We will study characteristics of young children with disabilities and examine supportive programs, practices, and services. We will focus on theoretical and applied knowledge about disabilities, including communication disorders, sensory impairments, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disabilities, giftedness, and physical and health related disabilities. We will discuss screening, assessment, early intervention, individualized education programs, inclusive education, community resources, family issues, and the requirements of various state and federal laws that impact children and students with disabilities. Students will learn how programs make accommodations, structure modifications, and differentiate instruction based on young children's needs.

This course will meet in the conference room in the Child Study Center.

School-age children and youth are often understood through the complex lives they lead in schools--academic achievers, behavioral misfits, and rebellious adolescents. Beyond the routine analyses of behavior, test scores and curriculum, what else can the lives of youth tell us about educational change? And who has power and agency to be part of educational decision-making? This course seeks to explore education by looking outside of schools: What are the experiences of students’ families and what do they want for their children? How do relationships with peers influence a student’s concept of self and sense of belonging in school? How do historical, political, and social encounters with race, class, and inequality shape families’ interactions with schools? Through an exploration of research, memoir, children’s literature and film as well as interactions with the course’s community-based educators (caregivers, parent organizers, and community leaders), this course seeks to understand young people through their complex relationships and encounters within families, peer groups and community institutions, all the while interrogating the ways schools can integrate the holistic lived experiences of children and youth into theories of educational change.

As popularly narrated, African Americans' modern freedom struggle is a social movement beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the late-1960s, characterized by the nonviolent protest of southern blacks and facilitated by sympathetic (non-southern) whites. In this course, we explore the multiple ways-beyond protest and resistance-that blacks in the twentieth-century United States struggled for their rights and equality using resources at their disposal. This exploration will take us out of the South and consider actors and activities often neglected in the narrations of the struggle. Throughout, we will return to the following questions: What defines a movement? What constitutes civil rights versus Black Power activity? How and why are people and institutions-then and now-invested in particular narratives of the black freedom struggle?

The Psychology Practicum in Child Development allows students to gain hands-on experience in the field of psychology and acquire course credit through their participation in non-paid teaching internships at the Child Study Center. Students are expected to spend 4-5 hours per week teaching at the Child Study Center, do periodic readings, keep a weekly journal, and attend three, mandatory supervision meetings. Does not count toward the minimum major or minor in psychology.

This seminar will focus upon children and youth as both objects and subjects within societies. Beginning with consideration of the social construction of childhood, the course will examine the images, ideas, and expectations that constitute childhoods in various historical and cultural contexts. We will also consider the roles of children as social actors who contribute to and construct social worlds of their own. Specific topics to be covered include the historical development of childhood as a distinct phase of life, children's peer cultures, children and work, children's use of public spaces, children's intersectional experiences of inequality, and the effects of consumer culture upon children. Considerable attention will be given to the dynamics of the social institutions most directly affecting childhood today: the family, education, and the state.

We hear calls from around the world to make universities, libraries, and museums more diverse by including ideas and objects from outside North America and Europe. If everyone agrees that changes are needed, why is progress so slow? This course takes up these questions in four ways: (1) We engage with ways of thinking, researching, and analyzing from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, (2) We examine how cultural and intellectual institutions, like libraries, botanical gardens, archives, and museums both contribute to and disrupt the inequality pipeline which marginalizes creators and creations from outside traditional centers of power, (3) We explore how students and faculty in places such as Taiwan, Argentina, Morocco grapple with similar questions of unequal access and power by discussing them together over Zoom, and (4) we learn not just to deconstruct but to reconstruct by experimenting with how to create new spaces and ways to learn, display, and classify ideas and culture.

This seminar engages a community of students in the study of teaching in all its dimensions and serves as the core seminar for students admitted into the full-time spring practicum of the Wellesley Teacher Scholars program. EDUC 340 and EDUC 341 are the co-requisites for this class. Weekly sessions allow students to explore the role of the teacher, the nuances of classroom interactions, individual and group learning, and building pedagogical relationships with students to support their academic, social, emotional, and identity strengths and needs. Careful examination of curriculum materials and classroom practice in specific teaching fields is included, as are methods for promoting student engagement and culturally responsive and sustaining practices in education. Students also learn about teacher research and the process of gathering data and acting to improve learning.

This course is an inquiry-based and field-centered research practicum for students admitted into the practicum phase of Wellesley’s teacher certification program. The course is designed to guide and oversee the teacher candidate’s knowledge and implementation of action-oriented, inquiry-based fieldwork throughout their practicum experience. The course is guided by DESE’s Standards of Effective Teaching Practice and focus on a teacher’s ability to teach all students, engage families and communities, and engage in a professional culture shaped by reflective practice, collaborative decision-making, shared responsibility, and professional growth.

