Programs

Social Studies prides itself in offering a rich environment with unparalleled opportunities for graduate students desiring a wide range of backgrounds and interests including visual culture, anti-oppressive education, gender studies, historical consciousness, moral education, and the history and politics of curriculum. In addition to the required coursework, a vibrant graduate student community is fostered through speaker series, research centres, seminars, and study groups. Many social studies faculty and students are actively involved in the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness and the History Education Network (a seven-year project, sponsored by a $2.1 million SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Clusters Grant awarded in March of 2008).

Our mission is to inspire, engage and provoke educators to understand, inquire into, and model curricular and pedagogical possibilities of deep involvement with the visual arts in culture and society. Within a large research orientated university situated on traditional Musqueam land, the Art Education Program strives to: Stimulate and conduct research within a vibrant and collaborative research community that focuses on methodologies and content relevant to the visual arts in culture and society. Provide for, model, and develop socially responsible and ecologically aware exemplary teaching practices in and across contexts with a focus on the visual arts in culture and society. Provide leadership, and engage with local, national, and international arts and culture organizations and professionals. The research interests of faculty in Art Education are diverse. They encourage a wide spectrum of student inquiry: art based research, a/r/tography, art curriculum, early childhood, teacher education, First Nations art and education, histories of art education, multiculturalism, museum and gallery education, perception and cognition, studio practices, technology and visual culture, theory/practice relationships, and gender studies. For more information on research in art education, please see the a/r/tography site. The University of British Columbia Art Education Program ranks in the top eight in North America and is one of two PhD programs in Canada (Concordia is our counterpart).

This is a collaborative program involving two departments: the Department of Educational Studies and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. The Program was created in response to increasing interest in the study of a combination of curricular leadership on the one hand, and organizational leadership in schools on the other. The applicants for this collaborative program will be teachers in K–12 education who wish to increase their level of understanding and skill in both areas. Upon completion of the program, the students will assume positions of formal or informal leadership in schools, making important contributions to the education of children.

This master’s program is offered to physical educators who are ready to move up a gear by refining and expanding their ideas of teaching, learning and knowing. Using Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) as a catalyst for thinking about ontological and epistemological issues in physical education, teachers will start to explore constructivist, student-centered and holistic approaches as possibilities for their own practice. They will also examine their position on continuums of belief from inclusion to elitism, transaction to transmission, integration to dualism, tactical understanding to skill acquisition, discovery to representation, concepts to techniques and finally between demonstration and creation of understanding rather than mastery. It has long been argued that research by teachers about their own classroom and school practices functions as a powerful mechanism for professional change, as it generates new ways of thinking about practice. The first cohort (2009-2011) focused on TGfU research and published an edited book titled ‘Reconceptualizing PE through TGfU’ (2012) made up of condensed versions of their final graduating projects. This has started a change that should generate health and sustainable programs of teacher research, distributed across schools, teacher groups, school-university partnerships and regional and national forums. This master’s program focusing on physical education is advertising the third cohort to begin in June 2014. Our internationally known program instructors have built upon the practical ideas, shared research, and reflections that presenters brought to the 2008 International TGfU Conference at UBC. Courses and texts will examine current teaching perspectives, constructs of ability, and curriculums, move into analyzing TGfU from pedagogical and learning theory perspectives, and finally, consider, define, and implement developmentally appropriate TGfU activities.