Education (EDUC)
EDUC 2155 - Exploring Strategies for Teaching and Learning (2 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 2155
Learn to become an effective Learning Assistant (aka undergraduate teaching assistant) through hands-on experience with proven teaching methods and learning theories. You'll work on developing essential skills like facilitating peer learning, providing constructive feedback, and creating welcoming classroom environments where all students can thrive. Through interactive discussions and real-world practice, you'll build your confidence as an educational leader. You'll engage with insightful readings, observe experienced instructors, reflect on your growth, and complete practical projects that prepare you to support undergraduate learning across any discipline. Whether you're specifically interested in becoming a Learning Assistant or want to develop valuable teaching and leadership skills, this course will equip you with the tools you need to succeed.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Becoming a professional teacher who is developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of reflective practice, collaborative action, and lifelong inquiry into teaching and learning.
- Developing a personal philosophy of and a vision for delivering technical content through education pedagogy.
- Develop understanding of how to integrate subject specific knowledge and pedagogy, nature of the discipline, and nature of learning in the college classroom.
- Designing learning environments that promote engaged learning.
- Developing skills in communication, management, and a variety of instructional and assessment strategies that contribute to meaningful instruction college classes.
- Becoming competent in selecting and integrating appropriate technological tools into instruction.
EDUC 2200 - Introduction to Adult Learning (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 2100
Do adults learn differently than do youth? This experiential and community-engaged course is for anyone interested in planning and facilitating adult, community and lifelong learning. As inquirers ourselves, we not only study principles, theories and methods, we also put into practice what we learn. One of the ways we do this is by incorporating adult learning approaches within the seminar's design and educational practice (andragogy, rather than pedagogy). Another way we apply what we study is by mentoring adult learners. Each student serves as a learning partner to a Cornell employee who is pursuing an educational aim. A journey of mutual learning is a satisfying and meaningful adventure. As employees' partners, we are co-learners and co-educators, recognizing that each person has knowledge and experience to bring to the quest.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, KCM-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Explore the relationship of leadership and learning in formal, nonformal, and informal education in personal and larger contexts.
- Develop deep consciousness of one's own core values for the purpose of mindfully engaging with diverse others in constructive and respectful ways.
- Learn and apply foundational principles and processes of instructional design and demonstrate these in planning and facilitating lessons with an adult Learning Partner across differences in generation, nationality, language, class, and ethnicity.
- Examine trends of educational inequity in this country and ramifications in the lives of adults of poor schooling as children.
- Through historic and contemporary cases, unpack narratives of popular education in community development, public engagement, and social justice through formal, nonformal, and informal venues.
- Recognize that being an educator involves not only understanding issues of power, inequity, and access, but also entails conscious ethical practice in everyday decision-making.
EDUC 2210 - Designing and Facilitating Learning for Development (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 2210
In Designing and Facilitating Learning for Development, we see commonalities across a variety of venues and settings where people meet together to learn, deliberate, and act. From professional development to social change and town hall to union hall, adult and community learning is everywhere. Yet, for many, the design and facilitation of meaningful learning experiences can be as mysterious as an unopened black box. How does one go about creating inclusive educational and participative experiences in our increasingly interconnected contexts? In this course we open the box and unpack the processes of crafting and conducting collaborative learning experiences. In developing our abilities as ethical leaders of learning and action we serve the growth of others even as we deepen our practice.Expected workload of approximately 3 hours per week during the FLD (field) portion of this course.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, KCM-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 Learning Outcomes:
- Compare and contrast three constructs of the concept of design.
- Differentiate major components of a design process.
- Identify decision points in a design process and categorize input needed to inform those decisions.
- Analyze a learning or action challenge and make a case for a suitable design approach.
- Demonstrate the co-generative relationship of design and facilitation.
- Synthesize and apply the principles and processes practiced through producing and implementing learning designs as an educational mentor to a learning partner.
