University of Canterbury

This course examines clinical psychology (also known as abnormal psychology). The main emphasis is on current views, perspectives, and research in this field. Clinical psychology draws upon most basic areas of psychological knowledge (e.g., social, developmental, physiological, cognitive, learning theory).

This course examines mineralogy, igneous and metamorphic petrology, and related ore deposits, and their use in interpretation of geological environments. It covers geologic processes sensitive to pressure, temperature and volatile availability, including magma crystallization and gold mineralization.

This course examines assumptions about witchcraft, magic and the dead, as well as introducing students to key anthropological concerns such as ritual, symbolism and religion.

Students are introduced to the entrepreneurial worldview that opportunities for innovation can be found across geographic, socioeconomic, industry, and cultural boundaries. Students must demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset through which they constantly seek to recognize innovation opportunities, across multiple contexts. Students are required to identify innovation opportunities that are local, national, and international in scope.

This course examines the way systems thinking is used in sustainability studies, including in local, regional and international contexts. Students are introduced to some of the strengths, limitations and major challenges inherent in this approach to helping us address complex interdisciplinary problems.

This course examines the interaction between forests and people, linking forest types and locations to their products and services. It covers sustainable forest management, the role of forestry tackling climate change, and Treaty of Waitangi obligations.

This course examines the social and ecological impacts of human activity in the context of a global fossil fuel civilization. Investigating problems of climate change, declining biodiversity, and environmental degradation, it provides an anthropologically
informed perspective on crucial issues at the intersection of ecology, sustainable development, and social activism.

This course examines conflictual sustainability problems. It considers how to listen across significant differences of life experience and professional training and how to build network supports, identify stakeholders, develop resources and policies for implementation and evaluation to create or co-create a sustainability action plans for an applied field problem. 

This course examines Maori and indigenous peoples’ knowledge in such fields as astronomy, physics, conservation biology, aquaculture, resource management and health sciences. It provides unique perspectives in indigenous knowledge, western science and their overlap, as well as an essential background in cultural awareness and its relationship with today’s New Zealand scientific community.

Informed by experiential education approaches, students will complete a weekend backpacking trip with instructors as part of the overall course and use reflections from these experiences, in conjunction with coursework on human-nature relationships, to critically analyze and develop a personal land ethic. The field trip explores the concept of wilderness in land ethics through a direct experience of actual wilderness. The course has a focus on bi-culturally competent and globally connected understandings of the relationships between humans and nature.