Courses

This course provides a survey of economics principles within both microeconomics and macroeconomics. It introduces students to the basic economic concepts that are fundamental to understanding economic observations in daily life, such as supply, demand, price, market equilibrium, national income, unemployment, inflation, economic growth, international trade, and so on. Through discussions of contemporary economic issues and policies, students will learn how households and firms make decisions under certain economic systems, how individual markets and the national and international economy operate, and how government policies affect economic outcomes.

This course examines various ways of studying, knowing, and understanding information and experience. It focuses on the axiomatic (or formal deductive), philosophical, historical, observational (or empirical), imaginative expressive, and interpretive paradigms of discovery and understanding. As a result of taking this course, students will understand the assumptions that underlie the various ways of inquiring used within and across disciplines, understand that every mode of inquiry has its own strengths and limitations in the exploration of a given question or problem, be able to sustain a line of argument using one or more modes of inquiry, and be able to articulate the commonalities and/or differences among various modes of inquiry.

Continuing development of the fundamental aspects of modern French as in FRN 101, with more emphasis on vocabulary/ expressions and grammatical structures.

This course introduces students to the core concepts, processes and issues of international relations. The goal of this course is to help students develop the intellectual tools to understand the complex international system in which we live. The first segment of this course introduces students to key concepts and theories used in the study of international relations allowing students to better understand the causes of international conflict and cooperation. The rest of the term is spent applying these concepts to better understand the challenges of international security, international political economy, and other global issues.

This course explores the historical and contemporary issues of peace studies (including economic, national/ethnic identity, religious, ideological, security and other aspects), and it continues with a post-Cold War emphasis on the possibilities for nonviolent ways of dealing with conflict and for lasting peace in the future. It examines the internal/personal and interpersonal sources of conflict in daily life and introduces such topics as “cultures of peace.” Topics explored include grassroots peace movements, nonviolence, international law and NGOs, peacekeeping and peacemaking, the role of individual peacemakers in their local communities, and current research in the field of peace studies.

This course considers the role ethics and philosophy play in how wo/man relates to her and his human and natural environment. The central themes of the course are the relationship between human centered and nature centered views of the universe and wo/man’s responsibility for the care of the universe. Philosophies considered include but are not limited to Anthropocentrism, Confucianism, Taoism, Aristotelianism, Humanism, Transcendentalism, American Indian, EcoFeminism and Deep Ecology.

This interdisciplinary course will focus on the molecular biology of cancer and the underlying chemistry of cell biology. Students will learn how proteins are encoded and the impact of genomic instability on protein structure and function; alterations of normal metabolism in cancer cells; and basic pathways of cell division and death. Complementary chemistry topics include chemical structure and bonding, biological polymerization, thermodynamics, enzyme kinetics, and redox reactions. Laboratory research will use model systems to understand cancer biology. Prevents co- or later enrollment in BIO 115 and BIO 130.

Aims at further developing students’ French language proficiency in the six aspects of listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and cultural understanding.

Continuation of FRN 201, while further enhancing students’ proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and cultural understanding. Relevant linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural information to prepare students for Study Abroad programs is included.

This course will examine embedded views of the relationship between humans and their environments in the context and function of music in different times and cultures. Music is both commonly a means of the most profound communication between humans and nature, and embodies cultural understanding and expression of the relationship, humans place in nature. Readings will include examination of music cultures, the expressed views and philosophies of the people in those music cultures, and studies of the ecological systems and ecological impacts of human actions where those people live.

From Heraclitus on, the concept of nature has proven to be unique in its ability to expand imagination, stimulate thought, and articulate disagreement. This class will place major texts in the traditions of natural philosophy, pastoral, and cultural critique alongside contemporary interventions, including arguments for the ecology without nature. Our goal is to rethink nature in response to the technological mastery of all life made possible by the advancement of science. The texts to be studied include Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Lucretius, Virgil, Rousseau, Diderot, Thoreau, Darwin, Dennett and Will Self. 

This introductory course asks students to evaluate the centrality of slavery to the history of the United States. We examine how the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of the continent affected the development of capitalism, governments, and cultures in the US. Developing these themes entails comparisons across places and time periods. The course identifies a nascent global system, comparing the US with selected locations in South America, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Students make comparisons of the past and the present, seeking to understand how the era of slavery constructed race formations and other legacies for the contemporary world. Throughout, students gain an introductory narrative of American economic and political history and acquire an introduction to empirical methods, critical theory, and current scholarship.

