How to Govern a School

This is a course for new and aspiring principals, school leadership teams, and school boards. The course provides frameworks and tools for leadership in educational governance. The course introduces participants to the work of nurturing the relationships among the school’s stakeholders, with a focus on the pivotal relationship between the board and the executive leadership team (or, in smaller schools, the principal). Different approaches to the work of the board are considered, with particular attention to the stewardship of the school’s vision, mission, and values, to the strategic formulation of policy and the monitoring of executive performance, and to accountability to the school’s parents and supporting community.


Dr. Gideon Strauss
ICS 260002 W25
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL)


Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is January 6 (Note that the first class for this course takes place on January 9). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

NOTE: A Team Audit option is available for school board members and executive leadership teams who wish to take this course together. Please email our Registrar directly at academic-registrar@icscanada.edu for more details.

Deeper Learning: From Wonder to Inquiry to Practice

Deeper Learning: From Wonder to Inquiry to Practice is a course which seeks to help Christian educators develop deeper learning. We will consider what it means to be image-bearers of God called to care for our neighbours and to be engaged in real work that is part of God’s story. Our consideration of these ideas will inform classroom practices and signature pedagogies in apparent, unintended, and even transformative ways. Together we will examine the importance of global citizenship as a form of deeper learning and the impact it has on developing a caring and just world.

Dr. Edith van der Boom

ICSD 260004 W25*

Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is January 6 (Note that the first class for this course takes place on January 9). Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*NOTE: Approved for Area 3 of the CSTC

The Radical Theopoetics of John D. Caputo

This seminar will explore John D. Caputo’s Theopoetics, a "weak theology" of narratives, prayers and praise in response to the call of God in contrast to a "strong" theology of predicative claims about the existence and nature of God. 

Dr. Jim Olthuis
ICS 150907 / 250907 F24

Remote (Online Synchronous)
Tuesdays, 6pm - 9pm EST

(MWS, MA, PhD)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.

Biblical Foundations: Narrative, Wisdom, and the Art of Interpretation

How can we read and experience the Scriptures as the Word of Life in the midst of an Academy that believes the biblical witness will restrict human freedom and thwart our maturity? How may we pursue biblical wisdom as we “re-think the world” when our Christian traditions seem convinced that biblical truth may be disconnected from—or simply applied to—the most pressing and perplexing issues of our time? This course will explore the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation—as the ongoing story of and for God and all God’s creatures, paying special attention to the way in which humanity’s attempt to find its way is interwoven with the story of the Divine presence and with the wisdom and promise of creation-new creation. In asking whether and how the biblical story may find its future in our ongoing narratives, we will attempt to identify which hermeneutical methods and sensitivities might help us discern its significance for present day life, including the academic enterprise. If Jesus is the Living Word at the heart of Scripture, does that change our understanding of where biblical truth is coming from and where it is going? Does the Bible have an implicit, sapiential pedagogy that we have misconstrued? Can the familiar Reformed themes of creation and covenant, election and eschaton speak to us in new, reformational ways? These are some of the questions we shall explore together as we reintroduce ourselves to the biblical writings.

Dr. Nik Ansell

ICS 1108AC / 2108AC F24 **

ICB2010H L6201*

Remote (Online Synchronous)

Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00pm ET

(MWS, MA, MA-EL, PhD)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program. 

**NOTE: Approved for Area 1 of the CSTC.

Cultivating Learning Communities of Belonging

This is a course for instructional leaders and administrators considering school and classroom cultures. Course content will include attention to social and cultural contexts, racial justice, Indigenous perspectives, human sexuality, restorative practices, and how these topics impact and form school and classroom cultures.

This course seeks to help students find clarity in answers to the following questions:

• What is the relationship between the daily behaviour of educational leaders and the cultures of schools?
• How do we awaken our students’ knowledge, creativity, and critical reflective capacities in our schools and classrooms?
• How do racism and other forms of oppression underlie achievement gaps and alienation within our schools?
• How can classroom learning be linked to larger movements seeking to effect change in the community?
• How can school culture be a vehicle for social change?
• How do we cultivate learning communities of belonging in our schools?

