Classes Taught
(EPS 390 GSE DA) Technology and Educational Reform
Instructor
with Dr. Nicholas C. Burbules
Syllabus (.doc)
Technology and Educational Reform explores the social, ethical, and policy dimensions of new technology use in education including the Internet, and other multimedia technologies. This course examines emerging issues confronting the uses of new information and communication technologies in education. This is a time of great opportunities and challenges, and one of the greatest of these opportunities (and challenges) is to think in new ways about the possibilities of education.
(EPS 590 OP) Open Source, Open Access, Open Education
Teaching Assistant
with Dr. Michael A. Peters
The present decade can be called the ‘open' decade (open source, open systems, open standards, open archives, open everything) just as the 1990s were called the ‘electronic' decade (e-text, e-learning, e-commerce, e-governance). This course will introduce course participants to the emergent paradigm of Open Education (OE): first, by setting the scene briefly outlining the challenges of higher education represented by globalization, the knowledge economy and the development of e-learning; second, by reviewing and concept and contemporary forms of ‘openness', including open source, open access and the ‘open society'; third, by providing a grounding in the state of the field of open education, including related topics like copyright, licensing and sustainability; and, fourth, by encouraging you to think and act creatively about current practices and possible alternative practices in open education.
Syllabus (.doc)
(EPS 590 GCM) Global Citizenship Education
Teaching Assistant
with Dr. Michael A. Peters
This course will explore the main theories and key concepts that shape the discourse of citizenship, including its history, its national and international formulations, and specifically the role of education. The course will also examine and reflect on the meanings of key principles such as human rights, democracy, nationalism and identity to discover how social, ideological and cultural issues interrelate with the teaching of history and citizenship. In addition, it will engage critically with the best and most relevant thinking and research to extend an understanding of the curriculum, to investigate the relationships between the humanities (politics, history and education), and to analyze research and practice in teaching and learning of citizenship education. The course will encourage participants to engage with the theoretical and normative aspects of citizenship including such topics as democracy and democratization, civil liberties, political participation, migration and asylum, nationality, culture, persistent inequalities, discrimination, identity and belonging, gender equity, race and ethnic relations, human rights, and globalization. It will also encourage specialization in researching one or more of the topics mentioned above.
Syllabus (.doc)
(EPS 590 ENT) Education, Entrepreneurship and Creativity
Teaching Assistant
with Dr. Michael A. Peters & Dr. Tina Besley
This new course aims to develop a critical understanding of the notions of entrepreneurship and creativity in education as important components in the global knowledge economy, to which the discipline of education has paid scant attention. Educators need to become far aware of the central role of education in the knowledge economy, as a vital component in a nation's economic well-being and comparative advantage. The World Bank has set out four pillars of the knowledge economy that all emphasize education as vital modernizing requirements for countries and since 2002 has conducted a series of annual forums on the knowledge economy. Education now plays multiple roles and becomes the primary driver for the economic system, linked to ICT as the medium, and innovation and creativity as the mainspring for productivity growth. The knowledge economy concept highlights human and social capital as the main resources for generational economic development, production and innovative capacity.
Syllabus (.doc)
(EPS 590 MP) Education, Culture & the Creative Economy
Instructor
with Dr. Michael A. Peters
The conception of the creative economy emphasizes the creative industries and institutions as an interlocking sector producing cultural goods and services as a rapidly growing and key component of the new global knowledge economy. It refers to those broadly defined design industries and institutions that draw on the individual and increasingly the collective resources of creativity, skill and talent utilizing social media and social networking. These new trends have strong potential for the generation of wealth and job creation through the exploitation of intellectual property and the development of open and free culture. Both the idea and policies associated with it originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the work of Landry, Howkins and Florida. Increasingly, the notion has been applied to education at all levels both in terms of the development of creative minds, the creative curriculum and universities as creative institutions. This course provides a broad conceptual understanding of the creative economy and its relation to education.
(EPS 590 CMC) Global Perspectives in Curriculum
Teaching Assistant
with Dr. Cameron McCarthy
This course will consider the impact and implications for modern curriculum theory and practice of the expanding economic, cultural and political networks of affiliation, association and interconnectivity across national borders around the world being generated apace in the new century. These practices and processes of interconnectivity have come to be collectively described by contemporary observers as “globalization.” Dynamics associated with globalization as expressed in the intensification and movement of cultural and economic capital, mass migration, and the amplification and proliferation of images are now fully articulated to modern schooling and the social and cultural environments in which both school youth and educators now operate. These developments are forcing us to reconsider the boundaries of curriculum practice beyond mainstream emphasis on subject matter specialization, if as educators we are to more fully engage with the complex range of experiences, images, and practices that now compel modern school youth and affect their articulation of needs, interests and desires. What, then, are the boundaries of the curriculum in the transforming school context and modern world in which we live? This course focuses on the way globalization has precipitated the rearticulation and the reconfiguration of key terms that have served to make modern life and modern educational institutional processes and experiences intelligible to students, educational practitioners and researchers alike. These key terms that will be centrally addressed in the course are a) nation/state, b) culture, c) identity, d) economy, e) the organization of school knowledge.
Syllabus (.doc)
(EPS 530 XM) Global Issues in Learning
Teaching Assistant
with Dr. Cynthia Carter-Ching
Global Issues in Learning examines the prevailing models of learning in Educational Psychology and discusses how these models account for diversity, culture, and geography/nationality. Reviewing both current and historical developments in learning research from sociocultural perspectives, this course discusses learning in multicultural and cultural minority communities within dominant Western contexts. In this class we will do the following: (1) Examine prevailing models of learning in Educational Psychology and discuss how these models account for diversity, culture, and geography/nationality (or not). (2) Review both current and historical developments in learning research that study learning from sociocultural perspectives. (3) Discuss differences between studying learning in multicultural and cultural minority communities within dominant Western contexts, versus stuyding learning in terms of cultural contact on a global scale. Investigate the institution of schooling itself, with its particular practices and ways of being, as a cultural socialization agent and its colonizing effects on "natural" ways of learning and interacting.
(EPS 415 XM) Ethics & Policy in Information Technology
Instructor
with Dr. Nicholas Burbules
Ethics & Policy in Information Technology explores the social, ethical, and policy dimensions of new technology use in education including the Internet, and other multimedia technologies. In this course we will be reading and thinking about some of the emerging issues confronting the uses of new information and communication technologies in education. This is a time of great opportunities and challenges, and one of the greatest of these opportunities (and challenges) is to think in new ways about the possibilities of education.
Syllabus (.doc)
(EPS 530 Z) Globalization and Educational Policy
Instructor
with Dr. Fazal Rizvi
This course is based on the assumptions that it is no longer possible to interpret and analyze educational policies within their national contexts; and that the processes of globalization not only encourage governments into pursuing particular policies but also shape the ways policies are now developed and monitored. We will review some of the key debates surrounding the notion of globalization; explore how educational ideas circulate around the world; and examine how global institutions, such as transnational corporations, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs and the media now promote a particular 'neo-liberal' view of education as a way of responding to what they view as the demands of the global economy and a globally inter-connected world. Drawing upon a range of case studies, taken from around the world, we will discuss some of the consequences of this view of education on individuals, schools and communities; and consider how its negative effects are being resisted around the world.
Syllabus (.doc)
Globalization and the English Language
Instructor
Bohai University
Description: This course examines current and historical interpretations of globalization and the recent dominance of the English language.