700

One of Simon Blackburn’s (1999) three arguments for why philosophy is important is that the act of reflection or its absence impacts human action. This certainly applies to a wide variety of vocational spaces within the field of education. This course pursues the reflection – practice connection through a study of classical (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Dewey) and contemporary (e.g., Nel Noddings, Maxine Greene, Jane Roland Martin, Richard Rorty) readings in philosophy of education.

This course will establish a critical theoretical orientation to leadership and develop an understanding of the politicized nature of leadership. An activist stance toward leadership will be examined by exploring human rights as a way of life and how leaders come to demonstrate their social, moral and political agency as they resist the status quo and promote equity and social justice.

The aim of this course is to familiarize students with the major theoretical traditions in social science and to develop an appreciation of the diverse forms of knowledge included within social science. The course will introduce students to the major epistemological stances and theoretical perspectives that shape current social research as well as the philosophical origins of these schools of inquiry.

Following Bernard Williams’ (1985) distinction between ethics and morality in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, this course examines the social aspects of leadership in moral terms using major writers in the tradition of political philosophy. Students will examine the philosophical texts that argue for and question social justice as an orientation in education leadership. This course aims to ground a critical approach to educational leadership in philosophical texts.

Building on, yet going beyond typical discourses in diversity and education, this course examines a variety of theoretical schools of thought for the purpose of deepening understandings of cultural difference. These understandings will then be applied to the educative process in an effort to address marginalization and oppression.

This course is designed to assist students in formulating, reformulating and pursuing their own theoretically informed research. Students will explore relevant bodies of literature that will inform their research, begin to navigate the process of crafting their inquiry and clearly articulate ways in which their proposed research will serve social justice.

This course is built on the belief that both pedagogy and assessment should be used as tools of liberation. Following Peter McLaren, Joe Kincheloe and Paulo Freire (among others), it uncovers ways in which both pedagogy and assessment are complicit in the oppression of some groups and individuals and then examines approaches for teaching and learning that enables students to both navigate and challenge social realities.

This course is designed to build a theoretical underpinning for critical qualitative research, which will include examining what is meant by critical epistemology. As this theoretical base is built, students will also begin to examine and put into practice the tasks of critical qualitative research.

This course examines social and philosophical foundations of curriculum. It takes the position that curriculum as what students learn, and the decisions made to determine it, are never neutral, and thus must be considered from the values and beliefs that make curricular programs rational. This course assumes a strong knowledge of the historical aspects of curriculum but seeks to understand the function of curriculum theoretically.

In this course, students will deepen their understanding of current school laws and legal issues. Critical legal theory will also be explored which asserts the law is a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize the injustices of society.

This course attempts to critically examine globalization and its confluence with education from a Lasallian perspective. It considers the connection between globalization and education at a general level to begin with, then move to particular considerations within this confluence including popular culture, technology, postcolonialism, language and "marketization" (Apple, 2005).

This course is fundamentally a search for, and claim about, quality and can not be a value-neutral process. This course will approach program evaluation as a tool for social change where the values of social justice, equity and emancipation are promoted. Students will study democratic, participatory and critical theories of evaluation and explore the ethical dimensions of this work.

For more than three decades, the field of educational leadership has focused a great deal of attention on the problem of educational change, why teachers resist change and why it is difficult to diffuse innovations and "scale up" reforms beyond pilot projects. This course will take a different approach where students will examine current educational reforms in relation to the crisis of American democracy, develop a critical perspective on educational leadership and educational transformation and discuss what it takes to change the persistent patterns of differences in success among students grouped by race, ethnicity, culture, neighborhood, income of parents or home language.

In this course students examine schools as institutions from an organizational perspective. It surveys the field of organizational theory that has largely developed in business in order to better understand how schools function the way they do by turning to studies in business about organizational structure and culture. Students will develop the tools to look at organizational behavior from a variety of perspectives, which will provide a basis for understanding the status quo of any organization and the dynamics for change.

This course aims to make students familiar with the issues in policy studies and the literature that has developed to address those issues. In so doing, this course also aims to provide students with analytical tools for critically evaluating policy. Specifically, we will examine the ways in which schools intersect with the state and how interest groups and politics affect that intersection.

This course traces the development of schooling in the U.S. from the Common School Movement and its antecedents to the present. It focuses diachronically on the dominant discourse that has provided the structure of thought for conceiving education, as well as for historically and socially locating those at the margins of that discourse. Major movements and trends in education will therefore be considered in their social, economic and cultural contexts as a way to understand their "history."

This course examines a variety of quantitative research designs and data collection and statistical analysis procedures appropriate to each.

This course will support students in preparing, writing and defending their dissertation proposal.

Students will be supported by their Dissertation Director and committee during the year they are working on their dissertation. Course to be repeated for a total of six hours.

Students will be supported by their Dissertation Director and committee if their dissertation is not completed one year after the completion of their coursework. Students must enroll every semester until requirements for the Ed.D. are met.