Term 2 - January to April 2010
CCFI 501 (3 credits) Living Inquiry in Learning Communities
Tuesdays 4:30 to 7:30 pm
Dr. Karen Meyer (EDCP)
Recognizing the pedagogical role that “living inquiry” plays in our lives as educators, researchers, and human beings is integral to understanding our educational practices and ways of being in the world. Living inquiry critically and openly investigates the impact of our presence, our knowing, our language and action within educational contexts. Living inquiry also acknowledges the lived and shared experiences of learners within multiple spaces of learning. This course is designed to explore with students theoretical, relational, and experiential (re)presentations of communal practice, exploring and creating integrity between theory and practice.
Students will engage in a variety of theoretical and experiential explorations-bridging reading of theoretical perspectives with generative dialogue, as well as collaborative and self-reflective practice. Investigating relational, intercultural, and communal sites of learning, students will generate narrative, interpretative and collaborative experiences that give voice to lived experience and shared learning.
CCFI 508B (3 credits) Review of Research in Educational Methods:
“Institutional Ethnography”
Mondays 1:00 to 4:00 pm
Dr. Dorothy Smith, University of Victoria
Institutional ethnography is an alternative sociological approach that originates in the women's movement and a commitment to exploring, from a standpoint in experience, how institutional and organizational relations enter into and shape our everyday lives. Traditionally ethnography is understood as involving some form of direct observation which may be as a participant. Institutional ethnography has developed methods of investigating how institutional and organizational processes are put together as people’s work coordinated in various ways by texts – written, printed, electronic, etc. etc. It is an approach that enables exploration of contemporary forms of power as people’s actual practices.
The first part of the course will introduce the basic ideas of an institutional ethnographic sociology and will also connect with examples of institutional ethnographic research so that you can see what it looks like (and its varieties). Later sessions will focus on the 'how' of doing institutional ethnography, on data collection, and writing up your research.
CCFI 572A (3 credits) Advanced Seminar in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education:
“Research Epistemology, Ontology, and Axiology: Disciplinary and Transdisciplinary Perspectives”
Thursdays 4:30 to 7:30 pm
Dr. Jennifer Vadeboncoeur (ECPS)
Graduate students engage in course content that introduces them to research traditions—in logical positivism and iterations of positivism(s); interpretivism, and forms of interpretivism, such as hermeneutics, and; critical theory, including neo-Marxist and post-modern perspectives. This investigation is significant because it frames, or should frame, an entire research project, from the articulation of research questions, through to research designs, methods of data collection, methods of data analysis, and the production of texts. Consistency within research traditions enables a researcher to conduct transdisiplinarity research with integrity.
Lefebvre’s notion of transdisciplinarity, expanded to include social foundations of education (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and psychology), frames the course. Graduate students are provided with course content that exemplifies disciplinary perspectives of each of the research traditions and includes examples of research that attempts to work across some of the “foundational” disciplines, though no research to date has been found that includes a transdisciplinary perspective of all of the above disciplines. Students may conduct readings across the research traditions within a single discipline, though they will be required to read each of the examples of research that works across disciplines.
CCFI 572E (3 credits) Advanced Seminar in Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education:
“The Medicalization of Education: Regulating ‘Un/fit’ Citizens—Disability Culture, Arts and Politics”
Mondays 4:30 to 7:30 pm
Dr. Leslie Roman (EDST)
The course provides a broad overview of the different conceptions and paradigms of impairment and disability: medical, social/socio-political and human rights frames, the latter particularly drawing upon community-inspired arts, theatre, autobiography, collective visual and performing arts, ranging from wheel-chair choreography and dance to rap and soulful poetry, from biting humor to satirical popular theatre. The spaces the arts create for empowerment and social change are what we will engage. The aim here is to reveal how wide-ranging disability communities use the arts and cultural politics to speak back “shamelessly” to the tropes and experiences of medicalization, eugenics, public health, educational and psycho-therapeutic practices and regimes. The course will examine whether and how feminist, post-structural, anti-colonial and cultural studies perspectives engage or take up disability studies.
CCFI 601A (3 credits) Doctoral Seminar:
“The Cultivation of Cosmopolitanism”
Wednesdays 4:30 to 7:30 pm
Dr. William Pinar (EDCP)
We will study cosmopolitanism as elaborated by its major exponents and critics, with special attention to the meaning of a cosmopolitan education. A keyword for our time, cosmopolitanism has been elaborated in terms of human rights, has been criticized as an extension of European colonialism, and has been studied historically. In addition to reviewing these major discourses – by Appiah, Benhabib, Cheah, Kurasawa, Nava – we will focus on its cultivation educationally, studying and critiquing my own suggestions for a curriculum of cosmopolitanism.
Because our readings derive from scholarship in cultural studies, philosophy, and education, we will continually slide toward – and resist – transdisciplinarity.
