Board Undergraduate Certificate in Resilience, Ethics and Adaptation

This is a survey course in psychology, exploring psychology's orientation and subfields, its guiding principles and research strategies. Through learning about the scope of psychology's subfields and the interrelationships among them, students are encouraged to appreciate the diversity and richness of human behaviour. Major topics in the following areas are covered: biology underlying behaviour, consciousness, sensation, and perception, learning and memory, language and cognition, personality, psychological disorders and therapy, motivation, emotion and stress. Students acquire knowledge about the key concepts that constitute the core of the introductory psychology curriculum.

Emotions influence many aspects of our lives — our motivation, thinking, behaviour, social relationships, and physical and mental health. This introductory course in the psychology of emotion describes the nature of emotion according to major psychological perspectives in order to increase understanding of emotional experiences and appreciation for the complexity of emotions. In examining some important theories and research studies, the emphasis will be on their relevance to everyday experiences.

Students explore culturally diverse frameworks for fostering empowerment, compassion, connection and wellbeing in the face of ongoing social discord and injustice. These include spiritual wisdom, conflict transformation practices, academic research and anti-oppressive pedagogies. Through introspection, multisensory discovery assignments and face-to-face play/experimentation, students forge their own paths towards greater wellbeing.

With the proliferation of contemporary memoirs and digital Life Writing platforms, people are expressing personal narratives in new ways. In this fully online course, students examine various forms of traditional and contemporary Life Writing.

Students explore many philosophical problems arising from modern technology, including: the dangers of trolling and groupthink; disagreement and toleration; political extremism and YouTube profiteering; the nature of and our ethical obligations to video game characters; posthumanism and artificial intelligence, and, whether you should share your Netflix password.

Students examine classical and contemporary philosophical views on living a philosophical life in the face of life’s dilemmas. They examine their own lives to determine what contributes to a philosophically good life for them. Main foci include philosophical perspectives on friendship, pleasure, happiness, morality, personal identity, freedom and responsibility.

Students examine the complex and dynamic relationship between leadership, facilitation and creativity. Through the study of cross-disciplinary theory, they assess conceptions of leadership within a global context and explore processes, methodologies, structures, styles and skills associated with creative leadership and problem solving.

Students examine the grassroots production and reproduction of collective memories from an interdisciplinary, Cultural Studies perspective, exploring the cultural politics of memory in a range of ways that are hands-on and critically engaged. Through examining contemporary case studies, students synthesize key concepts in memory studies such as narrative, power, erasure, invention, identity, representation, nostalgia and counter-memory with personal experiences and current events.

Through the synthesis of a range of theoretical perspectives at the intersection of the disciplines of Linguistics and Cultural Studies, students draw connections between notions of voice: its physical and mechanical nature, its cultural conceptualizations and its social impact.