Spring 2021
Who decided which first names are deemed "difficult to pronounce"? Why are the words "fear," "ignorance," "belief," and "guilt" used to normalize racism? Why do history textbooks avoid the use of the word "genocide" when addressing Atlantic slavery? This course explores the recent intellectual history of the role of naming and coded language in institutional anti-Blackness. Each class will analyze how structures of power have intentionally erased their histories and contemporary acts of racial oppression through linguistic and epistemic control, while also paying close attention to the language of resistance in Black activism.
Journeying from enslavement and Jim Crow to the post-civil rights era, this course will teach how law and social policy have shaped, constrained, and been resisted by black women's experience and thought. Using a wide breadth of materials including legal scholarship, social science research, visual arts, and literature, we will also develop an understanding of how property, the body, and the structure and interpretation of domestic relations have been frameworks through which Black female subjectivity in the United States was and is mediated.
This special topics course focuses on development of hydrology and environmental engineering educational modules. These modules focus on fundamental concepts (e.g. runoff, infiltration, contaminant transport) and use novel tools (hydrologic and transport models running in Jupyter Notebooks and online web interfaces). Modules may target a wide range of processes in hydrology and environmental engineering and may target any educational level from K-16. Students work in teams to 1) learn about engineering education, 2) develop self-guided educational modules, 3) participate in a learning fair where these modules are debuted.
What's the point of education? What should anyone truly learn, why, and how? Who gets to attend school? Is it a right, a privilege, a duty, an investment, or a form of discipline? Do schools level the playing field or entrench inequalities? Should they fashion workers, citizens, or individuals? Moving from France to the US, and from the Enlightenment to the present, we look at the vexed but crucial relationship between education and democracy in novels, films, essays, and philosophy, examining both the emancipatory and repressive potential of modern schooling. Topics include: Brown, class, meritocracy, testing, and alternative pedagogies.
Humans have profoundly altered the chemistry of Earth's air, water, and soil. This course explores these changes with an emphasis on the analytical techniques used to measure the human impact. Topics include the accumulation of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) in Earth's atmosphere and the contamination of drinking water at the tap and in the ground. Students will get hands on training in mass spectrometry and spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of air, water, and soil and will participate in an outreach project aimed at providing chemical analyses of urban tap waters to residents of Trenton, NJ.
This course aims to improve conversation skills in ASL, review and refine knowledge of basic grammar, broaden vocabulary, develop ASL-English translation skills, and increase awareness of Deaf culture. Students will develop their ASL skills through interactive activities in class and interacting with Deaf people out of class.
This course offers intensive practice in American Sign Langauge (ASL) through learning specialized vocabulary, analyzing grammar, developing ASL-English translation skills, and discussing ASL literary works and Deaf culture.
Within a broad context of historical, social, and ethical concerns, a survey of normal childhood development and selected disorders from the perspectives of the physician, the biologist, and the bioethicist. There is an emphasis on the complex relationship between genetic and acquired causes of disease, the environment, medical practice, social conditions, and cultural values. The course features visits from children with some of the conditions discussed, site visits, and readings from the original medical, scientific, and bioethical literature.
This course examines various political controversies that surround the role of race and ethnicity in American society. These controversies and issues affect public opinion, political institutions, political behavior, and salient public policy debates. Thus this course will assess and evaluate the role of race in each of these domains while also examining historical antecedents. The first half of the course will focus on historical antecedents such as the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. The second half of the course will focus on the nature of contemporary racial attitudes, in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.
Analyzing LGBTQ politics and public policy in the US and globally. Assessing the impact of the descriptive representation of LGBTQ+ people on public policy, legislation, legal reform and social change. Comparing domestic issues with LGBTQ politics around the world: in the global north and south. Understanding the role that elected officials, activists and voters can have in driving change, affecting their colleagues, constituents and neighbors. Considering internal tensions and conflicts within the LGBTQ family, as well as coalitions and allied movements. Students will focus on a community which resonates with them personally.