EDUC 2410 - The Art of Teaching (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 2410
This exploratory course is designed for students of all backgrounds and interests who have a desire to learn more about education and teaching. Teaching takes place in a variety of contexts from the family to the workplace, and this course endeavors to examine the elements of teaching that transcend the typical school-teaching environment. Designed to guide students in reflecting upon their experiences to help them better understand the decisions they make as teachers. Students have the opportunity to pursue their own interests through a teaching fieldwork assignment. Possible field experiences range from large group to tutorial situations, from preschool to adult education, from traditional school subject matters to recreational and occupational areas, and from school-based to nonformal situations. The course work and readings are designed to build on these experiences throughout the semester and provide concepts and skills to apply in the field.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment preference given to: sophomores, juniors and Education minors.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Learning Outcomes:
- Analyze teaching situations using appropriate conceptual frameworks.
- Articulate and critically examine their beliefs and assumptions about teaching and schooling.
- Reflect on the elements involved in being an effective teacher in formal and informal educational situations.
- Discuss current educational issues as they relate to formal and informal educational settings.
EDUC 2610 - Intergroup Dialogue (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRID 2610
Intergroup dialogue is a form of communication specifically designed for people to engage with one another across social, cultural, and power differences in a critical and meaningful way. This class prepares students to live and work in a diverse world, and educates them in making choices that advance equity. Its main objectives are to: explore our human capacity and need to connect with ourselves and others; increase understanding of personal and social identities and how they inform our lives; explore the effects of social inequity at personal, interpersonal, and structural levels (including the ways in which it disrupts human connection); develop students' skills to communicate, work, and lead effectively across difference; and strengthen individual and collective capacities to strategize for change on campus and beyond.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, SBA-AG), (ICE-IL)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Learning Outcomes:
- Cultivate authentic and meaningful interpersonal connections across difference.
- Describe your own personal experience of multiple social identities.
- Articulate connections between individuals' experiences of social identity and societal systems of power, privilege, and oppression.
- Use dialogue practices in communicating with others.
- Meaningfully engage with a range of perspectives on issues related to societal systems of power, privilege, and oppression.
- Identify actions and opportunities for ameliorating inequities connected to social identity.
EDUC 2710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics (3-4 Credits)
This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will recognize and assess the sociological function(s) of American Schools (e.g., socializer, sorter, trainer, and caretaker) as well as its role as a change agent, an equalizer, and reproducer of society's inequalities.
- Students will critique education as a major public policy issue in American society.
- Students will synthesize the legal framework and justification for local, state, and federal roles in public and private schooling.
- Students will explore and interpret social and fiscal data to clarify policy assumptions and critiques.
- Students will integrate and discuss their own schooling and what role they can play in the future of school improvement.
EDUC 3110 - Educational Psychology (4 Credits)
Educational psychology is the application of psychological principles and concepts to cases of teaching and learning. We study behavioral, cognitive, embodied, and social-cultural perspectives on learning and thinking, and we use them in planning and reflecting on weekly fieldwork outside the classroom. In the process, we become more mindful and skilled learners ourselves and better facilitators of others' learning. *Both the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 courses will focus on educational psychology as it relates to PreK-Adult learners; however, Fall fieldwork experiences will be with learners across the PreK-Adult spectrum; Spring fieldwork experiences will be with adult learners ONLY.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, KCM-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024, Spring 2024 Learning Outcomes:
- Be able to analyze and improve instructional materials and methods in terms of their ... Appropriateness for a given learning goal Demands on memory Demands on attention Demands on their ability to process the language of instruction Assumptions about the level of intellectual abstraction that learners are capable of Potential to activate learner motivation
- Be more efficient and effective at reading, summarizing, and asking critical questions about peer-reviewed original research in educational psychology
- Be more comfortable and skilled at facilitating learning for another person (through questioning, listening, and observing learners at work)
EDUC 3142 - Reflecting on the Intersections of Education and Prison Systems (2-4 Credits)
The school-to-prison track refers to policies and practices that facilitate the transfer of students out of the school system and into the prison system (including juvenile detention, county jail, immigration detention centers, or adult prison). This course takes a critical analytical look at the intersections of the prisons and schooling, emphasizing pedagogy, history and policy.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022 Learning Outcomes:
- Compare education policy and correctional policy to the real world of education during and after prison.
