Courses (An Abbreviated List)

07B:100 Issues and Policies in Higher Education

Good policy decisions reflect a thorough understanding of numerous pertinent issues. This course therefore focuses on selected issues in post-secondary education in the United States . Readings include analyses by higher-education scholars, articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education and mainstream publications, and writings of various higher-education critics of the past and present. After a broad consideration of different conceptions of what higher education should be, the class focuses on issues ranging from governance, to curriculum, to access. Themes such as diversity, the value of different types of knowledge, the roles of professors, and the rights of students, weave together discussions of different issues. This course fosters critical thinking about post-secondary education, preparing students to make thoughtful contributions to future discussions of issues and policies in higher education.

07B:101 Professional Seminar: Social Foundations

This course serves as an introduction to the five disciplinary components of social foundations; as professional development of social foundations scholars; and as a workshop on dissertation and other scholarly papers.

07B:102 History of American Education

This course explores the goals, purposes and problems of formal education, primarily at the elementary and secondary levels, in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We utilize both primary and secondary sources to investigate topics including: varied localized approaches to education during the colonial period and the early republic; the movement for common schools; the "feminization" of the teaching profession; the rise of the public high school; nineteenth-century forms of race and gender segregation; the growth of educational bureaucracy and vocational education; Depression and Cold-War reforms; the desegregation struggle; and increasing federal-government involvement in education.

Throughout, we explore the connection between educational policies and larger social, political, economic, and cultural developments. As a result, students gain a better understanding of the origins and evolution of various current educational practices, policies, issues and dilemmas. Class meetings consist of relatively brief lectures and in-depth discussions of the readings and issues.

07B:104 Education in the Third World

This course examines the historical development and contemporary impact of various educational institutions in developing countries. Internal and external actors are studied, including aid agencies, the World Bank, and NGO's. Particular attention is given to educational responses to globalization pressures and attempts to increase educational opportunities for minorities and women.

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07B:120 Teaching in a Culturally Diverse Society

The increasing racial and ethnic diversity of America's classrooms presents various challenges and concerns to our nation's teachers. This course identifies and examines these issues. This course also analyzes strategies, methods, and techniques for creating culturally, racially, and linguistically responsive teachers.

07B:123 History of Ethnic and Minority Education

This course is an introduction to examining the general educational histories of ethnic and minority groups in the United States. The primary focus will be on Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans, Latino/as, and Asian/Pacific Americans. Events and perspectives will be primarily explored from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth century. All experiences will be set within the larger context of the general educational aims and activities of those periods. These experiences and perspectives not only provide a more comprehensive understanding of the history of American education, they also provide context for contemporary policy discussions about American education.

07B:126 Twentieth Century Educational Movements: Equal Educational Opportunities

Numerous educational movements seeking diversity and equity mobilized during the twentieth century. As issues of diversity and equity continue to fuel current educational policy debates, this course examines the roots of equal educational opportunity movements from Brown V. Board of Education to the present. Topics for exploration include: segregation/desegregation; compensatory education; gender equity; multicultural education; bilingual education; inclusion and mainstreaming; and school choice.

07B:130 Educational Sociology

This course will offer an understanding of the role played by schools in society. We will examine such questions as the organizational features of schools, education as an institution and its relation to other social institutions, the role of the school in social inequality, and the social relationships of the classroom.

07B:134 Education and the World of Work

This course focuses on the relationships between education and schooling and various aspects of the world of work.  I interpret education and schooling broadly, to include formal secondary and post-secondary schooling, training, and learning that takes place out of school.  We will examine both conceptual and theoretical ways of thinking about schools and workplaces as well as several policy proposals for linking these institutions (e.g., school to work programs, job training, career academies, magnet schools, etc.).

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07B:142 Sociology of Higher Education

This is a unique course that combines the interdisciplinary field of sociology of education, with the field of higher education research. Sociologists of education look at issues of inequality and stratification, and we will be exploring these topics as they pertain to the world of higher education. I hope that by the end of the semester, the students will recognize the ways through which the sociological point of view can be helpful for higher education researchers as they form their research questions and learn to look inquisitively at the field.

07B:150 Education and Gender

This course examines the sociology of gender in educational settings. We shall examine such issues as unequal access to schooling, adolescent culture, the gendered nature of higher education, and single-sex schooling. The course treats gender as a fundamental base of social inequality.

07B:153 American Contributions to Educational Philosophy

This course also is designed to serve as an introduction to Philosophy of Education. In this course we survey the various strands of thought on the philosophical foundations of formal systems of education, as these have been developed in the U.S. over some 300 years. Readings for the course are quite eclectic in nature, and sit squarely on the lines that generally divide philosophy from history, religion, literature and politics.We begin with readings on education from the Pilgrims, and follow the social development of ideas on the necessity and function of public education; we read selections from Emerson and Thoreau, from Jefferson and Mann and DuBois, and from Peirce, James and Dewey. We read Counts, and Dennis from the '30's, move on to philosophical controversies from the 1950's and '60's, and end with an examination of the more recent controversies of the 80's and 90's. The intention is that students will come to more fully understand the present situation of crisis in education through examining the historical development of various educational crisis situations, and the philosophical battles that attended them.

