Course Catalog

Students in this course will explore various ideas about what it means to learn and how those ideas have impacted educational practice. They will explore relationships among learning, education, and power, in addition to investigating the design of learning environments that promote empowerment and/or social change.

This course focuses on children's and adolescent illustrated texts—including picturebooks, comics, and graphic novels—in elementary, middle, and high school learning contexts. Multiple theoretical and pedagogical aspects will be explored throughout the course, with a focus on the changing position of visual and multimodal literacies in this era of political, cultural, and social change.

Introduces students to current issues in educational practice, policy, and theory. Provides opportunities to investigate issues of teaching and learning to broader social/cultural trends. Topics vary with each offering. No prerequisites.

Why is our nation the only one in the world to take school sports so seriously, and what are the implications of this practice? This course attempts to answer these questions by starting with Thomas Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance, moving to Britain’s “Oxbridge” model of “sound mind, sound body,” then demonstrating how numerous forces combined these elements into a distinctly American concoction. The story is continued to the present day with a look at the business of school sports and at educational contributions that sports provide to these institutions, including high schools and colleges.

This class meets the Race & Ethnicity requirement.

Education Policy in a Multicultural Society explores policy and school improvement, and focuses in particular on the U.S. public school system, with an emphasis on both equity and access. In this course we begin by asking: what is public education for, and then consider how schools can be improved so that educational outcomes are ambitious and equitable. We build on students' understandings of the practice of teaching, developed in ED118, to investigate the dynamics of education reform.

We closely examine authentic texts – including artifacts from our own experiences in schools, as well as mandates and legislative texts, policies, data on school improvement, and other resources designed for the improvement of schools. We critically examine each of these, looking for assumptions about teaching and learning and their improvement, assessing the key levers for improvement that they provide, and extrapolating implications for the design and valuation of change. In so doing students will develop critical skills of analysis and interpretation that will enable them to (1) better understand and evaluate efforts to improve schooling in the United States, (2) collaborate substantively, (3) and write and speak about educational policy persuasively. Given the courses strong focus on equity and access, issues of inclusion, voice, and rigor will be consistent through-lines.

Coaching for Today's Society is a course designed to aid students in reaching people where they currently are. You will not be a successful coach if you do not know and understand your audience. In order to be effective when reaching out to your audience you must be able to paint a picture or create a shared vision that resonates with your audience on all sensory levels. During this course we will identify and discuss the basic tenets associated with our targeted groups from same age/similar thought processes to multi-generational influencers (Boomers). Coaching in the broad sense deals with basic interpersonal skill sets to help you build a solid foundation however understanding how to coach in today's complex society goes beyond the foundation. We will identify and discuss the roles of family/life experiences, cultural nuances and how social norms play in helping or inhibiting us from connecting with people whether at the high school level, college level or in the workforce. At the end of the course you will feel confident working with diverse groups of people in any given setting.

In EDUC 225, students will examine the social, cultural, and emotional experiences of Black and Latinx youth, the unique challenges they face within urban and segregated schools, and the relationships, cultural assets, and psychological mindsets that help them thrive despite marginalization. EDUC 225 is a hybrid course that includes both a seminar and a fieldwork component. The seminar will include course readings, analysis, and discussions on the above issues. In the fieldwork component, students, equipped with the knowledge and skills from the seminar, will serve as mentors for Black and Latinx adolescent boys at a local middle school to co-construct and implement character development curriculum (i.e. THREADS) that affirms the adolescent mentees and reinforces them with strategies to navigate the rigors of their learning environment and social community. Working together as allies, the student-mentors, and the mentee-boys will strategize culturally sustaining mentoring to work towards developing positive future goals, socio-emotional behaviors, and healthy racial-ethnic identities.

This course will develop literacy tutors’ skills in working with students in the elementary grades. In this course, participants will learn to develop engaging tutoring sessions and to enact a range of instructional routines for working with students in support of their literacy and language development.

Counts toward Education for Empowerment Minor & Psychology Minor. Every society devotes substantial resources to shaping children's development, but there are important differences in how children enter into and experience education across cultures. These differences reveal what societies value, fear, and believe about learning and development. By comparing education in diverse societies, we identify both universal features of development and particular ways that different societies promote healthy, competent adults. This course examines how cultural values, family background, educational practices, and historical contexts create different pathways for human development from preschool through adolescence.