- Analyze their prison classroom experience in the context of the broader criminal justice system.
- Articulate different philosophies of education/pedagogy as well as different philosophies of prison/corrections.
EDUC 3143 - Incarceration, Policy Response, and Self-Reflection (1-4 Credits)
EDUC 3350 - Youth Organizations and Leadership Development (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 3350
Participants learn how to facilitate both youth and adult volunteer leadership development. They examine factors affecting membership, purposes, design, operation, and administration of youth organizations.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate application of experiential learning models in education.
- Explain how youth organizations relate to secondary education and career exploration.
- Demonstrate knowledge and skills necessary for managing a 4-H/FFA chapter.
- Explain how the 4-H/FFA functions on the local, state, and national levels.
- Apply youth leadership theory to development of targeted youth organizations.
- Engage in the issues surrounding youth development in education & society.
EDUC 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3405, AMST 3405, LSP 3405
This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 EDUC 3510 - Engaged Learning through Extension, Outreach, and Instruction (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 3510
Course is designed to explore strategies and instruction across three aspects of adult education: the Cooperative Extension Service as a structured delivery vehicle, outreach in more informal and non-traditional formats, and college instruction as a formal structure to deliver technical expertise. The intent is to develop a program to meet our target audience, then implement a plan that successfully meets the needs and expectations of instructor and participants alike.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will become aware of differences and similarities across the audience profiles and develop targeted approaches to each.
- Students will gain understanding of the history and future development of extension programming and how it impacts instructional methods and opportunities.
- Students will develop a personal philosophy and vision for presenting technical information in a professional, yet approachable format that stimulates questions and further inquiry.
- Students will gain competency in selecting and integrating appropriate technological tools for instruction across a variety of audiences.
- Students will develop techniques to establish programming that differentiates presentations for a workshop, outreach program, and classroom presentation.
- Students will understand assessment strategies to verify learning objectives have been met and ascertain participant attitudes toward topics.
EDUC 4010 - Methods in Ag Sci Education: Welding and Metal (1 Credit)
Crosslisted with GDEV 4011
Students complete learning and skills development in GMAW and Mig welding and identification/handling of metals. Skills developed can lead toward instructional opportunities in agricultural sciences as well. This course is taught at Tompkins, Seneca, Tioga (TST) BOCES in Ithaca, NY.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Develop proficiency and knowledge of technical aspects of metal fabrication and welding procedures.
- Explain and practice industry approved safety procedures both as a demonstrator and as the safety items relate to welding and fabrication of metal.
- Describe how learning the new metal skills will translate into sharing those same skills with others as an instructor or facilitator.
EDUC 4200 - Adult Language Learners and Marginalization: Applied Teaching Methods for Empowerment (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 4200
When educators teach English to speakers of other languages, what assumptions do they often bring, about learners' goals, abilities, and backgrounds, and about the language-learning process? Which versions of English are often valued more highly in TESOL programs and materials? How can we create opportunities for English-language learning, while also recognizing the knowledge that learners already hold? Through reflections on readings, simulations, and weekly fieldwork, students will deepen their understanding of what it means to teach English to non-native speakers. Students will analyze and apply TESOL methodologies and receive feedback on their lesson planning and delivery in order to strengthen their teaching practice. Participants will learn from each other's situated experiences and increase their awareness of issues involved in global migrations and language learning.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023 Learning Outcomes:
- Outline recognized TESOL frameworks and methods, and their critiques, with their historical contexts.
- Develop and implement original lesson plans and unit plans that effectively address a specific English Language Learner's needs in multiple areas, including speaking, reading, writing, listening, grammar, pronunciation and/or specific content areas.
- Recognize barriers faced by adult English Language Learners in the U.S. and at Cornell, and propose institutional actions in response.
- Demonstrate knowledge and awareness of the cultural practices, values, and beliefs of diverse groups of individuals.
- Demonstrate understanding of systemic oppression at multiple levels.
- Assess one's own cultural perspective and the potential for associated biases.