07B:154 Education, Race, and Ethnicity

The goal of this course is to examine race and ethnicity in American education and their relationships with both the broader role of schooling and education in American society and such dimensions of social inequality as gender and class. Major topics in the course include, among others, immigration, educational and socioeconomic inequality, family structure, and social policy initiatives. The readings for the course bring a range of perspectives to these issues, including sociological, historical, cultural, legal, and economic.

07B:155 Critical Thinking

This course is designed to fulfill a new program research requirement, and is required for all Social Foundations students. In this course students engage in a rigorous study of the various ways, good and bad, that statements can be combined to create arguments. Students learn fundamental criteria by which to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments that they will encounter in educational policy analyses, and/or will attempt to construct themselves in pursuing their own research. The course includes an examination of the distinctive characteristics of deductive and inductive arguments. We focus first on informal logic, with emphasis on the patterns that weaken or invalidate a chain of reasoning. The second portion of the course is devoted to learning the basic norms and procedures of deductive reasoning.

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07B:156 Philosophies of Education

This course is designed as an introduction to the discipline of Philosophy of Education, and is expected to serve as the first course in the field for most students. In this course students undertake a wide-ranging survey of well-known philosophers' work, focusing on work that bears on issues of particular significance to educators. The issues first raised are primarily epistemological, the nature and scope of Knowledge, and the implications of various interpretations for conceptions of learning, teaching, and education. The survey begins with the Socratic dialogues, Plato's Republic, and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, then moves on to Locke's Essay on Human Understanding.

The social/political issues then take center stage, with the study of Rousseau's Emile, of selected works of Marx, selections from Peirce's writings, from Dewey's Democracy and Education, and from the writings of Lawrence Dennis, an American proponent of Fascism. Discussion focuses on the proper role of education in transmitting and/or reforming social values, the possibilities and limitations of educational institutions in such reform, and the proper relationship between educational institutions and government.

The course closes with a study of selected readings from contemporary philosophers of education, including a basic "methodological" work by Soltis, An Introduction to the Analysis of Educational Concepts. Students should leave the course with the ability to engage in independent analytical and evaluative work with respect to the philosophical issues that pervade education.

07B:157 Ethics and Education

In this course students survey, and critique, a variety of influential interpretations of the nature and process of ethical reasoning. Students read K ant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Ethics, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, and Dewey's Theory of Valuation, or Theory of the Moral Life, as well as selections from more contemporary works, such as Nel Noddings' An Ethic of Caring and Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. The purpose of the course is to equip students with the knowledge required to critically analyze and evaluate the strengths of ethical arguments, particularly as those arguments bear on decision-making in educational policy issues. I give particular attention to the importance of linking ethical theory and practice, and students prepare case-studies from "real-life" situations, which we examine in class in the light of the theoretical perspectives we're examining.

07B:158 John Dewey and Education

This course provides students with an in-depth look at the philosophy of John Dewey. We begin with a thorough critical reading of Dewey's fundamental philosophical work, Experience and Nature, examining the meaning of such terms as 'thinking,' 'ideas,' 'values,' 'ends and means,' 'growth,' 'communication,' to name but a few. Once the foundations are established, students move to the more practical applied philosophy, taking up issues of practice in curricular matters with How We Think. The final work studied is Democracy and Education, Dewey's ultimate statement of his philosophy of education in its social significance.

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07B:180 Human Relations for the Classroom Teacher

This course, required for teacher certification, is restricted to teacher education candidates. The course focuses on social factors such as discrimination, diversity, equity, racism, sexism, and ethnic and socioeconomic pluralism and their influence on American schools and classrooms. Class activities and assignments are diverse and vary among the sections. All sections take the final exam at the same hour, and one half of the final exam is based on the lectures. Three texts and a course pack are required. The format is lecture and discussion with one hour of lecture and three hours of discussion each week. The lectures are given by faculty members, discussion instructors, and guest speakers. The discussion sections are led by teaching assistants (TAs).

07B:176 Demographic Analysis for Educational Research

The motivation for this course is that educational researchers could do better research if they had clearer understandings of basic demographic concepts, techniques, and resources. I have tried to design this course to be as practical as possible. I'd like to move fairly quickly from some necessary theoretical and conceptual grounding in the field of demography to a usable bag of tricks.

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07B:195 Research in Cross-Cultural Settings

This course is designed to explore psychological, cultural and practical aspects of conducting qualitative research in cross-cultural environments. Students read critics' (Coles, Finnegan, Agar, Rosaldo, Kluge) reflections on the nature of this kind of work and develop their own research strategies for carrying out a cross-cultural research project.

07B:210 Education and Social Change

This course focuses on the relationships between education and schooling and a variety of social, institutional, economic, and cultural changes. We will consider how broader trends affect the structure and purpose of educational systems, how changes within education affect the wider society, how systems of schooling themselves change, and the prospects for planned change within systems of schooling.

