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Browsing Education by Author "Alsop, Steven John"
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Item Open Access Climate Change Education: An Exploration of Curriculum Enactments in Canadian Post-Secondary Educational Institutions(2018-03-01) Martinez, Ana Maria; Alsop, Steven JohnClimate change is indisputably one of the most pressing issues of our time. This dissertation is a study of curricula in Canadian Post-Secondary Institutions (PSIs). I conducted a survey of 225 PSIs for climate change courses during the calendar year of 2014-2015 and then focus on four PSIs with climate change programs to explore factors influencing processes of formation and implementation of climate change curricula. This research draws upon elements from literature in climate change policy, cultural studies, and curriculum studies to understand the formation of climate change programs. The study seeks to deepen understanding of institutional change in what I believe is unprecedented times. The first part of this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of course syllabi. Courses were coded according to their focus into Tiers-of-Concentration and Streams according to their area/discipline of concentration. The second part of this dissertation includes a series of in-depth interviews with climate change program creators, administrators, directors, faculty and faculty committee members in particular PSIs. My selection of four PSIs is based on their programs these institutions offer undergraduate and graduate climate change programs as well as their institutional reputations, inclinations and characters. Interviews with curricula innovators reveal some features shaping climate change curricula formation. I focus on four features: (1) The emergence of climate champions in bureaucratic procedures; (2) The culture of economics; (3) Disciplinary allegiances; and (4) Climate leanings. My study seeks to better understand climate change curricula innovations and cultures with a commitment to the importance of PSIs as sources of climate change expertise and leadership within democratic societies.Item Open Access Eco-Somatic Educational Journey: Physical, Emotional and Planetary Lives of My Body(2024-03-16) Anilkumar, Prerna; Alsop, Steven JohnThis study offers itself as an educational journey oriented by ecosomatics and earth democracy. It deepens these ways of knowing by locating them in ways of sensing, feeling, relating, being and living in a brown woman’s somatic body, experiencing her physical, emotional, and earthly entanglements, participating in the alive-ness of her earth family. Through the educational journey, this study carves possibilities and openings of a somatically textured environmental education by revolving around the question of what it means to do this work with the body in relationship with the planet, in this time and place. Bodywork in this study takes the form of exploring the researcher’s three bodily processes of digesting, breathing and menstrual bleeding framed through the physical, emotional, and planetary lives of the gut, breath, and menstrual blood. These explorations shed light on the various physiological and ancestral somatic entanglements, the enmeshed medicines of various emotions and the intertwined planetary kin relationships held within the gut, breath and menstrual blood. This study finds that all of these corporeal entanglements make and shape the living ways of digestion, breathing and bleeding which throb, simmer, swirl and flow in a somatic web of relationships.Item Open Access Planetary Praxes and Sustainable Universities(2015-08-28) Bentley, Christopher Michael; Alsop, Steven JohnWhat is sustainability in Higher Education (HE)? How should it be represented? Who gets to decide? This thesis offers a response to a particular technocratic and teleological way of thinking about sustainability in Higher Education, which has a series of high profile advocates in theory and policy. In contrast, my study explores two particular sustainability projects (Energy Management Project and Local Food) at a large Canadian suburban university campus. Using a grounded theory/situational analysis approach, I represent these two projects as dynamically bound praxes (shaped by a series of actors and imaginaries). Results: given the historical exigency and contention surrounding sustainability since the mid-90s, a multiplicity of actors in the Keele campus, both semiotic and material, have moved into positions to transform its demarcated boundaries therein. As I have begun to map these movements, I suggest this work be continued by future researchers in a position to do so.