EDUC 4223 - Community Learning Ecosystems: Place, SDGs & Hope (4 Credits)
Running shoes are not required, yet we are in training for a marathon. In this course we're enhancing our knowledgebase, toolbox, and collective leadership as we take up a contest unprecedented in human history - inclusive and just sustainability. Part race against the clock, part design challenge and part performance test, Team Humanity needs all of us to be informed, prepared, and in the game. Having teammates to train with nudges us to keep going as we learn with and from partners, communities and action leaders in this grand challenge. We examine five major concepts and explore their mutual generativity as we look for leverage points of system change: just sustainability; lifelong learning; place; learning ecosystems and social competencies for collective leadership and learning.
Distribution Requirements: (KCM-AG, SCH-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL, CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025 Learning Outcomes:
- By the end of this course, students will be able to: Demonstrate the capacity to analyze, evaluate, and posit relationships among key concepts central to the course: 1) Lifelong Learning; 2) Place & Placemaking; 3) Sustainability & Climate Action; 4) Community as Ecosystem of Learning; Learning Cities/Learning Localities; and 5) Collaborative, Social Learning for Sustainability.
- Explicate properties of Learning Places, Learning Communities, and Learning Societies, and to differentiate among them.
- Apply knowledge of effective methods of designing and facilitating nonformal educational programming.
- Ascertain and analyze a variety of policy actors, practitioners, educators, networks, and action arenas relevant to lifelong learning and sustainability.
- Investigate and critically assess initiatives that integrate lifelong learning, placemaking, sustainability and climate action.
- Distinguish different claims and conceptualizations of hope-including actionable, radical, critical, and pragmatic hope-and climate optimism, distinguishing between wishful thinking and cautious climate optimism.
EDUC 4402 - Anthropology of Education (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4402
This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
EDUC 4458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4458, FGSS 4458
This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered-racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2017
EDUC 4720 - Philosophy of Education (3.5 Credits)
What are the aims of schooling? How are those aims to be achieved? Can Artificial Intelligence be a 'teacher'? What interests guide the formation of educational aims? Questions such these are central to the formulation and reformulations of philosophy of education as they name topics like educational authority, virtues, curricular standards and the social/technological contexts of schooling among others. Drawing from both canonical and contemporary texts and their critics, this course provides an opportunity to analyze and interpret philosophies of education in the changing contexts of 21st century educational policy, neuroscience and technology and ongoing social, environmental and economic injustices.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, ETH-AG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2018
Learning Outcomes:
- Assess research findings on testing and measurement in mass education, school disciplinary practices, in contexts of racialization, multi-lingualism/linguistic diversity, gender, etc.
- Analyze educational policies in NYS and the US to identify the socio-cultural, economic interests and any stated ethical commitments that are articulated in defining terms such as intelligence educational opportunity or similarly teacher learner knowledge objectivity mind etc.
- Identify key formulations of virtue education, philosophies of care, feminist ethics, standpoint epistemology as relevant to the activities of teaching and learning toward broad social aims, especially with attention to democratic participation.
- Articulate defensible arguments for philosophies of/for educational practices (Aristotelian, Pragmatist, Feminist, Decolonial) or policies for two topics in education- testing, multicultural curriculum, anti-racist education, etc.
- Reflect on and apply at least one framework (virtue, standpoint epistemology) from a tradition in philosophy of education defending mass schooling and the a select few of the aims and policies which guide them.
EDUC 4790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4790, LSP 4790, AMST 4792
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022 EDUC 4826 - Leading Dialogue Across Difference: Practicum in Intergroup Relations (4 Credits)
Crosslisted with ILRID 4826
Through theoretical and experiential learning, students in EDUC 4826 will further develop knowledge and skills gained in EDUC 2610 for leadership across social, cultural, and political differences. Through weekly seminar sessions, students gain a working knowledge of scholarly literature drawn from the fields of critical intergroup dialogue, practice theory, social identity theory, and social justice education. Students learn about the theories and empirical evidence on why and how communication and collaboration across difference work. Moreover, through unique experiential learning opportunities in the classroom, students practice communication and collaboration across difference, as well as facilitation skills fundamental to leading intergroup dialogue processes.
