Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Education

How have schools changed and how should schools change to ensure "the good life"? This interdisciplinary, team-taught course examines the potential and limits of a human ecological education as an instrument of enlightened progress and lasting positive social, cultural, and environmental change. It explores three essential questions about education and its relationship to human development and social progress. Looking at the role of formal educational institutions and their relationship to government and other social institutions: What is the role of schools in development and social change? Considering the role of teachers as agents of change: What is the role of the teacher in school/organizational change and community development? And finally, reflecting on our subjective motives for working in the field of education: Why do you want to become an educator? Through course activities such as service-learning in schools and group project work on a contemporary educational phenomenon (e.g., school choice, new technologies for learning, single-sex education), students will learn how educational policy at the federal, state, and local levels impacts teaching and learning, investigate the moral dimensions of the teacher-student relationship, and reflect on the construct of teacher-learners. Students will be introduced to a variety of educational research methods (i.e, ethnography, case study, quasi-experimental, correlational) that will allow for critical analysis of the knowledge base that strives to impact educational policy and practice. Evaluation will be based on participation, reflective writing, service learning, and group projects and presentations.

How does a child think? What causes them to learn? What teaching approaches work best with young children? These questions and more will be explored through readings, lectures, field observations, and planned class activities. This course will provide an introduction to early childhood education (preschool to eighth grade). Theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, Gardner, Erikson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Gilligan will be used to examine the physical, mental, emotional, moral, and social aspects of childhood growth and development. Students will explore a range of curriculum models, approaches, and strategies as they learn to apply developmental theory to best practices. These best practices will include the role of teachers in creating meaningful learning experiences and classroom environments (curriculum), documenting learning, assessment, inclusion, and family involvement. The primary modes of instruction for this class will be lectures, classroom discussions, field observations/reflections, and cooperative hands-on learning activities. Short reflective papers, an observational journal, and class projects will be used to assess learning.

This course is a broad overview of children's literature and its place in the elementary school classroom. It examines the range and trends in literature for children that includes all genres, prominent authors, illustrators, awards, critical evaluation, and integration into instruction across the curriculum. Students participate in and design lessons which incorporate or extend children's response to literature. They survey poetry and media appropriate for elementary students. Students read an extensive amount of children's literature, keep a response journal, develop an author study, and create a teaching unit using children's literature.

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

Human ecologists who educate, embrace not only the interdisciplinarity of knowledge, but also the complexity of individual student development in political school environments. This course focuses on two essential nuts and bolts of teaching: curriculum design and assessment. How can a teacher learn what students know, how they think, and what they have learned? How can a teacher use this knowledge of students and subject matter to plan learning experiences that will engage diverse interests, adapt to a wide range of learning styles and preferences, accommodate exceptional needs, and meet state-mandated curriculum standards? This course is a required course for prospective secondary school teachers that provides an introduction to the backward design process and diverse assessment strategies. Students will engage in examining theory and practice designing and implementing curricula and assessments. A service-learning component will provide students with the opportunity to observe and participate in a variety of assessment methods in the subject they aim to teach. The final project will be a collaboratively designed, integrated curriculum unit, including lesson plans and assessments. Evaluation will be based on participation, reflective writing, individually designed lesson plans and assessments, and the final project.

Algerian Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), one of the most widely translated French philosophers of the 20th century, developed a body of work often referred to as "deconstruction." Derrida’s oeuvre has influenced multiple fields and disciplines, including Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory. This course will track some of the ways in which Derrida engaged with ideas of difference, through a focus on questions his work poses for understandings of the human. The class will engage with Derrida’s archive through reading some of his early work, including essays and interviews about the status of writing and speech, language, and philosophy, and then move through his later work, including his increasing focus on explicitly political topics such as the death Peñalty, the animal, sovereignty, and war. Although the texts we read will be primarily Derrida’s own writing, we will also read authors who respond to and build on Derrida’s thought. These may include Gayatri Spivak, Ranjana Khanna, Samir Haddad, Peggy Kamuf, and Michael Naas, as well as texts by those with whom Derrida was in dialogue, such as Sigmund Freud, Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. As we move through Derrida’s texts and those informed by them, we will pay particular attention to questions about sexual difference, colonialism, the human, death in relation to life, and representation. Students will be evaluated on participation in seminar discussions, weekly reading responses, a mid-term paper and final paper. There are no prerequisites for this course, but students will be expected to conduct close readings of challenging texts. Students are encouraged to contact the professor with any questions about the course and whether it is a good fit for them.