The Psychology Practicum in Child Development allows students to gain hands-on experience in the field of psychology and acquire course credit through their participation in non-paid teaching internships at the Child Study Center. Students are expected to spend 4-5 hours per week teaching at the Child Study Center, do periodic readings, keep a weekly journal, and attend three, mandatory supervision meetings. Does not count toward the minimum major or minor in psychology.

Enrollment in this course is by permission of the instructor. Application & Interview with the instructor are required. Interested students should fill out this form.

From Disney films to Nickelodeon cartoons to Newberry award-winning texts, popular children's media offers us the opportunity to analyze how complex issues of identity are represented in cultural productions aimed at a young audience. This course takes, as a site of analysis, media aimed at children to investigate the lessons imparted and ideologies circulate in popular films and books. How is class drawn in Lady and the Tramp? What are the politics of language at play in Moana? What are the sounds of masculinity in Beauty and the Beast? How does Mulan construct gender, race, and militarism? Using an intersectional frame of analysis, we will trace popular tropes, identify images of resistance, and map out the more popular messages children receive about difference in our world.

This course is intended to provide a supportive learning community for first-generation college students. Students with questions about the course should email the instructor prior to registering.

Does education in the United States encourage social mobility or help to reproduce socioeconomic inequality? What is the hidden curriculum—the ideas, values, and skills that students learn at school that are not in the textbook? Who determines what gets taught in school? How do schools in the US compare to school systems in other countries?  What makes school reform so hard? Questions like these drive this course which offers students an introduction to the sociology of education including topics such as schools and communities; student-centered pedagogies; the role of teachers, students, parents, mentors, and peers in producing and addressing educational inequalities (including tracking and measures of achievement); school violence, school reform, and knowledge production. We also look comparatively at education systems across the world.

For students interested in current best practices in active learning and inclusive teaching, this course provides a unique experience to learn, teach, and change the physics curriculum at Wellesley. Students will read and discuss current literature in physics education, gain practice in supporting inclusive group work, refine their own physics knowledge, and do hands-on projects to improve the studio physics experience at Wellesley College. Students must complete this course prior to working as Physics Learning Assistants.

The Psychology Practicum in Child Development allows students to gain hands-on experience in the field of psychology and acquire course credit through their participation in non-paid teaching internships at the Child Study Center. Students are expected to spend 4-5 hours per week teaching at the Child Study Center, do periodic readings, keep a weekly journal, and attend three, mandatory supervision meetings. Does not count toward the minimum major or minor in psychology.

Making scientific discoveries is clearly important, but it is also vital to be able to communicate science effectively to non-expert audiences. How do people learn? And in particular, how do inquiry-based learning techniques improve the learning experience? This course provides students the opportunities to explore and apply current research on learning and instructional strategies by developing a series of hands-on in-class chemistry activities. Students will read primary literature on pedagogical approaches from a range of sources, including chemical education journals. Students will synthesize and apply numerous chemical concepts that they have learned in-depth in previous chemistry classes in order to design and teach chemistry lessons at a local elementary school. Additionally, students will communicate and teach chemistry to non-expert audiences at a science cafe. This class will be useful to students considering careers in the medical profession, so that they can clearly explain science to their patients; careers in research science, so they can inform the public of their discoveries; and careers in education, so they can teach science in an exciting and meaningful fashion.

Students will examine current research and practice in the teaching of English Learners, with a focus on secondary education. Students will explore challenges facing this diverse group of learners and how to build on the assets they bring to their classroom communities. Students will develop skills necessary to plan and promote discussion, engagement, and content mastery while supporting continued language development. Lesson planning will prioritize culturally relevant and responsive teaching while acquiring skills to analyze and adapt required teaching materials. Limited fieldwork observations are required either online or in person; more extensive fieldwork can be arranged. The course is structured to support students pursuing middle school and high school teacher licensure and meets requirements for a MA Department of Education endorsement in Sheltered English Immersion when MA Secondary Education certification requirements are completed. It is also applicable to students considering teaching abroad, teaching in urban schools, or pursuing any other work with emerging bilingual youth.

Enrollment in this course is by permission of the instructor only. Students who are interested in taking this course should fill out this Google Form.

Since the 1990s, Critical Race Theory scholars in education have asserted that as long as race remains undertheorized, antiracist change in education will conveniently remain elusive. In this course, students will study texts that theorize race while engaging in their own collective and individual theory-building around the role of race in education. These two activities together will represent student praxis for social change; that is, students will enter a dialogic relationship with existing scholarship while theorizing it forward. Methodologically, this course centers counternarrative/storytelling as an inquiry method for students to explore the role of race in their lives, in their many endeavors (e.g., as researchers, teachers, and policymakers), and to surface new antiracist and liberatory ideas in education.

Enrollment in this course is by permission of the instructor. Students who are interested in this course should fill out this Google Form.