Prerequisites: EDUC 2610 or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (ICE-IL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Learning Outcomes:
- Communicate effectively across difference.
- Demonstrate disciplinary knowledge of literature on critical dialogue.
- Apply skills for leading individuals from different backgrounds within a multicultural society.
- Demonstrate capability to mediate conflict through dialogue for mutual understanding.
- Through critical reflection, examine how personal and group socialization connects with larger societal systems.
EDUC 4940 - Special Topics in Education (1-4 Credits)
The department teaches trial courses under this number. Offerings vary by semester and will be advertised by the department before the semester starts. Courses offered under this number will be approved by the department curriculum committee, and the same course is not offered more than twice under this number.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
EDUC 4960 - Undergraduate Internship In Education (1-3 Credits)
On-the-job learning experience under the supervision of professionals in a cooperating organization. A learning contract is written between the faculty supervisor and students, stating the conditions of the work assignment, supervision, and reporting. All 4960 internship courses must adhere to the CALS guidelines at cals.cornell.edu/academics/student-research/internship.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
EDUC 4970 - Individual Study in Education (1-3 Credits)
A student may, with approval of a faculty advisor, study a problem or topic not covered in a regular course or may undertake tutorial study of an independent nature in an area of educational interest.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
EDUC 4980 - Undergraduate Teaching (1-3 Credits)
Participating students assist in teaching a course allied with their education and experience. Students are expected to meet regularly with a discussion or laboratory section, to gain teaching experience, and regularly to discuss teaching objectives, techniques, and subject matter with the professor in charge.
Prerequisites: GPA of at least 2.7.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
EDUC 4990 - Undergraduate Research (1-6 Credits)
Affords opportunities for students to carry out independent research under appropriate supervision. Each student is expected to review pertinent literature, prepare a project outline, conduct the research, and prepare a report.
Prerequisites: GPA of at least 2.7.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: juniors or seniors. Not open to: students who have earned 6 or more undergraduate research credits elsewhere in the college.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-UG); (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 EDUC 5223 - Community Learning Ecosystems: Place, SDGs & Hope (4 Credits)
Running shoes are not required, yet we are in training for a marathon. In this course we're enhancing our knowledgebase, toolbox, and collective leadership as we take up a contest unprecedented in human history- inclusive and just sustainability. Part race against the clock, part design challenge and part performance test, Team Humanity needs all of us to be informed, prepared, and in the game. Having teammates to train with nudges us to keep going as we learn with and from partners, communities and action leaders in this grand challenge. We examine five major concepts and explore their mutual generativity as we look for leverage points of system change: just sustainability; lifelong learning; place; learning ecosystems and social competencies for collective leadership and learning.
Prerequisites: experience in design and facilitation in one of these areas- nonformal education, asset-based development, community-based arts, participatory action research or public sociology/anthropology.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL, CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022 Learning Outcomes:
- Investigate and apply theories and practices of five core concepts central to the course: Lifelong learning, place and placemaking, inclusive Just Sustainability, community as ecosystem of learning; learning cities/learning localities, collective intelligence, and collaborative social action for sustainability.
- Work in real-world sustainability endeavors at multiple scales (local, national, & international) through collaborative undertakings (both as a class and independently).
- Develop further as a learning-centered leader by serving in a mutual, co-learning partnership as the educational mentor with an adult learner.
- Recognize, and engaged with, a variety of policy actors, practice networks and action arenas germane to lifelong learning and sustainability.
- Deepen own experiential knowledge of component elements of learning cities through engagement in local and wider settings at three levels: self, self with another, and self with multiple others.
- Increase own sustainability literacy.
EDUC 5350 - Youth Organizations and Leadership Development (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 5350
Participants learn how to facilitate both youth and adult volunteer leadership development. They examine factors affecting membership, purposes, design, operation, and administration of youth organizations.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG)
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-CEL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate application of experiential learning models in education.
- Explain how youth organizations relate to secondary education and career exploration.
