Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy

at York University - School of Continuing Studies Canada

Designed to inspire, develop and enhance creative and critical thinking, the curriculum in AMPD's Department of Dance fosters deeply embodied and intellectual learning. Canada's largest and most comprehensive dance program educates innovative, thoughtful and articulate dance professionals, prepared to be engaged leaders in diverse environments.

Program Structure
Dance students take a common first year and then branch into one of two streams according to their interests and goals. Upper-year students may audition to join the department's resident company, the York Dance Ensemble. They also have the opportunity to gain hands-on training in lighting design for dance, to embrace emerging media and integrate technology into their dance practices, and to extend their professional experience through field placements, collaborative research and guest teaching.

Streams
Choreography/Performance
This stream centres on studio work in contemporary/modern dance, with options in urban, contemporary/ballet and world dance forms. Students acquire specialized knowledge and skills in movement observation, production and performance, informed by an understanding of choreographic elements and principles, somatics and embodied storytelling. they learn to create and present original works in a variety of performance spaces incorporating professional production values and contemporay media technologies.

Dance Education
Students in this stream explore practical and theoretical aspects of teaching dance in a variety of communities and settings, including innovative approaches and experience working with children, youth, adults in all stages of life, marginalized individuals and people with disabilities. Graduates are prepared to enter the field as educators in recreational, community-based and private settings.

Featured Facilities

• Five spacious rehearsal studios
• Two choreography studios
• Black box dance theatre-studio
• A 600-seat thrust stage
• Strate Dance Studio Theatre
• Pilates conditioning equipment
• Extensive costume collection
• Audio and video recording facilities
• Extensive library collection of dance books and periodicals
• Dance-specific computer software and peripherals

York's Portuguese & Luso-Brazilian Studies program covers not only the Portuguese language but also the culture, history and literature of the entire Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world across all continents. Learn about and engage with a diversity of cultures – their art, literature, music, history and social and political landscapes through courses such as:

• Luso-Brazilian Cultures and Cinemas
• Cannibal Brazil: Cultural Encounters in Literature and Film
• Language in Context: Portuguese in the Greater Toronto Area
• Mapping Brazilian Identity Through Fiction: History, Race and Gender

The Portuguese language is the fourth most widely used language in the world, spoken daily by over 250 million people.

Its study will prepare you for work both nationally and internationally, offering you instant entry to Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, East Timor as well as numerous Lusophone communities around the world - Canada, USA, Germany, France, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, Venezuela, Luxemburg  - and the territories of Macau and Goa.

We are the only university in Canada that offers a course solely dedicated to the region of the Azores. The Culture and Literature of the Azores delves into the uniqueness of this North Atlantic archipelago, whose natives make up the majority of the Portuguese immigrants in Canada.
Our program offers many opportunities for you to move beyond academics, exploring experiential education opportunities, and engaging in cultural events that will enliven your learning.

The study of English literature explores literary history for its relation to current culture, re-thinks the dynamics of the book as a visual medium and examines the fundamental changes to knowledge and language created within our gendered, post-colonial world.

We offer a full range of English literature courses from the medieval period to the present, with particular strengths in contemporary poetry, popular literature, Canadian, American, African, South Asia and Caribbean literatures. The program invites you to explore some of the world's greatest literary works while developing critical thinking, reading and writing skills. You can choose from courses in:

• Poetry
• Drama
• Fiction
• Satire
• Folklore
• Literary criticism
• Critical theory
• Gender studies
• Stylistics and poetics
• Comics and cartoons
• Science fiction
• Children's literature
• Travel writing

The English Department is the first and best place for considered and disciplined responses to the discourse and images that are shaped by the constantly changing technologies of a word-based world, and it is through the study of English literature that the critical skills necessary for understanding the past and the present are acquired.

Our goal is to provide you with a useful knowledge of literary works, both as art forms and as documents of human behaviour. By studying English literature, you will gain a vision of humanity as expressed in verbal art that crosses boundaries of time and place. Thanks to our location in the heart of the Greater Toronto Area, you can take advantage of the city's wide range of literary events including the Harbourfront Reading Series and Word on the Street.

Advance your career and prepare for management roles in the field of business through experiential, real-world learning activities taught by leading business experts.

What is the Post-Graduate Certificate Business Administration?
What do most successful managers, whether they work for start-ups, established corporations, or non-profit organizations have in common? A fundamental understanding of business principles. Whether you’re looking to build on existing experience or gain entirely new professional skills, our Post-Graduate Certificate in Business Administration is the perfect opportunity to prepare you for what comes next in your career.

