Required Courses

Classes are scheduled on Tuesday evenings from 5:00 - 8:00 p.m. (Mountain Time - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) with blended delivery (synchronous on Zoom, asynchronous, and self-directed).

Note: you must take a course in the term for which you apply. Course offerings are dependent upon sufficient enrollment.

Each course is structured with interdependent modules integrating somatic, relational, contemplative, nature, and creation-centred processes as well as PowerPoint presentations, video clips, forums, and Q/A sessions. Each module is structured with discussion, practice, reflection, and application, which invite diverse professional contexts and concerns (schools, hospitals, psychological services, adult learning centres, political organizations, and so on).

Assignments draw from select required texts and assigned module readings (provided). There are no exams.

These are graduate-level, credit courses, requiring between five and ten hours of coursework per week. This includes time spent on readings, assignments, presentations (group and individual), and writing papers.

Fall Term I

EDU 595 Understanding Multiple Trauma Perspectives ★3

Trauma can be personal, familial, cultural, ethnic, and collective (national, religious, geographic). Without a witness and a means to express and release the event, trauma often manifests as a symptom, disturbing multiple areas of functioning (education, health, vitality, relationships, vocation, even financial capacity). Traumatic experiences leave traces, whether large scale—on our pasts, societies, and cultures—or small—on our families, pets, students, patients, and communities, with dark effects imperceptibly passed down through generations. They leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy, vitality, and intimacy, even on our biology and immune systems. This course considers current theories of trauma as well as ways to explore healing trauma through engaging processes that extend beyond the intellectual, such as breathing, grounding, storying, moving, rhythm, image-making, reflecting, and writing—all of which can be integrated into diverse learning context.

Winter Term I

EDU 595 Mediating Trauma through Place-Conscious Learning and Relationships ★3

This course intends to further skills for effective trauma-sensitive practice by focusing on the relational activities of place-conscious learning. Just beyond the introductory eco-critical examination of literature highlighting decolonizing, Indigenist, analytical psychological, and psychogeographical approaches to placeful learning will be opportunities to build capacity through the practice and design of activities to deepen knowledge of:

  • the ethics of place
  • somatic experiencing
  • places of otherness
  • emotional topography
  • archetypal terrains

Additional time will be allotted for collaborative learning to explore how place-bonding experiences, memories, and relationships can be applied as support for intercultural understanding and the recovery of health in schooling conditions.

Fall Term II

EDU 595 Embodying Images: Trauma and the Mythopoetic Imagination ★3

This course offers in-depth understanding of the relationship between body, words, and memories by focusing on the familial, cultural, gendered, ancestral, and archetypal underpinnings of traumatic responses. It explores and adapts strategies and tools from trauma specialized approaches to trauma relevant to learning spaces. Embodied reading and writing, found poetry, archetypal amplification, fragmentation journaling, and pastisching are gateways to the mythopoetic imagination—a form of metaphorical and symbolic knowing, sensitive to the unconscious movements of the bodymind. The practical objectives of the course are how to use such knowledge for personal wellbeing and to enhance learning with trauma-sensitive instruction and assessment.

Winter Term II

EDU 595 Embracing Expressive Processes as Trauma-Sensitive Practice ★3

This transdisciplinary course further develops the multiple trauma perspectives introduced and developed in the previous courses. It looks more deeply at memory, attachment theory, neural integration (with bilateral and sensorimotor practices), and contemplation. It draws upon place, land, and the arts to enter creative processes so to reconnect deeply with the self and relations. Developing practices (breathing, grounding, visualizing, amplifying, and imagining) in this way helps us move through trauma, loss, grief, and life transitions.