- Demonstrate knowledge and skills necessary for managing a 4-H/FFA chapter.
- Explain how the 4-H/FFA functions on the local, state, and national levels.
- Apply youth leadership theory to development of targeted youth organizations.
- Engage in the issues surrounding youth development in education & society.
EDUC 5510 - Engaged Learning Through Extension, Outreach, and Instruction (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with GDEV 5510
Course is designed to explore strategies and instruction across three aspects of adult education: the Cooperative Extension Service as a structured delivery vehicle, outreach in more informal and non-traditional formats, and college instruction as a formal structure to deliver technical expertise. The intent is to develop a program to meet our target audience, then implement a plan that successfully meets the needs and expectations of instructor and participants alike. The graduate level option will incorporate workshop, outreach, and instructional presentations developed from the grad student's area of expertise. A unit plan of instruction will also be developed.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will become aware of differences and similarities across the audience profiles and develop targeted approaches to each.
- Students will gain understanding of the history and future development of extension programming and how it impacts instructional methods and opportunities.
- Students will develop a personal philosophy and vision for presenting technical information in a professional, yet approachable format that stimulates questions and further inquiry.
- Students will gain competency in selecting and integrating appropriate technological tools for instruction across a variety of audiences.
- Students will develop techniques to establish programming that differentiates presentations for a workshop, outreach program, and classroom presentation.
- Students will understand assessment strategies to verify learning objectives have been met and ascertain participant attitudes toward topics.
EDUC 5710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics (3-4 Credits)
This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: Cornell Teacher Education Program or permission of instructor.
Exploratory Studies:
(AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2021 Learning Outcomes:
- Students will recognize and assess the sociological function(s) of American Schools (e.g., socializer, sorter, trainer, and caretaker) as well as its role as a change agent, an equalizer, and reproducer of society's inequalities.
- Students will critique education as a major public policy issue in American society.
- Students will synthesize the legal framework and justification for local, state, and federal roles in public and private schooling.
- Students will explore and interpret social and fiscal data to clarify policy assumptions and critiques.
- Students will integrate and discuss their own schooling and what role they can play in the future of school improvement.
EDUC 6720 - Philosophy of Education (3.5 Credits)
What are the aims of schooling? How are those aims to be achieved? Can Artificial Intelligence be a 'teacher'? What interests guide the formation of educational aims? Questions such these are central to the formulation and reformulations of philosophy of education as they name topics like educational authority, virtues, curricular standards and the social/technological contexts of schooling among others. Drawing from both canonical and contemporary texts and their critics, this course provides an opportunity to analyze and interpret philosophies of education in the changing contexts of 21st century educational policy, neuroscience and technology and ongoing social, environmental and economic injustices.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2018
Learning Outcomes:
- Assess research findings on testing and measurement in mass education, school disciplinary practices, in contexts of racialization, multi-lingualism/linguistic diversity, gender, etc.
- Analyze educational policies in NYS and the US to identify the socio-cultural, economic interests and any stated ethical commitments that are articulated in defining terms such as intelligence educational opportunity or similarly teacher learner knowledge objectivity mind etc.
- Identify key formulations of virtue education, philosophies of care, feminist ethics, standpoint epistemology as relevant to the activities of teaching and learning toward broad social aims, especially with attention to democratic participation.
- Articulate defensible arguments for philosophies of/for educational practices (Aristotelian, Pragmatist, Feminist, Decolonial) or policies for two topics in education- testing, multicultural curriculum, anti-racist education, etc.
- Reflect on and apply at least one framework (virtue, standpoint epistemology) from a tradition in philosophy of education defending mass schooling and the a select few of the aims and policies which guide them.
EDUC 7010 - Empirical Research (1-6 Credits)
For study that predominantly involves collection and analysis of research data.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
EDUC 7402 - Anthropology of Education (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7402
This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
EDUC 7458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7458, FGSS 7458
This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered-racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2017
EDUC 7790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas (3 Credits)
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7790, LSP 7790, AMST 7792
This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.
Exploratory Studies:
(CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022