Courses / Module

The purpose of this module is to help students become familiar with an array of traditions, issues, themes, and perspectives in educational thought that help develop a conceptual base for teaching and learning in multiple educational settings.

Asking fundamental questions about education supports students in exploring the different aims and conceptions of education and to understand how ideas, beliefs and values shape educational theory, purpose, and practice. It enables students to explore their own positions, to reflect on curriculum, and to build critically reflective practitioners who explore educational questions from multiple perspectives. It also enables a more expansive understanding of issues and questions central to educational theory and practice.
The module will approach education through a philosophical lens. The focus of the module will be on engaging in students in educational thinking. Students will engage with a range of texts addressing key questions in the philosophy of education and will be supporting in connecting these questions with their experience as students and as educators.

Students will be encouraged to understand key issues from multiple perspectives and to interrogate the fundamental assumptions and presuppositions shaping educational theory and practice, exploring areas such as ethics and existence in education, values and aims in education, knowledge and curriculum, identity and relationality. The module will also open up imaginative way of re-engaging with these questions and support students in connecting theory to practice.

Given the objectives outlined above, the module will explore historical and contemporary responses to a variety of questions that have shaped the field and discourse of Philosophy of Education, including but not limited to:
What is an educated person?
What is knowledge?
What is the relationship between education and society?
What is the relationship between educational philosophy and educational practice?
How to educate and what is the role of the educator/s?
Where to educate (place, context, time, space)?
What should be the content of an education (curriculum)?
What are the connections between education, power, knowledge, and justice?
What kinds of experiences are educational experiences?
How does philosophy of education approach existential themes in education?
What perspective does philosophy of education offer when engaging with questions of ethics and education?
Who participates in the conversations about education, who writes about education, who teaches, whose voices are not in the conversation? Who should?