Bachelor of Arts in Youth and Childrens Studies

at Wilfrid Laurier University - Brantford Campus Canada

With our small class sizes and close-knit environment, you’ll get a unique educational experience at the Brantford campus. With lots of opportunities for field placements, you’ll receive practical experience in community settings like daycare centres, educational institutions, community centres and human-service agencies.

We also offer opportunities to get involved in current research projects with our faculty members.

You’ll graduate from our program with a solid grounding in psychological theory and experience working in the field. This, combined with the other benefits of a social science degree (critical thinking skills, communication skills, project management and analytical skills), will give you the qualifications that employers are looking for.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

The Indigenous studies field is growing rapidly and we have designed a program that will prepare you to engage with important issues facing Canada and the world through course work in two programs and community service-learning opportunities. Our classrooms teach the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous people (who make up about 20% of the world’s population) to deepen your understanding of these issues.

Your courses will cover topics in Indigenous rights, history, ecological knowledge, and teaching practices. Your education will be complemented by courses in Indigenous languages, literature and media.

Diverse teaching methods, such as planting medicines in our Medicine Garden course, bring class material to life and allow you to understand Indigenous worldviews by applying them to the world around you. 

Human Rights and Human Diversity (HRHD) prepares you for a career where you can make a difference by advancing human rights and social justice in Canada and around the world.

You will examine current issues that matter in people's lives such as:

• children's rights
• disabilities
• multiculturalism
• women's rights
• crimes against humanity
• racism
• human trafficking
• gender issues

You will study organizations that can be used to address injustice like the UN, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and nongovernmental organizations. You will develop skills that are highly sought-after by human rights organizations, such as:

• grant writing
• policy analysis
• intercultural competence
• professional fundraising
• advocacy
• designing social media strategies

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.