Contextualizing Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Learning

EDER 693.11 Uncovering Curriculum

In this course we take up curriculum itself as a contested, political, relational, and situated object of study. We work to uncover ways of understanding curriculum and its responses to complex questions in education. As one way into this work, we consider significant moments (historical, contemporary, critical, for example) in the field of curriculum studies. Beginning with the provocation that curriculum is more than a mandated program of study or course content in a specific disicpline, we inquire into the relational dynamics between how curriculum lives in various educational settings and the broader undertakings of curriculum studies. Some questions considered in EDER 693.11 include: What is curriculum? What happens when we expand the positioning of curriculum as a political text ? What is worth knowing and teaching in schools and other educational sites? What is it we should teach and why? What gets silenced, masked, and misrepresented in the process of curriculum enactment? What are the ways in which curriculum is enacted through the artifacts, relations, and events of teaching and learning?

EDER 693.40 Reimagining Learning

In this course, we invite students to (re)consider learning, learners and teaching in educational spaces. Throughout the course, we investigate and question the implications for and about learners, learning and teaching when these implications are considered through various discourses, experiences, positionalities, and institutions. We grapple at the intersections of sociological, cultural, psychological, developmental, decolonizing, and critical discourses that shape how we understand learners, as well as the ways in which life paths affect relationships with and in learning. Questions guiding the course include: What identities do we inhabit, enact, perform as learners and educators? What assumptions underpin how learning is situated in various socio-cultural contexts? Where does learning reside? How do we recognize learning in relation to measuring, coding, and classifying learners and learning? How are learners differently positioned within and across society and educational spaces? Where and how does learning occur? What is the role of social identities in shaping learning opportunities?

EDER 693.41 Questioning Pedagogy

This course focuses on the mediating space of pedagogy, where curriculum and learning come to be enacted through teacher-student-content-space-time relations in various learning sites. Pedagogical considerations in this course drawn attention to critical questions of persons, practices, and politics when interpreting and living curriculum in context. We invite students to situate ethical relationality by way of anti-racism, decolonial, and social justice orientations at the core of pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we uncover the possibilities for opening new ways of thinking, being, and relating in the world. Questions guiding this course include: What is pedagogy? How has pedagogy been articulated through time and across contexts? How have ideas of best practices vacillated over various epochs? What are the implications of student—teacher relations across learning contexts? How do participants read, understand, and interpret their roles in educational settings?

EDER 693.xx Un-Disciplining Knowledge

In this course, we will work to understand disciplinarity and how it relates to knowledges, to school subject areas and pragmatics, and to interpretations and enactments of curriculum. We will take up critical perspectives on disciplinarity, examining how disciplines can produce knowledge and learning in ways that become hegemonic while also considering such possibilities as decoloniality, epistemic disobedience, fugitivity, flight, and futurity, and holism. Questions guiding this course include: What are the disciplines and how do they work to shape the contours of knowledge and knowers? Knowledges have been shaped through cultural and historical processes into disciplinary structures that are laden with inequitable power and values. What is at stake when we work within and across the boundaries of these structures of feeling and belonging? What can be opened up through transgressive practices of undoing disciplinarity?

EDER 693.12 Inquiry through Math and the Fine Arts

This course takes a fresh approach to both mathematics and the fine arts by juxtaposing disciplines traditionally set in opposition to one another. Through acts of reflection, comparison and contrast, students will come to understand the distinct ways of knowing invited by mathematical and artistic inquiry, and will also identify creative places of connection and relationship between the disciplines. Areas of exploration may include: musical thinking; patterns, shapes and abstract thinking; problem-solving; spatial reasoning; perspective and design; and visual ways of knowing. 

EDER 693.13 Inquiry through the Humanities

Students will explore acts of sense- and meaning-making within both the language arts and social studies. Areas of exploration may include: historical thinking; critical literacy; multimodal communication; citizenship and ethics; relationship, community and identity; creativity and expression; and approaches to literature and media. We will consider the unique ways of knowing that are enabled by the language arts and by social studies, and also consider the places where the two might be productively brought together to create interdisciplinary forms of inquiry through the humanities.  

EDER 693.14 Inquiry through Sciences, Health, and Environmental Education

Students will assess the limitations and possibilities of Western (Eurocentric) modes of scientific inquiry, and explore critical and Indigenous approaches to health, wellness, ecology and the natural world that encourage relationality. Topics for consideration may include: traditions of scientific inquiry; critical, interpretive and Indigenous approaches to science, health and physical education; scientific learning as socially situated and participatory; intersections of environmental and social justice; public knowledge of science and interpreting scientific information; citizen science; science for social justice; critical media literacy and environmental communication; and land-based experiential approaches to place, community and wellness.  

EDER 600 Research Methodology in Education

This first course in educational research methodologies provides the background necessary to make cogent decisions around the types of research questions that might be asked and the kinds of insights and answers particular methods can provide.

This introductory course is intended for graduate students in the first year of their cohort-based Master’s of Education programs. The course focuses on some of the issues and dilemmas that frame the context for contemporary research, and guides participants in a preliminary consideration of research strategies, questions and methods, for further study and application in the subsequent course EDER 692 Collaboratory of Practice. In relation to EDER 692 Collaboratory of Practice, this first course includes a discussion of action research in education as a pragmatic way to integrate various methods to examine critical questions about learning in broader contexts. Participants will also be encouraged to approach research articles and reports with a critical perspective and develop some skills and techniques for this kind of close reading.

EDER 602 Program and Practice Evaluation

Students in this course will have an opportunity to discover how to creatively establish, plan, and evaluate adult education programs that will positively affect their organization or community.

EDER 604 Collaboratory of Practice

Collaboratories of Practice represent a fusion of two important developments in contemporary research: communities of practice and collaboratories. A collaboratory is a new networked organizational form involving structured experiences of authentic, real-world practice which serve as sources of active inquiry and professional learning. This course provides opportunities for individuals or groups to investigate real world problems and to devise or recommend pragmatic solutions suitable to their contexts.

EDER 606 Writing Educational Research

This course will focus on examining and developing the skills associated with crafting an academic paper. Topics will also include genres and purposes of academic writing, and venues for presentation and publication.

EDER 681 Studying Curriculum

This course examines study, studying, and having studied as distinctive educational experiences. It considers temporal, spatial, and ethical conceptualizations of curriculum study and curriculum as study and questions the relationships between understanding, learning, questioning, and application. Through conceptual and phenomenological accounts of the studier’s stance, students are invited to retrospectively and prospectively consider questions of intentionality, action, and potentialities of educational being.