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2024 Mini-Course Program (MCP)

The Department of History is encouraging proposals for the 2024 Mini-Course Program (MCP) at Carleton and U Ottawa. This program attracts High School students from the Ottawa region in grades 8-11 to Carleton’s campus. It is an important way that we are able to have an impact on local students and highlight the incredible work being done in History. The Mini-Course program attracts passionate, keen students, who might go on to become History students at Carleton.

The Mini-course program offers high school students a week-long experience on campus to explore an area of their interest and usually involves a mixture of didactic learning (short lectures, discussions), hands-on activities and campus exploration.

We are hoping to support instructors in two ways:

The MCP can be a great way for graduate students to get an initial experience in teaching, or to try out innovative pedagogy they may wish to incorporate into future teaching. A key theme we want to underlie our offerings is Hands-on History – we want students to “touch” history. Whether they are creating art projects, building a board game, working with archival documents, putting together an exhibition, or getting experience with digital tools, we want the students to have a chance to do history.

Overview: https://carleton.ca/mcp/
Description of application process: https://carleton.ca/mcp/apply-to-teach/
Details: https://carleton.ca/mcp/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/Instructor-Responsibility-2024.pdf
Application form: https://carleton.ca/mcp/apply-to-teach/emcp-course-proposal-application/

Important Details

The mini-course program happens the week of April 29 to May 3, 2024, 9am-3pm Instructors must attend an orientation on Sunday April 28th, 2024
Mandatory instructor training is on March 19th, 2024

Remuneration: Course Instructors will be compensated a total of $1,250 and will be reimbursed up to $125 per course for in-class expenses. Both compensation and reimbursement are issued as a one payment at the end of the week. If a course is co-taught (which is common), this amount is split equally.

Title of mini course

The course title is extremely important! Students are given over 160 courses to choose from each year, your title needs to be captivating and relevant for students to click on your course description. Courses should be designed to give students a glimpse of what they can study within your department. Craft a title that appeals to students interested in history, but also more generally in the arts, cultural studies, the humanities and social sciences.

Course description: Maximum 500 words (3,000 characters). is course description will be used as part of the MCP selection process (handled by the Undergraduate Recruitment Office) and, if successful, will be included in the catalogue of mini-courses that will be distributed to high-school students. is dual-purpose means that your proposal should be catchy, jargon-free and targeted to secondary students (e.g. more selling than explaining).

*Such as the VR lab, Book Arts lab in MacOdrum, Archives and Special Collections, other library classrooms ….