Education

This course explores key global challenges, including the climate emergency, decolonialization, racism in education, displacement, and migration. The course gives students the means to understand and design proposals (or strategies) to address these challenges. This course takes an exploratory and multidisciplinary look at what is known about climate change and will also examine the inter-relationship between climate change and other key issues. The course provides students the opportunity to creatively explore the role of education in developing hopeful proposals for responding to these challenges and for imagining social, political, and economic alternatives that promote environmental, social, and epistemic justice.

This course introduces students to the field of inclusive early childhood education. The course discusses early child development, as well as the process of identifying specific developmental needs in early childhood and how individuals think about targeting educational interventions for these needs. The course reviews the history of inclusive special education as well as current ethical perspectives, approaches, trends, and challenges in the education of all infants, toddlers, and young children. Students read and discuss theoretical material, case examples, and empirical research, and consider their implications for inclusive educational practice.

This course examines teachers and teaching. It explores teaching traditions, their origins, stories of teaching in New Zealand; stories of teachers that generate change; and how teaching and teachers are understood in diverse contexts such as early childhood, schooling and our wider communities. It considers the following: How should we teach? What counts as knowledge? What contradictions do teachers encounter?

This course is an introduction to the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. There is a practical emphasis on classroom techniques in language teaching, teaching observation, lesson planning, and classroom management. The goals of this course are to develop: (a) a basic understanding of the fundamental properties of language teaching, (b) several techniques for teaching the language skills, (c) the basic skills of curriculum designing and lesson planning, and (d) techniques of evaluating language teaching materials

The Internship Workforce course provides students with an overview of working in the United Kingdom. The course looks at the changing organizational structures of work in Britain. It examines the social and economic changes that affect the workplace in the UK. Topics covered include: sociology of work, trade unions, 0ppression at work, generational changes at work, and the future of work. An internship while studying in London provides an opportunity to experience a “hands on” working situation and a different perspective on the workplace and working practises, while developing professional skills.
 

This course addresses aspects of pluralism and multiculturalism from a socio-psychological perspective. The course focuses on various kinds of minorities in contemporary Israel society including immigrants (“Olim”), Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Druze, and others. Students analyze the complexity of biculturalism, and its relationship with psychological and socio-cultural adaptation. Finally, students review the DOPA model as a conceptual and methodological tool for the mapping and measurement of perceptions and orientations toward cultural diversity in educational contexts.