Instructor: Leslie Roman, Associate Professor, Educational Studies

Email: Leslie.Roman@ubc.ca

the short description:

This course is designed to help prospective teachers examine their assumptions, educational beliefs and pedagogical practices in the context of the wider social forces and educational inequalities that impinge on schooling in British Columbia, Canada and elsewhere. The discourses about schooling, the nature of teachers' work and teachers, as well as particular groups of students, include many interested parties and voices, and not just those of educators, researchers, and academics. Claims about the purposes and outcomes of schooling are always interested and hardly consensual. Rather, they are debated quite heatedly and involve disagreements not only about the purposes and outcomes of schooling but also about whose knowledge and visions of social justice and equality should govern the curricula of schools. Such claims and conflicts over the aims and outcomes of schooling originate from a variety of individuals, groups, and organizations including governments, teacher organizations, parent groups, religious and cultural groups, student groups, school boards, and various social movements. This course will focus on claims made about the relationship among teachers, students, and schools with particular emphasis given to social divisions and oppressions by gender, class, "race"--particularly with respect to the experiences of First Nations people, and lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered students. Issues of multiculturalism/antiracism, heterosexism/homophobia, sexism, ageism, and classism will be central to our examination of the wider social context of education and to the challenges of curricular justice and policy-making.