In this course, students will frame, design, and conduct a large-scale, mixed-methods research study on K-12 education policy. Applying foundational theories from critical qualitative educational research, economic theory, and quantitative causal inference, students will examine contemporary issues facing educational institutions in the United States. Students will examine firsthand how businesses and schools interact to create and prohibit equal opportunities for education while examining education as a political and economic institution. Together, we will engage in important disciplinary boundary-crossing to define research questions and study problems in order to find solutions that can move educational policy-making toward equity.

Examines special education in urban contexts including how urban districts have been historically formed, populated, and funded. Includes applicable laws and how these laws impact who attends urban schools and why, such as disproportionate representations of historically marginalized youth and families in special education. Prerequisites ED 101 or 120, ED 360, 385, or 386 & ED 250: Disability & Activism in Education Contexts or ED 205 or COI.

In this class, we will engage theories of identity as reflexive narrative by examining contemporary cultural artifacts in the United States, primarily through social media, popular memes, and broadcast media. By examining how educators are portrayed, characterized, animated, and performed in contemporary media, we will find and surface the cultural presuppositions on which these narratives lie. In surfacing the presuppositions, we hold to understand stereotypes about education, educators, and students, we will make visible the cultural schemas we share about education. Once these are named, we are better positioned to find, surface, and center counternarratives that reframe our assumptions about education away from deficit orientations and instead focus on subaltern educational practices and the role they have played in history’s most important liberatory movements. • Education majors and minors only • Seniors only

In this class, we will engage theories of identity as reflexive narrative by examining contemporary cultural artifacts in the United States, primarily through social media, popular memes, and broadcast media. By examining how educators are portrayed, characterized, animated, and performed in contemporary media, we will find and surface the cultural presuppositions on which these narratives lie. In surfacing the presuppositions, we hold to understand stereotypes about education, educators, and students, we will make visible the cultural schemas we share about education. Once these are named, we are better positioned to find, surface, and center counternarratives that reframe our assumptions about education away from deficit orientations and instead focus on subaltern educational practices and the role they have played in history’s most important liberatory movements.