Course Description
Epistemologies, underlying theories, and research approaches to language, culture and teaching and learning are examined. The seminar considers questions of knowledge, sociotechnical relations, and educational praxis in relation to dynamics of language, culture, teaching, and learning. This is a core course requirement for all doctoral students.
Aims and Purposes
The course will orient students to the world of academia in the context of educational scholarship and research in the Faculty of Education, York University. As new arrivals to the world of the university, it can be difficult to navigate the culture of graduate studies. This course will support students to engage foundational texts, ask questions, develop research problems, and find meaning in their doctoral journey as they embark on this significant commitment to thought, knowledge production, and learning.
The course uses foundational readings and cultural production to support students in developing a scholarly focus and program, along with set of methods with which to orient themselves to educational research and scholarship. Beginning with the necessary task of writing grants and ending with the chance to share one’s ideas with peers in book review presentations (Fall, 2022), we aim to take students into the work of academia. Through your participation in a weekly seminar and other experiences we will build a community of scholars and critical scholarship.
The fields of study we take up in the course touch on foundational pillars from the vantage of a range of methodologies and interpretive practices. We will link each one of these lenses to the study of education, with the view to help you situate yourself within the field, to recognize where you are positioned within a larger and often contradictory site of research, but also to supporting ourselves, and each other.
This seminar begins with three assumptions: (a) language/s, culture/s, and technology are interwoven in teaching and learning practices; (b) what, how and why we teach and/or learn is shaped by changing historical, sociotechnical, discursive, material/natural environments, and institutional forms (at the same time, institutions tend to conserve or ‘reproduce’ existing practices and social relations) and (c) over the past decades we have experienced paradigmatic shifts within educational theory — critical theory/post-structuralism, New Literacies studies, informal and community-based learning, intersectional/feminist perspectives, Indigenous epistemologies, decolonization and postcolonial studies, critical race theory, critical disability studies, technology (STS) studies. These interdisciplinary frameworks provide different perspectives, practices, and contexts to re/consider the dynamics of language, culture, teaching and learning.
We Do Theory: In this seminar, we mobilize diverse texts and theories to explore educational foundations, and to consider diverse epistemologies and practices. We will interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions, and critically speculate on educational, social, and ecological futures. Your critical, intellectual, and creative engagement with the texts/theories will drive this course and our learning community.
INSTRUCTOR
Kurt Thumlert, PhD Institute for Research on Digital Learning (IRDL) Kaneff, 709 kthumlert [at] edu.yorku.ca