Our accelerated delivery and comprehensive curriculum will allow you to strengthen and validate your business skill set and earn a valuable credential in just eight months. Better still, you will have the flexibility to balance your personal or career responsibilities while still achieving your professional and educational objectives.

What you will learn
This program is taught by an instructional team with years of professional experience in the business field. This experience gives them the ability to bring the curriculum to life and relate it to the current industry. Through practical, real-world, industry-minded assignments and projects you will learn to make strategic marketing decisions, effectively manage projects, and increase productivity and how to apply these learnings to real-world situations. You will also study current economic, social, and environmental business trends.

You will develop the core occupation-specific skills to effectively perform in the world of business, while also strengthening your cross-functional skills so you can excel in any role and industry. Our curriculum is critically reviewed regularly, ensuring you ear learning the most relevant and up to date lessons.

Program Benefits
Developed in consultation with industry experts, this program encompasses key business knowledge and skill areas though real-world projects, with minimal traditional testing. In the final capstone course you will apply all of your knowledge and business skills from previous courses in an exciting, hands-on format using online simulation software.

Our unique student-cohort model also allow you to progress with the same peer group from start to end. This mean a stable learning schedule, a logical smooth flow from one course to the next and the opportunity to build support networks, study groups and lasting connections with your classmates and instructors.

Master a professional digital and content marketing skill set and gain the expertise and confidence to make data-driven marketing decisions that show results.

Why take our Digital and Content Marketing program?
No matter where in the world you work, there are companies trying to reach the right audience with their marketing message. Innovations in digital marketing and content marketing have made it possible to serve your content to just about any target audience you can dream of, with international reach and real results. In this program, you’ll learn to be the person behind the message and develop the expertise to lead marketing and business objectives .

What you will learn
This eight-course program starts from the basics, giving you a solid foundation in core marketing and business concepts before moving on to master advanced topics in digital and content marketing. In eight months of full-time study, you’ll earn a comprehensive education in core areas, including, web analytics, email marketing, content marketing strategy, editorial planning, copywriting and consumer research.

You’ll also develop technical competencies in user data and segmentation, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) communications and PPC (Pay per click) advertising.

Program Benefits
Created in collaboration with industry leaders, this accelerated certificate gives you the opportunity to work on assignments that are relevant to real-world job requirements, practice key cross-functional skills needed to excel as a digital marketing professional and graduate with a portfolio of project work. Through our student-cohort delivery model, you will advance through this program with the same peer group, allowing you to form connections with a community of marketing professionals.

As 21st century medicine and health care becomes increasingly sophisticated, the demand grows for highly skilled people with a biomedical science background.

Biomedical scientists study biological processes and diseases with the ultimate goal of developing effective treatments and cures. Biomedical research requires careful experimentation by many scientists, including biologists and chemists. Discovery of new medicines and therapies requires careful scientific experimentation, development, and evaluation.

York's Biomedical Science program provides a comprehensive curriculum taught by the leading researchers in the field, including Samuel Benchimol, Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Health Research. The Biomedical Science program focuses emerging areas of biomedicine including physiology, microbiology, immunology, endocrinology, molecular genetics, and development.

This four-year Honours program also allows you the option to do a minor in another related discipline such as Chemistry, Psychology, or Kinesiology & Health Science.

The Biomedical Science stream is designed to help you:

• understand and explain the basic structures and fundamental processes of life at the molecular, cellular and population levels;
• effectively apply the scientific method for problem solving and experimental design;
• collect, organize, analyze, interpret and present quantitative and qualitative data;
• identify and describe current issues and challenges within the field of biomedical science;
• demonstrate and apply fundamental biological laboratory techniques and skills; and
• communicate effectively in written and oral forms.

The program will be particularly valuable if you're planning a career in biomedical research, and will also be a good choice if you're preparing for medical school.

Did you know that studying philosophy is great preparation for law school, an MBA or other graduate studies? Philosophy majors regularly perform much better than average on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).

This program is offered by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies on the Keele Campus.

The word 'philosophy' is derived from the Greek for "love of wisdom" and is one of the world's oldest subjects of study. Philosophy pursues questions in every dimension of human life, and its techniques apply to problems in any field of study or endeavor. It is a reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths, a quest for understanding and a study of principles of conduct.

Explore life’s deepest questions concerning the nature of happiness, the requirements of justice, the limits of knowledge, and the meaning of freedom. You’ll discover how to develop answers to these questions and how to engage in fruitful argument with alternative points of view. These skills are applicable to all areas of modern life: intellectual, professional and personal.