Babies, who look like helpless blobs, are capable of impressive feats of learning. 3-year-olds, who can't cross the street alone, know an astounding amount of information about their environments. We will focus on landmark studies that elucidate how children's biology, cognition, language, and social experiences interact to set the stage for what we do and who we are. Is the baby's world a 'blooming, buzzing confusion', or do babies enter the world prepared to make sense of their environments? How can we understand the collaboration between nature and nurture during development?
Principles of psychology relevant to the theory and practice of education. Through selected readings, discussion, and classroom observations, students study theories of development, learning, cognition (including literacy), and motivation, as well as individual and group differences in these areas; assessment; and the social psychology of the classroom. The course focuses on how learning by children and adolescents at the elementary, middle, and secondary school levels is influenced by their own characteristics and experiences and the various contexts in which they learn: family, school, community and culture.
By taking a comparative approach, this course examines the role of social, economic, and political factors in the emergence and transformation of modern cities in the United States and selected areas of Latin America. We consider the city in its dual image: both as a center of progress and as a redoubt of social problems, especially poverty. Attention is given to spatial processes that have resulted in the aggregation and desegregation of populations differentiated by social class and race.
This course covers selected topics in the sociology of organizations. We first undertake a brief introduction to organizational theories. We then consider empirical applications across an array of domains and sub-fields, including work and labor markets, politics and social movements, education, and social stratification.
This course will examine how institutions develop, vary in design, and shape public policy. Law will be a primary focus because it is central to the development of institutions in modern societies and provides the formal means for expressing and fixing policy. The course will cover a wide range of institutions- social, economic, and political- not only in an American context but also in comparative perspective.
Prejudice is one of the most contentious topics in modern American society. There is debate regarding its causes, pervasiveness, and impact. This goal of this course is to familiarize students with the psychological research relevant to these questions. We will review theoretical perspectives on prejudice to develop an understanding of its cognitive, affective, and motivational underpinnings. We will also discuss how these psychological biases relate to evaluations of, and behavior toward, members of targeted groups. In addition, research-based strategies for reducing prejudice will be discussed.
This course will explore the relationship between social movements and legal/policy reforms and critically assess the scope and limits of the 1960s-era civil rights laws through an examination of the following legal and policy issues that Black Lives Matter activists have pushed to the center stage of local and national policy debates: policing; mass incarceration; the role of prosecutors; protests and surveillance; labor, work, and wealth; education reform and school discipline; health care reform and access; housing and environmental conditions; and voting rights.
This course explores three questions in the economics of education: What are the economic returns to education? How do people's valuations of education relate to economists' measures of returns? how are individuals' choices and educational outcomes mediated by information? We pay special attention to higher education policy and to choice-based reforms in K-12 education. Do these reforms 'work?' If not, why not? Topics include signaling and human capital theories, valuation of school quality, charter/magnet schools, and informational and financial frictions in higher education.
A study of essential methods of learning and teaching, including learner characteristics and needs, organization and structure of educational institutions, development of curriculum and instructional goals, preparation of evaluation and assessment, and design of subject/level specific methodologies and classroom management techniques. Required course work includes 18 hours of site-based field experience and evening laboratory sessions. Students should have one morning of unscheduled time available each week to allow for school visits. The course is open to any student who has an interest in teaching.
TPP 404 is a 175-hour assignment as a student teacher in a local middle or high school, with approximately 20 hours of clinical work per week over 12 weeks. Students assume increasing control of instruction with the support of a host teacher, and the experience culminates with the design and delivery of a small unit of instruction. Assignments include research on the classroom and school context and an analysis of the unit of instruction taught in the final weeks of the semester. The objectives of the course focus on the role of classroom context in the teaching and learning process; instructional planning; and teacher reflection.
Seminar taken concurrently with Practice Teaching (TPP 406). Students investigate the processes of curriculum development and implementation, develop learning goals and rubrics for assessment, study national and local issues in education and their impact on schools, examine current philosophies and effective practices, reflect on their work and evaluate their performance as practice teachers.
Supervised practice teaching (a minimum of 12 weeks) in a secondary school. Teaching is done under the supervision of an accomplished teacher and a program staff member who regularly observe and discuss the student's practice teaching. Students gain firsthand experience in developing teaching strategies, planning and implementing instruction, assessing student learning, and classroom management. Must be taken concurrently with TPP 405.