Bachelor of Arts in Humanities with Leadership Foundations

at Wilfrid Laurier University - Brantford Campus Canada

More than ever, we need to be connected to the past to understand our present and future. The history program at our Brantford campus will introduce you to the people, events and ideas that have shaped our reality. More than we realize, the current challenges facing humanity – and how we approach these challenges – are grounded in historical events.

History students develop exceptional writing, research, and critical thinking skills, as well as the ability to understand events and issues in their proper historical and cultural contexts.

HISTORY AT LAURIER BRANTFORD
Laurier’s History program is designed with multiple opportunities for students to enhance their acquirement of historic knowledge and skills through a rigorous curriculum which includes traditional classroom learning through lectures and seminar discussions and hands-on training to be a historian.

• Go behind the scenes of museums and historic sites in Brantford, Brant County, Six Nations of the Grand River, Hamilton, and Toronto to learn how historic artefacts and documents are collected, preserved, and displayed.
• Get certified to collect oral history interviews and tell the stories of your ancestors and local community members.
• Discover and analyze historic records and objects in archives, libraries, and private collections.
• Communicate the results of your research and learning in essays, podcasts, local and digital exhibits, theatre and film, blogs, conference presentations, and reports.

The Game Design and Development program will help you learn to communicate through playful experiences such as analog and digital games. Through play, today’s designers can explore social, cultural, and environmental issues while innovating on and challenging the conventions and assumptions embedded in existing games. You will create gameplay that pushes the medium forward, exploring, expanding, and innovating how games engage players, share experiences, and transform lives.

At Laurier in Brantford, you'll get the Laurier English degree, well known for its quality and comprehensiveness, but you'll take it in a more rigorous, more tightly guided, smaller-campus environment.

English at Laurier in Brantford is the only English program in Ontario that is built to offer the educational experience that many Canadian students travel to the Maritimes to get at prestigious small universities such as Mount Allison or Acadia, and that many American students pay more than CDN$70,000 a year to get at elite undergraduate liberal arts universities such as Williams or Swarthmore. English at Laurier in Brantford offers an intensive, small-class, limited-cohort educational experience without forcing you to leave the province, at a fraction of the price that you'd pay in the United States.

ABOUT LAURIER BRANTFORD'S ENGLISH PROGRAM
English offers an overview of the history and forms of literature written in the English-speaking world. An education in English will sharpen both your communication skills and analytical abilities while providing you with a better understanding of how your culture made sense of the world historically and how we do now in the contemporary world.

You will learn how to critically engage with content to explore hidden meanings and discover how humanity uses language for artistry, information-sharing, providing comfort, for inciting inspiration and much more. By taking the same approach to your own communities, how you find meaning will be transformed and how you communicate these meanings will be strengthened.

Our program provides the flexibility to seize opportunities in a wide range of professional fields such as editing, professional writing, public relations and social and digital media. English is an ideal program to help you thrive in changing times and only at Laurier's Brantford campus can you enhance your degree with a minor in Professional Writing.

Our combination Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Policing program is unlike any other in Canada. Combining a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Policing (offered online) with another BA program in Waterloo or Brantford – such as Psychology, Criminology, Health Studies or Religion and Culture – enhances the breadth and depth of your knowledge by expanding perspectives and experiences.

The courses are designed to provide you with the skills to critically evaluate and apply different perspectives of our rapidly changing modern communities to police work experiences.

Extensive consultations with law enforcement agencies across Canada helped to shape the topics that are covered in the program including leadership, communication, diversity, ethics and building resilience. An advisory board ensures the course material stays relevant and current.

ACQUIRE KEY SKILLS
Through this program you will gain the following skills:

• Analysis and interpretation in order to productively contribute to law enforcement policy development.
• Application of criminological and psychological theories and perspectives to interpret and critique law enforcement issues.
• Refined interpersonal communication to enhance leadership skills.
• Sharpened critical thinking abilities to analyze and understand multiple perspectives and issues encountered in the field to better service individuals and the communities.
• Crafting and delivery of arguments using logic and sound reasoning.

The media environment is rapidly changing and evolving. The skills associated with journalism continue to be highly valuable, but not just for traditional media outlets anymore. Increasingly all industries, corporations and organizations rely on digital media for their communications and marketing needs. Content creators push their content to where their digital audiences are, such as Instagram, Snapchat and other social media platforms. But with an overload of content, how we do we strategically use these new technologies to share news and content of all kinds with audiences?

Our Bachelor of Arts and Science (BASc) in Public Health (formerly Health Studies) program is concerned with understanding how physical and social factors influence health status, with the aim of identifying and promoting interventions that will reduce disease and injury, prolong life, and improve population health.

Why do courts make the decisions they do? Why do governments pass the laws they pass? Law and Society provides you with an understanding of how society shapes law and how law shapes society. Our program applies a critical approach to revealing the underlying relationship between law and society by using real problems and examples so you can better understand the impact of law on people’s lives. It will also refine your knowledge of the many social factors that affect law, such as race, gender, age, sexuality, gender and wealth.

Law and Society enables you to examine the relationship between law and such important social phenomena as crime, culture, gender, family, social movements, Indigenous rights, intellectual property, the environment, labour, and poverty

As a Criminology student, you’ll delve into the exciting world of crime, criminals, victims and the law. Criminology isn’t like an episode of CSI; while forensics are part of what you’ll study, your classes will also draw on sociology, psychology and law to examine what defines a crime, why people commit them and how society responds. Criminologists focus on:

• Theories explaining the causes of crime;
• The social impact and reaction to crime and deviance;
• Victimization;
• The criminal justice system and law enforcement responses; and
• Crime prevention.

At Laurier, you’ll get a well-rounded education that emphasizes critical thinking, theoretical explanations of behaviour, a foundation in qualitative and quantitative research methods, and communication and writing skills – which just about every employer you meet wants to see.

In this program, you'll earn an Honours Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree from Laurier and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom (UK) in six years. You are guaranteed an offer of admission to Sussex’s Law School if you maintain a minimum B average (73-76%) when at Laurier. 

In this innovative, competitive-entry program, you’ll have the opportunity to study alongside other high-achieving students. You’ll also have access to supports dedicated to your academic and professional success. Because the LSAT is not a requirement to study law in the UK, your focus during your first two years at Laurier can be on your studies.

Humanities with Leadership Foundations
Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Humanities with Leadership Foundations program allows you to combine a traditional arts education with foundational leadership courses to realize your leadership potential.

Our Social and Environmental Justice program is unique in Canada – we provide you with the knowledge, inspiration and career skills to directly contribute to the world we live in both locally and globally. Our curriculum examines topics such as poverty and policies to reduce income inequality, climate change and sustainable communities, and citizens’ roles in a democratic society. Our graduates are socially aware citizens and inspirational leaders in their communities who contribute to a more positive collective future for all.

Embracing Laurier's designation as an Ashoka Changemaker Campus, the program prepares you for a career in the field of social and environment justice through targeted courses such as Social and Environmental Justice in Practise and the Community Internship. In addition, the Social Innovation Specialization supports the development of the entrepreneurial skills needed to be successful in your own socially focused business venture or within an established organization.