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Academic Plan: I will be taking 3 courses per term. My academic plan for the two terms includes the following 6 courses.

First Term:

1. Communication Studies (CMNS) 420: Topics in Communication: Children and Media (3 Credits)

Overview: Children and Media focuses on how children up to the age of thirteen encounter and employ the media and genres of storytelling: from oral narrative and print, to the audio and visual mediation of narrative in picture books, radio and other audio forms, and screen technologies such as television, film, and video games. The course applies contemporary theory and methodology to examine narrative and considers the competencies, or ¿¿literacies,¿ that children develop in order to understand narrative and produce their own.

Course Objectives:
1. Help students apply the concepts of narrative theory to the study of how children receive and use narrative across a variety of media.
2. Define and explain various types of literacy that children have developed as they experience narratives in various formats, including oral, written, aural, visual, and multimedia.
3. Explain how children¿¿s competencies with narrative and various media are connected to the changing social constructions of childhood and the changing educational outcomes intended for children.
4. Help students understand how children make sense of the world through the social and intellectual tools at their disposal.
5. Explain salient characteristics of oral, aural, print, visual, material, and digital culture as they affect children¿¿s engagement with stories and storytelling.
Assist students in analyzing and assessing the likely effectiveness of media products and educational resources for children through an examination of how they use narrative.

2. Communication Studies (CMNS) 455: Media Ethics (3 credits)

Overview: This is a course about the ethics of journalism. It provides students with an introduction to the different philosophical views of ethics; a critical examination of the rights, responsibilities, limitations, and abuses of media in democracies such as Canada and the United States; and an analysis of emerging pressures to redefine journalism as a reliable, responsible process of accurate reportage and critical commentary on our society.

Course Objectives: Students completing the course will better understand the use and abuse of sources, research materials, quotes, the positioning and concealment of information, plagiarism, ethics as it relates to the coverage of criminal and terrorist acts, and the role of the news media in exposing or validating public prejudices.
After completing this course, students should be able to:
1. Analyze and discuss contemporary journalism in a variety of media.
2. Understand and evaluate scholarly and critical works about ethics in media production practices.
3. Formulate your own critical analyses of the role of ethics in news coverage.
4. Understand and discuss media codes of ethics and their application in Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
5. Explain the balance of rights and responsibilities involved in media practices by media organizations and journalists.
6. Understand and discuss the social, political, and ethical implications of media.
7. Discuss the various roles of media in public life.
8. Explain the ethics involved in selection of sources and research material by news media.
Outline

3. Cultural Studies (CLST) 201: Cultural Studies and Everyday Life (3 credits)

Overview: Cultural Studies 201: Cultural Studies and Everyday Life is a junior-level, three-credit course that takes as its organizing metaphor, Raymond Williams¿¿s remark that ¿¿culture is ordinary.¿ This course will provide an introduction to cultural studies by exploring, reflecting on, and evaluating how, on a daily basis, we are immersed in culture.

Course Objectives:
o To demystify the idea of ¿¿culture¿ by showing the ways in which it permeates our everyday lives.
o To question the distinction between things deemed to be cultural and things assumed to be natural.
o To explore the ways in which everyday culture can be a site of contestation.

Second Term:

4. Communication Studies (CMNS) 202: Media and Power in Canadian Society (3 credits)

Overview: Canada¿¿s mass media have played a particularly significant role in the country¿¿s development as a distinct nation. The course is structured around issues of media power in Canadian life. It examines aspects of the Canadian experience in the context of current perspectives on national and international media developments.

5. Education (EDUC) 316: Program Planning and Methods in Adult Learning (3 credits)

Overview: This course will introduce students to the theory, concepts and practices of program planning, evaluation, and instructional methods in adult education/learning contexts. Program planning is an important practical skill for adult educators whether they are responsible for developing, delivering, administering or evaluating educational programs of any type or duration but needs to be understood within a societal and theoretical context.

6. Cultural Studies (CLST) 325: Understanding Cultural Studies (3 credits)

Overview: In CLST 325: Understanding Cultural Studies you will learn about the history and origins of cultural studies, analyse and discuss some of the key theoretical debates initiated in and around what constitutes cultural studies, and review examples of the range of approaches that continue to shape and reshape (the ever-expanding boundaries of) the field.