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 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.

Does education in the United States encourage social mobility or help to reproduce the socioeconomic hierarchy? 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 to do?

Questions like these drive this course. It offers students an introduction to the sociology of education by broadly exploring the role of education in American society. The course covers key sociological perspectives on education, including conflict theory, functionalism, and human and cultural capital. Other topics include schools and communities; the role of teachers, students, parents, mentors, and peers in 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.
 

In this course students will engage with a spectrum of historic and contemporary school reform efforts across different contexts in the United States. Making use of a diverse array of texts from articles to podcasts and videos, students will struggle with both the promise of education as a tool for remedying race- and class-based inequalities and the stubborn reality that too often schools reflect and reproduce injustice. The structure of the course session and activities prompts students to learn about and experience alternative educational possibilities. Working in groups, pairs, and as individuals, students will explore scholarship and cases in educational anthropology, sociology, history, and critical theory, while questioning the purposes, processes, and products of schooling. Central to the course is the community students create with the instructor for mutual learning support and debate. All members of the course are engaged in a learning stance that centers a discipline of hope and engages with the proposition that communities can organize their own struggle to define and demand a humanizing and liberatory education. Students also have multiple opportunities to explore their own educational experiences and design their own research or educational initiatives to act on their learning.

The United States is multilingual. Since before colonization, many Indigenous languages circulated as well as the languages of the colonizers and the languages brought by enslaved Africans. Today, there is incredible linguistic fluidity and diversity across the country. However, linguistic pluralism in schools has traditionally only been extended to the elite, making language a battleground for anti-Immigration, anti-Indigeneity, and anti-Blackness. In this course, students will unpack the linguistic ideologies that have been operationalized in schools and what these have meant for the experiences of multilingual learners. Students will learn about the history of multilingualism in schools, its current political landscape, and how grassroots efforts have imagined and pushed for linguistic justice.

Adolescents are developing socially, cognitively, and civically in their online and offline worlds, transforming how formal and informal learning takes place. Students in this course will digest research findings and reflect on their own experiences about how social technologies (e.g., Instagram, gaming, mobile phones) can influence wellbeing during the tween and teen years. Harnessing personal narratives that appeal to different stakeholders, we will develop timely and accessible strategies to inform adolescents, educators, families, youth workers, and policymakers about the implications of these findings. This interdisciplinary course spanning education, psychology, media studies, and health communication fields  involves transforming research into digestible, brief, non-academic pieces intended for the general public and provides opportunities for students to explore their own interests. Sample assignments include a policy brief, op-ed, e-newsletter, 2 minute podcast, social media messaging campaign, and strategic writing for UX design. Each week, fellow classmates critique each other’s work in a friendly, constructive environment while guest writing coaches and industry professionals provide useful tips to hone each piece to its creative potential.

In this class, we will look at several forms of knowledge production that have historically emerged behind the walls of U.S. prisons. These have included captivity narratives, disciplinary regimes, formal university-funded humanities education and, most importantly, self-organized political education and study groups. Moments of the latter have caused some political and politicized prisoners to refer to prisons as “universities of revolution.” In today’s prison abolitionist movement, inside-outside study groups serve as social hubs, political workshops and cultural anchors. By looking closely at the history of imprisoned intellectual production (writing, radio, artwork, etc), we will see how imprisoned people and their supporters theorize, understand, and struggle against the prison regime through organic and mutual forms of political education

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.

This course is open to First-Years, Sophomores and Juniors. Seniors who are interested in taking this course should fill out this Google Form.

Uses a microeconomic framework to analyze important questions in education policy about school finance, organization, efficiency, and equity. Is education a private good? What are the costs and benefits of expanded education for individuals, communities, and countries? What are the consequences of more widespread early childhood education and college attendance? What is the role of teachers, peers, and families in education? Does school choice promote student achievement? Applies concepts such as comparative statics, subsidies, externalities, perfect and imperfect competition, cost-benefit analysis, and welfare analysis to these and other questions. Each semester includes one or two policy discussions on contemporary issues in education.

The United States is multilingual. Since before colonization, many Indigenous languages have circulated as well as the languages of the colonizers and the languages brought by enslaved Africans. Today, there is incredible linguistic fluidity and diversity across the country. However, linguistic pluralism in schools has traditionally only been extended to the elite, making language a battleground for anti-Immigration, anti-Indigeneity, and anti-Blackness. In this course, students will unpack the linguistic ideologies that have been operationalized in schools and what these have meant for the experiences of multilingual learners. Students will learn about the history of multilingualism in schools, its current political landscape, and how grassroots efforts have imagined and pushed for linguistic justice.

Enrollment in this course is by permission of the instructor only. Interested students should fill out this Google Form.

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.

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 only. Interested students should fill out this Google Form.