AUSTRALIA

This course examines the history, politics and culture of Sydney. Students will explore the city through walking tours and from many vantage points, including its beaches, rivers, parks, subcultures and multicultural communities and will learn more about the past and present of Aboriginal Sydney, Western Sydney and Queer Sydney. Drawing on a vast range of historical and contemporary accounts, the course traces Sydney’s extraordinary urban transformation from a tiny penal outpost to a global city of international renown in only 200 years. 

This course provides first-hand laboratory experience of the structure and function of critical endocrine and neuroendocrine systems, including the reproductive system, and how environmental factors can affect an animal’s physiology. 

This course examines the economic techniques used by policymakers to address environmental issues. These techniques include: Pigovian taxes and subsidies; regulation with asymmetric information; marketable permits; pricing contributions for public goods; optimal damages; and the allocation of property-rights and market failures.

This course examines economy-wide issues in economic development. It covers topics such as social welfare, education, institutions, corruption, microfinance, foreign aid, the geography of economic development, and theories of economic growth and development. Special emphasis will be placed on drawing policy lessons from the latest research and country experience of growth and development.

This course examines natural history. It covers human history and past landscapes; Earth history; some soils; how plants work; material conserved in collections; the history of natural history collecting; herbaria, museums, arboretums, and national parks; indigenous knowledge; agricultural history; ocean systems; and dealing with natural history in a designed, built, and managed future.

This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop knowledge of and teaching skills related to music education approaches that have influenced current practice. Students will focus on a number of internationally recognized approaches to teaching music, including those developed by Orff and Kodaly; Comprehensive Musicianship, and the creativity movements of the 1960s and 1970s. More recent approaches reflecting multiculturalism, globalization, mediated learning, constructivism, Informal Learning and forms of enculturation and musical creativity evident in children's musical worlds will also be explored. An important focus of this course will include building confidence in performing on chord-based instruments and drums.