Efforts are made to blend contemporary and historical issues and many of our professors draw their inspiration from widely separated philosophical approaches. In keeping with this, there is a great deal of cross-disciplinary work. The department offers a wide range of courses which examine contemporary problems and issues such as:

• Applied ethics
• Philosophy of mind
• Social and political philosophy
• Argumentation theory
• Feminism

York offers one of the largest, most productive and innovative communities of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary research and undergraduate and graduate teaching in sociology.

Sociology looks at social relations, interactions and power dynamics to gain insight into how society works. Sociology is the study of societies and the way that they shape people's behaviour; beliefs, and identity. Probably the most important thing about sociology is that it enables us to make sense of the rapidly changing world that we live in. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, sociology enables us to understand ourselves. The way that we think, behave, and feel, indeed our very sense of identity, is socially produced.

In York's Sociology program, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how human action and consciousness both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures. Develop excellent reading, writing and key critical and analytical reasoning skills. Learn research techniques that can be applied to virtually any aspect of social life:

• Criminal justice system and social regulation
• Social class and inequality
• Organization, welfare or education reform
• Health care
• Race and racism
• Discrimination and law
• Gender relations
• Migration and how families differ and flourish

At either campus, you will study with great professors such as Stuart Schoenfeld, a specialist in the sociology of the environment; Françoise Boudreau, the recipient of several awards for outstanding teaching; Donald Carveth, a renowned psychoanalyst frequently featured on CBC and other media; and Brian Singer, a specialist in social and political thought.

How do culture, politics and the economy intermingle to inform current debates on social justice in Canada and around the globe? Choose a program that will let you contribute to meaningful change in the world by establishing a sound foundation in social theory and practice.

York’s Interdisciplinary Social Science program (ISS) provides students with a solid grounding in cross-disciplinary social science research methods and critical social theory.

Students have the opportunity to explore courses from a range of fields including Work & Labour Studies, Development Studies, Health & Society, Urban Studies and African Studies to critically examine historical and contemporary issues related to social and political thought, social justice and diversity, sustainability and the environment, social exclusion and identity, diaspora and global development.

In addition to fostering strong theoretical and methodological training, the ISS program grounds itself in the belief that social analysis cannot be separated from social practice. Professors and many students affiliated with the program are actively engaged in fostering social change.

Students are strongly encouraged to combine their ISS degree with another Major or Minor program, either within the Department of Social Science or outside it.

Students may choose among one of the four different degrees:

• BA: 90 Credits
• Honours BA: 120 Credits
• Honours Double Major BA: 120 Credits
• Honours Major/Minor BA: 120 Credits (where the Major is Interdisciplinary Social Science)

Students who choose the Honours degree will not have to select a stream, but they will have to choose from an approved list of Theory Courses as part of the degree requirements.

A degree in ISS will benefit students interested in studying the relationship between culture, politics and the economy in Canadian and global contexts. Our degree programs prepare students for a wide variety of careers in the public, private, volunteer and community sectors, as well as for further post-graduate studies.

4 years honours option also avilable for this program. For more information please visit program page.

Graduates of the ITEC program are uniquely positioned to plan, design, build and administer information systems.

Information technology deals with information and its use in organizations and society. York's Information Technology (ITEC) programs provide you with the educational background to pursue an exciting career in the application of computers to a variety of tasks faced by organizations today.

Unlike traditional computer science and engineering programs, which focus on developing broad computing skills, ITEC focuses on applications of software and information technologies and how they can be systematically designed and developed to meet critical business and organizational problems.
 
This way, ITEC prepares you to become a versatile Information Technology professional who possesses a strongly developed intuition about business, organizational and societal needs, and combines it with robust technical and methodological skills to analyze, design, implement, customize and manage information technologies to fulfil those needs. 

Bachelor of Commerce – Information Technology

The BCom - ITEC ensures that in addition to essential technical and methodological skills, graduates have a deeper and broader understanding of business and commerce. Thus, courses on accounting, marketing, organization behaviour, enterprise resource planning and strategy are added to the list of courses. 

Students in our BCom - ITEC program will pursue specializations in:

• Business Systems Analysis: will prepare you for a career as an information technology analyst, systems analyst or information technology consultant.
• E-Commerce Development: gives you the technical knowledge required for the design and development of consumer and business-to-business electronic commerce systems.
• Information Technology Auditing & Assurance: responds to the growing demand for information system audit, control and security professionals. This stream was developed in close consultation with the Information Systems Audit and Control Association and will be of interest to students seeking the certified Information Systems Auditor designation.

4 years honours option also avilable for this program. For more information please visit program page.