Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies
Education Futures
The Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies - Education Futures is designed for aspiring and practicing school leaders. It provides practical approaches to leading in the present by better anticipating the future.
For example, courses offered in this Certificate have explored:
- The challenges facing the professions and the role school leaders can play in strengthening professional practice;
- The role emerging technologies (including the disruptions and promises of AI) can have in reshaping teaching, learning and assessment;
- How curriculum change and development can be used to better prepare students and teachers for the emerging future;
- What assessment may look like 3-5 years from now, exploring the emergence of generative AI, competency assessment, peer assessment and a call for more authentic assessment.
Grounded in academic reading and practice informed by the interdisciplinary tools of anticipatory studies, the work students do is intended to support their current and future practice. Students develop project and use-case proposals, which they can implement in their school or professional learning community.
School leadership development is a key component to achieving high performance through a focus on equity. The attributes of school leadership needed to advance equity and support the great schools for all students are the very same qualities that one would expect of leaders across multiple sectors from the community to the national and international level.
These are some of the challenges all school leaders share:
- How to ensure equity for all learners, no matter what their home conditions, physical or mental challenges, or levels of community support.
- How to provide learning pathways that meet and assess the needs of different learners while also ensuring that all learning and assessment taking place in the school is of a high quality.
- How to enable schools to design learning pathways for all students so that their ambitions, hopes and opportunities are realized.
- How to integrate regenerative thinking into our strategies for the future of teaching, learning, assessment and professional development.
- How to leverage technology to support engaged and inclusive learning for all.
- How to leverage the assets of a community to enable all to learn in a school.
Given the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world in which schools and school leaders operate, the courses in this program offer practical tools and approaches to understand what is happening and why. Using these tools, also informs what school leaders can do now to use their anticipation of the future to act.
Notes:
- This program can ladder into a Master's degree. Click here for more information.
- This program does not qualify students for Alberta Teacher Certification.
Program Goals
Through the GCES Education Futures, students will:
- Explore and better understand the contested visions of the future of education and how these shape schools, the profession and educational policy-making.
- Apply the interdisciplinary tools of anticipatory studies in project design and innovative responses relevant to work as a school leader or teacher and research interests.
- Collaborate with international networks of research-practitioners who are leading change in areas such as decolonization, sustainability and the digitization of learning and assessment.
- Interpret and critically assess trends, forecasts and emerging policy directions which impact teaching and learning in schools.
- Use this learning to develop practical projects and actions that can help improve the experience of teaching, learning and assessment for teachers, students and stakeholders.