English

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.

This course analyzes how cyber issues are changing the world of politics and security. It covers particular trends in the field, such as attempts to integrate cyber attacks into traditional militaries, the role of the internet in information warfare and propaganda, and the emergence of internet governance as a new topic for international negotiation and perhaps even arms control. Topics include cyber and society, cyber and war, nonstate actors, and cyber governance. 

This course examines the main challenges that cognitive science faces today, focusing on the capacity to learn sensorimotor categories, to name and describe them verbally, and to transmit them to others, concluding with cognition distributed on the Web.

This course introduces students to a range of high-profile controversies by viewing them through the prism of the law. It enables the students to transcend the culture wars by critically engaging with the moral, political, and legal issues at stake and by becoming skilled participants in the respective debates. Students engage with some of the most important and controversial political issues of our time, and these issues will be approached by studying and comparing landmark judgments from the world’s most influential and powerful courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the U.K. Supreme Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court. 

This course will extend each student's knowledge and understanding of the educational possibilities of top-roped rock climbing in New Zealand. Through the course students will critically analyze the literature relevant to top-roped rock climbing and use this analysis to plan, implement and evaluate a rock climbing experience which incorporates contemporary approaches to outdoor education and is supported by the New Zealand Curriculum. The technical and legal aspects of safety and risk are explored and students develop skills in establishing educational and safe rock climbing experiences. Through field trips to climbing areas in the Port Hills/ Nga Kohatu Whakarekareka o Tamatea Pokai Whenua, students learn about the importance of place to climbers and the significance to Tangata Whenua.

This course explores how language appears and is employed in popular cultural productions, including songs, films, advertisements, and more. It considers the changing nature of language and how different media use language to tell stories, express ideas, and have effects on their readers, viewers, or listeners. The course analyzes specific works for its language choices and its circulation; its differences in oral and written contexts; and the constellation of associations that can be created across time, space, and media. 
 

This course aims to do the following: 

1) Develop skills and knowledge one has acquired in foundational Media, Communication and Culture courses.
2) Introduce a range of interesting popular cultural productions and increase one’s cultural literacy in the process.
3) Recognize that scholarly inquiry and appreciation does not exclude popular culture and that they are worthy of discussion, analysis, and aesthetic appreciation.

The course introduces the foundational and holistic knowledge and understanding of urbanism―the study of relationships between people in urban areas with the built environment. It provides a comprehensive inquiry of urban history, key theories, topics, design principles and practices related to urban design, urban planning and landscape design. The emphasis is on developing critical and analytical skills of reading, documenting, analyzing and synthesizing complex information regarding contemporary urban issues and conditions. 

This course offers a productive and student-centered entry point to studying, understanding, and appreciating the American cultural mosaic through the (hi)stories that Americans have been telling themselves in an ongoing process of defining who they are—and, who they are not—vis-à-vis other cultural communities. It is through these narrative (hi)stories that first contact is often made not only with American identities, values, and mores, but also historical events and/or eras, ideological fault lines, and social (in)equalities. The course advances students’ understanding of specific American eras, historical contexts, locales, themes, issues, and fault lines through popular cultural "texts," ranging from literary texts and music to film, television, and video games.

This course explores key concepts and recent advances in environmental economics with the view to addressing environmental policy questions. It is concerned with studying the interaction between human activity and the natural environment. Students capture work both on how economic growth can be made cleaner but also on how to mitigate the damages from this growth. The course illustrates how frontier theory and empirics from economics can be brought to bear on the key climate, environmental and energy challenges that face mankind.