This course is a "bottom-up" history of education seminar on African Americans' struggle for equal education during the civil rights movement. As "bottom up" history, the course explores and seeks out overlooked and untold stories of youth and teacher activism. The course will include learning how to do oral history and engagement with the local community.

Inequalities persist at every level of education. Throughout this course we will study innovations designed to address these disparities. We will investigate the process by innovations are designed and will critically assess the efficacy of a wide range of innovations. The course will feature numerous guest speakers involved in innovation design and implementation, including leaders in the private, educational, and government sectors.

In this course, we explore the question, "How do we grow and change throughout our lives?" Using a topical approach, students will learn how biological, psychological, and social processes evolve from birth through late adulthood. We will examine how individual and environmental factors influence development and critically examine our beliefs about what it means to "grow up."

This course examines adolescent learning and development and is designed for students who plan to teach in secondary schools. Adolescent cognitive, physical, and social development is considered from a multi-level (e.g., school, family, community) perspective. In identifying links between these domains and learning, three themes emerge: individual variability and diversity, developmental trends, and translating educational research to practice.

Most college students have spent 16,000+ hours in educational settings. That's a lot of time devoted to learning new information. This course addresses questions such as: Why does learning take so long? What really happens inside the brain? What keeps people motivated to learn? Are some environments better than others for learning? What societal conditions impact learning? Are people similar or different in the way they learn?

In this course, we will explore whether innovations intended to improve outcomes for children and youth "work." How can we judge whether a particular approach is more effective, efficient, sustainable or just than present solutions? This class is a chance to better understand how to use evidence in the process of developing effective social innovations.

Will civil discourse save democracy or deepen oppression? Why does speech matter so much to political struggles? What does it mean for political dialogue to be successful? This course integrates theory with practice as students engage in political dialogue, then draw on their experiences, primary source research, the popular press and political theory to analyze the relationship between political dialogue and democracy.

In this course we will cover theories, methods, and research at the intersection of education and neuroscience and the implications of this work for educational practice. Major topics include research on student development in reading and math, as well as the development of foundational skills that support student learning, including executive functions, emotion regulation, and motivation.

Psychological and social development during adolescence are affected by multiple factors, such as biological, social and cultural changes, and larger macrosystem influences. We will examine how these influences shape development generally during the 2nd and 3rd decades of life. We will explore questions of identity, relationships, health and culture by considering key questions that adolescents explore such as "Who am I," and "Where am I going?"

Is it inevitable that classrooms and schools look similar across the world? Why have modern education systems been adopted by societies with a diversity of local histories, cultures, and resources? This course examines the effort to increase access to modern Western schooling, explores countervailing conceptions of education, and considers what is gained and lost in modern schooling.