Education (EDUC) 300

Overview

In EDUC 300, we do not limit our attention to formal adult education projects. Rather, we start from the premise that all societies, from primeval times to the present, are evolved learning systems. Learning precedes schooling to begin with, and it cannot be contained in its professionalized boxes. This axiom opens the way to see what might be occluded if we were simply searching for the “seeds of the present in the garden of the past.” Our net is cast wide, and our challenge is to invent new ways of understanding how adults learned before and during the age of formalized schooling.

This course moves the student inside the process whereby Canadians, high and low, learned in their everyday lives, in spaces and places they created to learn something new as well as in the formally authorized sites that gradually emerged in Canadian society (universities, technical institutes, and so on).

Outline

EDUC 300 is divided into the six units listed below.

• Unit 1: Reclaiming Our Past: Memory, Tradition, Kindling Hope
• Unit 2: First Encounters: New Worlds, Old Maps (1492-1760)
• Unit 3: Adult Learning in the Age of Improvement (1760-1880)
• Unit 4: Adult Education in the Age of the 'Great Transformation' (1880-1929)
• Unit 5: Adult Education and the Crisis of Democracy, 1929-1960
• Unit 6: Propelled into the Learning Age, 1960-2008

Evaluation

To receive credit for EDUC 300, you must complete and submit four assignments and receive a course composite grade of at least D (50 percent). There is no exam. The assignments are weighted as follows:

Course Materials

The course materials include a reading file. All other materials are available online.

Challenge Evaluation

To receive credit for EDUC 300 challenge registration, you must achieve a grade of at least D (50 percent) on the examination.

Undergraduate Challenge for Credit Course Registration Form

• Challenge for Credit Form