This course examines the role of cultural institutions and ideas in the forming of the American mind from 1865 to the end of the twentieth century. It explores the influence of native progressive traditions as well as European social thought on modern American thinkers from across the political spectrum. Readings from W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Addams, Henry George, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Lionel Trilling, Ayn Rand, Richard M. Weaver, Richard Rorty, William F. Buckley, and others.

Physical Geography is the science of the physical environment on Earth. This includes fundamental principles, processes, and perspectives from three major subject areas: (1) atmosphere and weather, (2) biogeography, and (3) geology and landforms. In this field- and laboratory based course, students will gain knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of our planet.

The course examines the historical development of educational thought and practice in the West from the early Greeks to the present, focusing on the theme of humanism – its interpretation by the early Greeks, its reformulation in the Christian era, its eclipse and later revival during the Renaissance and its tenuous existence in the age of the modern and pre-modern state (1600-1900). Students will read from the works of such writers as Plato, Dante, Pico Della Mirandola, Erasmus, Vico, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Rousseau.

This course will examine three central questions of the stage: What are the literary and cultural origins of the theater? How does an actor relate to the written word? How can the actor influence the audience? To investigate these questions, the course will provide basic training in theater exercises for motion, speech, and concentration, in-class discussion and performance of plays, and analysis of both Eastern and Western philosophical ideas of the theater.

This course traces Ecocinema as an evolving field of environmental activism at a time when the threat of anthropocentric climate change has captured our global environmental consciousness. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Film, Ecocinema originated in the mid 1990s and “explores the historical, formal, political, and ethical aspects of the relationship between cinema, the natural world, and nonhuman animals.” How have wildlife and nature documentaries changed over time? How are documentaries different from fiction films or animated films in conveying environmental content? In this introductory-level course, students will be exposed to a multitude of environmental topics via engaging filmic content while also learning to critically analyze filmmakers’ intentions and to identify different filmmaking techniques and styles.

This course examines the modern theories of the market system, demand and production, and the interactions between consumers and firms under various market conditions. Students learn how market forces determine prices, resource allocation, and income distribution. Students are also introduced to public policy evaluation and welfare economics.

This course introduces the factors that determine national income, employment, unemployment, inflation, and economic growth. The course also examines the tools of monetary and fiscal policy available to policy makers and the effects of policy on the economy.

This course is designed for students who are preparing to study abroad. It will enhance students’ oral fluency and comprehension in French while at the same time increase their own intercultural awareness. The target language of their study abroad, French, is used as a vehicle to promote and challenge students’ awareness of key concepts related to sociolinguistic and interculturality (e.g., essentialism, stereotyping, otherising). Each student will be invited to reflect on different types of intercultural encounters and how these encounters shaped or will shape them: real ones (from students’ own experiences meeting new people), mediated (through videos, narratives, readings), and improvised (through roles plays and improvisations).

The goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the great – popular and classical works – written in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Readings include the bawdy tales of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Cervantes; Dante’s great epic poem, Inferno (from “The Divine Comedy,”) Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, More’s Utopia, and Montaigne’s Essays. These timeless pieces have shaped and continue to shape the Western imagination from Shakespeare to James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. Attention is paid to the historical contexts although emphasis will be on genres and forms.

In this course, students are introduced to the analysis of financial assets and institutions. The course emphasizes modern asset pricing theory and the role of financial intermediaries, and their regulation in the financial system. Topics covered include net present value calculations, asset pricing theories, financial derivatives, the efficient market theory, the term structure of interest rates, and banking.

This course is a one-semester advanced language course primarily designed to further develop listening and speaking skills and to increase writing ability, with particular attention to advanced syntax and to vocabulary expansion. Class will be conducted entirely in French.

Designed to bring students to an advanced level of proficiency in grammar and composition, the course puts the emphasis on experiencing and producing the language in context through a multi-media approach. An intensive review of grammar is integrated into the writing practice. A good knowledge of basic French grammar is a prerequisite (French 202 or equivalent is recommended). Conducted entirely in French, the course will study selected grammatical difficulties of the French verbal and nominal systems including colloquial usage. It will also guide the students through the different rhetorical modes of writing in French. Class will be conducted entirely in French.

