Lecture: 2 hours per week / semester
Seminar: 2 hours per week / semester
Classroom instruction will include both lectures and seminar discussions. Lectures will provide instruction on weekly topics with opportunities for student inquiry and discussion. Seminars will encourage active class participation in the analysis of assigned primary and secondary readings. Classroom instruction may also include facilitation of student-led projects, student presentations on specific readings and/or topics, and other types of student-led activities. Classroom instruction may also include tutorials and workshops on transferrable skills, including research methods, academic citation practice, and presentation skills.
Major themes include: scholarly approaches to the study of education; the rise and transformation of educational institutions; the relationship between schools, professions, and society; the professionalization of teaching; educational policy, curriculum and pedagogy; the politics of education; streaming, vocationalism, testing, and inclusivity; and the ways in which gender, social class, and ethnocultural identity have shaped the experiences of students and teachers.
A sample course outline may include the following topics.
Note: Content may vary according to the instructor’s selection of topics.
- Introduction
- The Transformation of Education from the Classical World to the Renaissance
- Literacy, the Printing Press and the Transformation of Learning
- Education, the Enlightenment, and the Nature of Childhood
- Common Schooling and Elite Education
- Education, Aculturation and Assimilation in an Industrial Era
- Progressive Education: Child-Centred Education and Scientific Management
- Separate and Unequal: Indigenous Children and Schooling
- Schools, Militarism, Nationalism, and Education for Democracy
- Becoming a Teacher
- School and Society in the Cold War Era
- Education for the Workplace, Education for the Professions
- Contested Terrain: Contemporary Debates
- Histories of Education in the Twenty-First Century
At the conclusion of the course, successful students will be able to demonstrate historical thinking skills, research skills, critical thinking skills and communication skills appropriate to the level of the course by:
1. Locating, examining, assessing, and evaluating a range of primary sources and secondary scholarly literature critically and analytically (reading history).
2. Constructing historical arguments, taking historical perspectives, and interpreting historical problems through different types of writing assignments of varying lengths (writing history).
3. Participating in active and informed historical debate independently and cooperatively through classroom discussion and presentation (discussing history).
4. Independently and cooperatively investigating the ways that history is created, preserved and disseminated through public memory and commemoration, oral history, community engagement, and other forms of popular visual and written expressions about the past (applying history)
An example of one evaluation scheme:
Seminar Presentation 10%
Historiographic Essay 10%
Reading Notes 15%
Primary Source Analyses 20%
Research Essay and Presentation of Research 30%
Textbooks and Course Readers may be chosen from the following list, to be updated periodically.
An instructor’s custom Course Reader may be required. Additional online resources may also be assigned. Additional reading lists and links to specific resources also may be provided online or in the instructor’s course outline.
Axelrod, Paul. The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Burke, Sara Z., and Patrice Milewski, eds. Schooling in Transition: Readings in Canadian History of Education. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Miller, J. R. Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Thomas, Gary. Education: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
One 1000-level History course; or permission of the instructor
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