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.

Educators need to understand the wider forces influencing educational practice, theory and policy and to be able to reflect self-critically on the interests underlying claims made about schools, teachers and particular groups of students since such claims also impact greatly how resources and opportunities are distributed among and between schools and social groups and whether and how teaching/education is valued and rewarded in the larger society. The course aims to develop in prospective educators the conceptual background and language to evaluate the on-going debate about the purposes, means, and ends of education in order to communicate effectively and persuasively in the profession each of you is about to enter. This required course is taught from a variety disciplinary and ideological perspectives. We shall take up the question of developing pedagogies that challenge different forms of social inequality and oppression including classism, sexism, ageism, racism, and heterosexism.

The course will draw on your experiences as an emerging professional educator as well as a variety of frameworks, feminist, antiracist/multiculturalist, and anti-heterosexist in an effort to meet the challenge teachers face of learning to teach respectfully in a diverse society. In our society, the term "diversity" is a slogan for power differentials and gaps in which some "differences" are rendered stigmas of inequality, subordination and presumed inferiority, while others bear the badges of privilege, power, and presumed superiority. The assumption of this course is that the work of a teacher requires a deep critical understanding of one's self as well as one's interconnections with others, differential power, and institutions. In order to understand the wider context of schooling, we shall discuss the wider popular cultural texts and contexts of education as they are experienced by different social and cultural groups in formal and non-formal educational contexts, chiefly those of popular culture. We shall examine how and whether youth construct their identities in relation to the representations of different social groups in the media (MTV, advertising, television, music, and radio), adolescent magazines, romance novels, classroom textbooks, and youth subcultural practices. How do the significant post-War changes in the economy and cultural expectations affect the transition youth make to adulthood? Is the ideology of "adolescence" useful to understanding that transition? We shall ask what is at stake in the rhetorical labelling of students as being "at risk" for dropping out, teen pregnancy, etc. Finally, we shall ask how the current rhetoric of crisis and reform in education shapes the vision of whose knowledge counts in the curricula and educational practice, as well as what constitutes meaningful democratic participation by all who are the subjects of education.

The class will be organized around mini-lectures, group work, role-plays, and other creative ways using our emotions to help us with our intellectual work in thinking through the difficult challenges facing schools, teachers, students, and communities today. We shall also spend substantial time spent in small and large group discussion of the readings, videos, and with guest speakers on select topics. Sources of information for this course include: the course reading package (available through the instructor (price TBA), additional readings and handouts provided by the instructor (at student expense for photocopying for approximately $20.00 payable to UBC ASAP and collected by the Instructor), conversations and interviews with families, teachers, and members of the larger community who participate in non-formal or formal education.

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