Experimental critical writing is a slippery genre that challenges and breaks down traditional genre distinctions, sidestepping and/or transforming conventional expository protocols. A hybrid form, experimental critical writing challenges disciplinary boundaries and borrows, as it pleases, from various genres – personal essay, historical writing, memoir, non-fiction, drama, diary, autobiography, fiction, reportage, poetry, rant, and manifesto. Exceeding genre and discipline boundaries, experimental critical writing produces new epistemologies not possible within forms bound by conventional constraints. This course will uncover some of the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “experimental critical writing;” explore emergent “alternative” theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the production of knowledge; blur the boundaries between disciplines, genres, the academic and non-academic; and consider what it means to produce new knowledge as a socially and ethically responsible global citizen.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

This course is an introduction to the design and implementation of public finance in high-income countries as well as in developing economies. Topics include the role and size of the public sector, rationale for public sector interventions (such as market failure and distributional concerns), issues of tax compliance and enforcement, tax reform, public expenditure policy (such as social protection programs), fiscal balance and deficit financing, fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations. Students will apply these theories in order to critically evaluate current policy issues in areas of education, health care, environment, and welfare reform.

This interdisciplinary policy course examines the prevention and management of threats to human health caused by interacting environmental conditions and social forces. Major topics in this course include air and water pollution control, toxic substances control, climate change and environmental health, disease control, pandemics, public health emergency management, and public health leadership. This course covers public and environmental health policies at the community, national, and international levels.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

An introduction to species diversity, natural history, and ecological and evolutionary relationships of fishes. Emphasis on form and function, ecology, behavior, sensory modes, fishery management, global crises in fisheries, and marine protected areas. Laboratories include identification of major groups of fishes, methodology and experimental approaches to the study of fishes.

This is an intensive upper-division course designed for Humanities majors and non-majors who seek to prepare themselves to engage issues of graphic literacy in an increasingly visual global and professional culture. This course will pursue landmarks in the history of cinema and establish analytic vocabularies for interpreting film masterpieces as well as emerging visual technologies. Our curricular emphasis will be upon “film texts” of the highest artistic status. Our analytic emphasis will focus on (i) critical approaches to those texts and (ii) interpretive disputes carried out across the last century’s divergent critical viewpoints, now under siege by aesthetic and conceptual norms that seek consensus (hegemonic unity) in a world only recently opened to multiple cultural perspectives.

Visual rhetoric can be understood as visual argument (or an argument using images). This course encourages students to explore and write about non-traditional forms of rhetoric drawing from a wealth of topics related to film genres, ancient rhetorical genres and film studies. This is not a film appreciation course but rather, a writing and rhetoric course, which encourages students to engage with the way in which visual culture communicates and makes arguments. Each week, we will explore and write about a different film genre and its particular concerns. Our analyses of movies in this course will turn on the fundamental examination of how meaning is created through the power of artistic vision and visual technology.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

Environmental policies are social actions designed to protect the environment. This course examines the processes and consequences of policies for environmental protection. This course also examines the roles of leadership, laws, and organizations in environmental protection.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

This upper division course combines theory and policy application in studying environmental issues from an economist’s perspective. Major topics include theoretical and applied modeling of economy-environment relations, causes and consequences of market failure affecting environmental services, design and evaluation of environmental policy instruments, and the political economy of environmental policy. Students will learn to identify the economic components of an environmental issue, analyze the effects of human economic activity on the environment, and to present and discuss the pros and cons of various environmental policies.

This upper division course combines theory and policy application in studying environmental issues from an economist’s perspective. Major topics include theoretical and applied modeling of economy-environment relations, causes and consequences of market failure affecting environmental services, design and evaluation of environmental policy instruments, and the political economy of environmental policy. Students will learn to identify the economic components of an environmental issue, analyze the effects of human economic activity on the environment, and to present and discuss the pros and cons of various environmental policies.

In this course we examine “education” by looking beyond the typical setting of the school. Instead, we will consider education in the context of learning and culture. As scholars in history and anthropology have shown in recent decades, learning can be found in classrooms, families, churches, and public places. It can be thought of broadly as the process by which people acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, and skills. We will study the past as a deeply constitutive force in the present. Historians call this approach cultural history, anthropologists call it historical ethnography. Specific topics will include prominent and influential theories of pedagogy and learning as well as the historical and cultural dynamics of race and ethnicity in learning. Throughout we will keep the long history of education reform in – including contemporary initiatives. The course is a reading and writing intensive seminar, with students expected to complete an original research paper testing or applying principles discussed in class. 