Dr. Edith van der Boom
ICSD 260008 F24*
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL)


Syllabus


Enrolment Notes:
To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 6 (Note that the first class for this course takes place on September 12).  Maximum enrolment of twelve (12) students. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.


*Approved for Area 2 or 3 of the CSTC

Philosophy at the Limit: Richard Kearney

A study of Kearney’s trilogy Philosophy at the Limit as well as his Anatheism, focusing on his exploration of that “frontier zone where narratives flourish and abound.” Participants will examine Kearney’s attempt to sketch a narrative eschatology that draws on the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Ricoeur.

Dr. Ronald A. Kuipers

ICS 220508 F24

Remote (Online Synchronous)
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm ET

(MA, PhD)

Syllabus 

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.

Facing the Darkness: The (Human) Nature of Evil

In this interdisciplinary theology seminar, we shall probe the origin and nature of evil by engaging key biblical, philosophical, psychological, and anthropological resources. Central to our discussions will be a sapiential (wisdom-oriented) re-reading of the Fall narrative of Genesis 3–4, set against the backdrop of the good, yet largely wild, creation of Genesis 1–2. In addition to surveying a variety of contemporary theodicies read up against the challenge offered by both “protest atheism” and the biblical lament literature (especially the book of Job), we shall also pay special attention to the correlation between victim and agent in the ongoing dynamics to “original sin” and to the concomitant role of fear in the construction of culture. In attending to evil’s (arguably) anthropocentric origin as a key to its present nature—which will prompt us to revisit our understanding of the primordial conditions of possibility along with the largely overlooked biblical connections between the Satan and the absolutization (and denaturing) of Justice—we shall also look ahead, via pondering the relationship between law and grace, to the promise of a (divine and human) judgment unto salvation.

Dr. Nik Ansell

ICS 120801 / 220801 F24

ICT3352H / ICT6352H L6201*

Remote (Online Synchronous)

Tuesdays, 10:00am-1:00pm ET

(MWS, MA, PhD)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program. 

Religion, Life, and Society: Reformational Philosophy

An exploration of central issues in philosophy, as addressed by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and the “Amsterdam School” of neoCalvinian thought. The course tests the relevance of this tradition for recent developments in Western philosophy. Special attention is given to critiques of foundationalism, metaphysics, and modernity within reformational philosophy and in other schools of thought.

Dr. Neal DeRoo

ICS 1107AC / 2107AC F24

Remote (Online Synchronous)

Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm ET

(MWS, MA, PhD)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations. 

The Aesthetics of Compassion

The emotion of “pity” (eleos) or “compassion” is at the heart of Athenian tragedy, the great forbear of Western tragic drama. For Aristotle, creating feelings of pity and fear in an audience was thought to provoke a catharsis of those emotions that enabled a positive moderation of our passionate natures. But, as George Steiner has observed, the subject matter of tragedy places those emotions in a register beyond the ordinary. As fundamental human responses to extraordinary human suffering, they signal the “core of dynamic negativity” that underwrites authentic tragedy. Raising the problem of human pain and fragility in the face of circumstances potentially beyond human control, representations of human suffering have a metaphysical and, more particularly, theological dimension that has long provoked philosophical interest in the dynamics of tragic drama. In this course, we will examine the interface between philosophy and works of tragic drama as that interface pertains to the psychology and aesthetics of compassion. Looking to such writers as Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil, we will investigate the place of compassion in Western philosophy and theology and the roles that art and imagination have played in the stimulation of compassionate response. 

Dr. Rebekah Smick
ICS 120104 / 220104 F24
ICH5751HF L0101*
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:00pm ET

(MWS, MA, PhD)

Syllabus

Enrolment Notes:

To register for this course, email academic-registrar@icscanada.edu. Last date to register is September 13, 2024. ICS reserves the right to decline registrations.

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.