07B:220 History and Philosophy of Postsecondary Education

This course analyzes the development of post-secondary education in the United States . It traces, over four centuries, the evolution of higher education from a small enclave for white males, to a ubiquitous and stratified system that serves a wide variety of students. We investigate topics including: European influences; scholarship and student life in the early colleges; alternative forms of "higher" education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the rise of the university and the modern system; the role of athletics and youth culture in the university; and post-secondary education's tremendous growth, along with its complex problems, during the last half-century. Throughout, we analyze changes in higher education's participants, content, and structure. Thus, through the lens of history, we consider philosophical issues including: access to higher education; the undergraduate curriculum; academic freedom; the role of universities in society; and the balance of teaching, research and service. Class meetings consist of lectures by the professor, short presentations by students, and extensive discussions.

07B:240 Topics in Education: History of Teaching in the United States

In Schoolteacher (1975), Dan Lortie wrote, "Teaching seems to have more than its share of status anomalies. It is honored and disdained, praised as 'dedicated service' and lampooned as 'easy work.' It is permeated with the rhetoric of professionalism, yet features incomes below those earned by workers with considerably less education . . . teaching, from its inception in America, has occupied a special but shadowed social stan ding." (p. 10). Similarly, John Goodlad observed in Teachers for Our Nation's Schools (1990), "There has been over the years much talk among educators and within their professional organizations about the emergence of teaching as a profession. 'Hasn't the damn thing emerged yet?' asked a colleague in exasperation. The answer is 'not quite'. The conditions necessary to a profession simply have not been a part of either teacher education or the teaching enterprise." (p. 70).

In this seminar, teaching's "special but shadowed" standing and "not quite" professional status frame our wide-ranging examination of the history of teaching in the U. S. We read a variety of books and articles on the history of: teacher education; who has taught (the race, class and gender composition of the teaching force; the conditions under which teachers have taught; teacher unionism; and the personal agency exercised by teachers to shape their experiences. Course work includes extensive readings, thoughtful seminar discussions, and various paper assignments.

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07B:240 Topics in Education: History of Women's Education in the U.S.

In this advanced seminar, we engage in a wide-ranging examination of the history of girls' and women's involvement in education in the United States . We examine the history (events and developments) and historiography (how historians have interpreted the history). The course is divided into four parts. First, in Part I we look at both early historiography (pioneering studies of the history of education for women) and early history (women's education during the Revolutionary era and the early republic). Parts II, III and IV familiarize us with the last few decades' proliferation of scholarship on women's education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The largest section of the syllabus, Part II is a chronological look at women students in higher education. Part III focuses on important books on the history of girls in K-12 schooling and science education, and Part IV examines the history of women teachers, professors and administrators in K-12 and higher education. Course work consists of extensive readings, thoughtful seminar discussions, and various paper assignments.

07B:240 Topics in Education: History of School Leadership in the U.S.

In this advanced seminar, we engage in a wide-ranging examination of the history of school leadership in the U.S. We read a variety of books and articles on the history of public-school administration in general, gender issues, and parental influence. The course is divided into three parts. First, in "The Rise, Growth & Evolution of Education Administration," we take a more-or-less chronological look at developments such as the crusade of Horace Mann and the other common school reformers, the social efficiency movement and the growth of bureaucracy, and the challenge of race and civil rights. Then, we continue with units on female administrators and parental involvement in school leadership.

07B:240 Topics in Education: Critical Theory

In Critical Theory students undertake an analysis of the purpose(s), and the actual functioning, of public education in a democratic society, with a particular focus on the works of Critical Theorists critical of current institutions and practices. The course begins with an introduction to the philosophical roots of Critical Theory, with readings from Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, and from Hoy and T. McCarthy, Critical Theory. Students then turn to contemporary applications of that perspective, studying critiques of contemporary educational systems and their effects, including Apple's Ideology and Curriculum and Cultural Politics and Education, Kanpol's Towards a Theory and Practice of Teacher Cultural Politics.

The discussion format of the course is intended to encourage students to engage in extensive dialogue, helping them not only to understand the very challenging reading assignments, but to engage in their own critiques, both of the educational systems and of the critiques of those systems they are reading, and of the philosophical positions that constitute Critical Theory.

07B:306 Education in China

This course provides historical context for understanding the educational challenges currently facing the People's Republic of China. Readings focus on the work of historians, sociologists and journalists (Fairbank, Vogel, Hinton, Snow, Terrill) who have reported on and studied Chinese society during the past seven decades. Educational policy toward minorities is examined, including the case of Tibet.

Advanced Theory in Sociology of Education

In this course we will revisit the basic concepts of sociology of education that we have studied in the “sociology of education” class, and will discuss them in greater depth. In addition, we will expand and cover additional theorists in the field such as Basil Bernstein, Michael Apple and Henry Giroux, and additional topics, such as critical theory and postmodernism. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of paradigms in the field, as well as the nature of the field itself and the nature of research in the field.

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