The graduate level Early Childhood/Elementary Teacher Licensure Programs hold a social justice perspective towards education, curriculum, and teaching. From this perspective, the purpose of education is to promote a democratic society based on principles of social justice and economic equity. Schools and education should be laboratories for democracy, where adults and children learn together to raise questions about issues and problems, both of a cognitive and social-critical nature, and they work together to find the answers to those problems.
We, the Elementary Education Faculty, believe that people learn by constructing their own knowledge in relationship with other more knowledgeable people in the context of authentic activity. We believe that knowledge is a social construction, and that knowledge reflects biases, interests, and power that underlie relations between individuals and between groups.
A basic task of education is to support students' abilities and dispositions to analyze experiences as they relate to justice and equity issues, and then to take action to address injustices or problems in that experience.
We perceive teachers as the more knowledgeable others who seek to engage the learner in activity that is culturally sensitive, meaningful, authentic, and educational. We intend for our students to become citizens who have the strategies and dispositions to identify problems and issues that are important to them and their communities and then to work systematically and responsibly towards solutions to those problems. Basically, we want our students to become citizens who participate in the political life of their communities in an intelligent and compassionate manner.
In our programs, you will learn to
