and the psychology of oppression, the limits of revolutionary class politics, and the power of 'dramaturgical vocabulary', and how his ideas continue to make him a major scholarly figure. The course will also situate Fanon in such intellectual currents as Marxism and Neo-marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis, Negritude, African philosophy and anti-colonialism, drawing out the specific implications for education and schooling.

Exploring women in leadership positions within the context of education will create new pathways of understanding intersectionalities and leadership practices. By weaving women’s leadership practices into learning, knowledge creation discourse, educators as well as learners will have a better understanding of how gender plays out in leadership. The main objective of this course will be to explore different leadership models from a feminist & anti-colonial thought framework in order to create an educational space that develops learners and educators' consciousness in relation to: What is leadership? Does one need to be in a position of authority to be a leader? What does it mean to be a leader from marginalized communities? We shall also examine strategies that different women employ when they find themselves in positions of leadership. In this course, we will explore the questions and issues of women and leadership and how that intersects with schooling from diverse perspectives. Ngunjiri (2010), suggests that women can transform their communities and organizations from within by choosing to work with all stakeholders by navigating through the cultural and organizational challenges, in order to bring a shift of consciousness in communities or organizations. This course seeks to further these analyses and offers insights into how spiritual discourse informs women educators’ everyday leadership practices. The course will concentrate on literature that examines women & leadership; gender and leadership; women in positions of authority etc and knowledge production from historical and contemporary perspectives as well as from a local and global perspective.

This course attends to research approaches coming out of two distinct literatures: Indigenous land education or pedagogy, and Black feminist geographies. Texts and assignments will focus on empirical and conceptual research projects which can be informed by critical Indigenous studies and Black studies engaging place and land.

This course seeks to critically interrogate notions of the transnational found in recent feminist theorizing. 'Transnational' has been invested with a variety of meanings and political attributes, from descriptions of global capital to the politics of alliance and coalition-building, from the creation of subjectivities through to the reconfiguration of imperialist ideologies and practices in the contemporary conjuncture. It is about linkages and unequal connections. By engaging a broad and necessarily interdisciplinary spectrum of work, this course seeks to trace the variety of methods and investments that feminists have brought to bear on their engagement with transnationality. What are some of the implications for theory, for activism, for imaginative and pedagogical practices?

This course engages Indigenous feminist approaches to research, and the application of theories of refusal to academic knowledge production.

The continent of Africa has a fundamentally rich and dynamic history, dating at least as far back as the Nubian civilization, pre-dynastic Egyptian systems of thought through to the many diverse philosophical traditions found around the continent today. Contemporarily, many Pan-Africanist thought scholars have made the argument that the West’s exclusive claims on knowledge have complicated the rationality of non-Western peoples, most especially those of African descent. “African Classics: Decolonial Thought in Education” will engage students in critically examining the relevance and importance of comprehending the African Philosophy, gender, economics, governance, politics, spirituality, phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology. This course involves the development of a framework to map the geographical beginnings in the context of African decolonial thought in education. These connections are aimed at providing context for students’ engagement in the philosophical foundations of African ways of theorizing and practise. Through this, students will be able to engage in critical self-reflection. Students in this course will make sense of the role played by discourses around the construction and reconstruction of African decolonial systems of thought.

Practical experience in an area of the humanities, social sciences and/or social justice education fieldwork is a vital element of the development of skills in the application of knowledge from theory and research. In consultation with the SJE departmental Practicum Liaison person, the student shall establish a practicum supervisor and a suitable placement in consultation with her/his practicum supervisor, signaled by completion of an EdD 'Practicum Agreement Form' (SJE website, 'Students', 'Dept. Specific Forms'). For successful completion of this course, the student is required to: a) spend 72 hours in active educational fieldwork; b) have regular contact with their individual practicum supervisor; c) submit an interim report of approximately 1500 words to the Practicum Supervisor; and submit a final paper of approximately 8000 words to the Practicum Supervisor offering a final synthesis of specific field experiences & their relationship to a relevant body of academic and sociological literature which shall be graded on a Pass/Fail basis. Examples of relevant educational placements include but are not limited to school boards, community organizations, social service organizations, unions, cultural organizations and other organizations with relevant educational functions, broadly conceived.

Course description same as SJE2998H.

Courses that will examine in depth topics of particular relevance not already covered in regular course offerings in the department. The topics will be announced and described in the schedule of courses.

Course description same as SJE5000H, but at the doctoral level.

This course will introduce students to work and learning trends in Canada and internationally, with a focus on the relationships between workplace learning and social change. There are three intellectual objectives of this course. The first objective is to situate workplace learning within broader social trends such as globalization, neo-liberalism and organizational restructuring. Second, the course allows for an exploration of the connections between learning as an individual phenomenon and learning as a social/organizational and social policy phenomenon. Finally, a third objective of the course is to highlight the learning strategies that seek to foster social change through greater equality of power, inclusivity, participatory decision-making and economic democracy.

The goal of this course is to develop a working dialogue across two separate bodies of research -- learning theory & social movement theory that to date have encountered one another only rarely and when so, virtually always inadequately. The focus is on building capacity in students to carry out research on various aspects of social movement learning. In doing so, our goals are to understand knowledge production, distribution, storage, transmission as well as the learning dynamics endemic to social movement building, action, outcomes and change. The course will emphasize learning as a unified composite of individual and collective human change in relation to socio-cultural and material perspectives primarily, the participatory structures of social movements as well as traditional changes in consciousness, skill and knowledge amongst participants. We will draw on both advanced theories of education/learning understood in the context of the long- established sociological sub-tradition known as 'social movement studies' and 'social movement theory'. The course will take a critical approach to social movement studies introducing the inter-disciplinary history of social movement studies over the 20th century followed by reviews of canonical theories of political process and the polity model approach, resource mobilization, frame analysis, neo-frame analysis, contentious politics, dynamics of contention and contentious performances. A significant proportion of the course will involve detailed secondary analysis of a specific social movement of the student's choosing, and will demand regular research reports that are meant to serve as a resource for our collective learning as well as to support the production of individual final papers directly. The course is highly recommended to advanced masters as well as doctoral students. No prerequisites are required.

How do working people collaborate to put their skills, capacities, and creativity to practice at and for work? How do we participate at work? What are the practitioner communities that bring together our creativity and productive capacities? How do communities of practice form and how can they be fostered in for-profit, public and quasi-public, and non-profit and social economy organizations? This participatory, presentations-based, and experiential learning course will see students and practitioners from the field delve into the different ways communities of practice and practitioner communities form in different workplace settings, how they may thrive, how we learn in them, and the issues that might challenge them.

This course will allow students to engage in advanced learning and research on the central national and international debates in the field. The focus is on building capacity in students to carry out research on various aspects of work, learning and social change. In doing so, students will develop extensive analytic and conceptual knowledge in the areas of the historical development of the notion of ''workplace learning'' and its links to diverse agendas of social change. The course will require the critical assessment and research applications of theories of workplace learning and social change, as well as practice and policy in the area. The course will include exploration of advanced case study research as well as national and international survey research, and encourage the linkages with students doctoral thesis work. Weekly seminars will be held.