Environmental law plays a critical role in the practice of environmental protection. This course provides a general introduction to environmental laws and legal processes at the national and international levels.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

The Americas were populated for millennia before European colonization transformed the hemisphere and the lives of its indigenous inhabitants. The descendants of these people live in many parts of North America – including Orange County, California. This seminar explores the histories and cultures of selected Native American peoples from Canada, Mexico, and the United States during selected eras from before colonization to the contemporary period. Reading current and classic scholarship on Native Americans and writing a research essay on a topic of the students’ choosing, students will acquire an understanding of the historical and cultural processes that have defined Native American lives.

This advanced course provides further instruction in Geographic Information Science and ArcGIS applications. It is geared towards making students more familiar with the geospatial career field through interaction with GIS employers, GIS professionals, and a conference attendance (when possible). Course topics include more in-depth vector and raster data analysis, terrain mapping, viewshed and watershed analysis, spatial interpolation, modeling, and some python programming.

This course focuses on case studies of the development and management of policies for environmental protection. These case studies allow a detailed examination of the practical challenges facing environmental managers and leaders today, and an examination of the possibilities for new approaches to environmental management and policy in the future.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

This course examines the processes and consequences of policies for environmental protection in an international and comparative context. The course focuses on the role of institutional processes, government organizations, and nongovernmental organizations in environmental politics and policy across the world.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

The goal of this course is twofold: to examine the evolution of Greek philosophy from the earliest known stages and explore the way in which philosophical and literary issues permeated and continues to permeate the work of contemporary thinkers and writers; and to provide a take on the antique world.

This course is designed to provide students with perspective on the impacts of exotic species, those organisms that are not native to a geographical area, primarily within Southern California but will also cover major invasions in the USA. The ecological, genetic, and evolutionary impacts of the invasions will be explored. Additionally, the management and control of exotic species will be discussed.

Biogeography is the science of the distribution of plants and animals and the patterns and processes responsible for these distributions. This course introduces students to the discipline of biogeography and its major topics such as island biogeography, speciation and extinction, diversification, and conservation from a more geographical perspective emphasizing large scale patterns through space and time. The class consists of lectures and labs in which students explore lab work and science concepts to prepare students for careers in the conservation and ecology fields. Students write three detailed lab reports following scientific writing conventions to practice science writing skills. 

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

Students learn experimental design, data collection, analysis, synthesis, and interpretation of data derived from field sampling and experiments in ecological studies. The class also covers data collection for impact assessment and environmental monitoring.

Media have a long history. The term refers to the means of encoding and transmitting information beyond its original setting. It covers all technologies of inscription, not only the latest ones: from rhyme and writing to the Internet and virtual reality. "Mediology" (or the science of the media) argues that transmission alters the nature of the message -- the world encoded is the world reconfigured to be otherwise than it used to be. Do media function as prosthetic enhancements of our senses? Or do they bend hearing, seeing and sensing into shapes that would never emerge in the first place? Does the experience of the media obscure the nature of their impact? Who is the media subject: Narcissus or Orpheus? In addition to classic theories of the media (Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Niklas Luhmann), this advanced seminar will also consider the emerging environmental media theories.

This course satisfies the advanced writing skills course requirement.

EDU 501 introduces first-year students to the main themes of the MA program, beginning with a critical inquiry into the dialectical relations of school and society. It examines social forces of change and persistence as the structural constraints, as well as the opportunities (for innovation and creativity, for example), within which schools, teachers, and administrators operate. Conversely, students study the generative results of school reform nationally and cross-nationally for the organization of society around the goals of education in general. Social structures – family, home, church, and community – educate no less than the school classroom and teacher. Through intensive readings and discussion, small-group projects, and weekly essays, the course, which takes place during the first Fall Block, asks students to reflect on ways in which the educational functions of school and society complement and oppose one another, foster needed changes, both in our schools and in the larger society, and impede them, protect valued traditions and act to destroy them. The need for leadership at all levels forces an examination as well of the types of leaders who in different societies and at different times have successfully brokered relations between schooling and societal change.

EDU 502 approaches educational leadership as the facilitation of a complex web of interconnections in which various actors, student and non-student alike, form together with the surrounding society a single ethnographic space for the production and contestation of meaning. Students study and analyze case studies of educational administration that inform and reflect a variety of surrounding cultures, each with its own unique norms and assumptions, historical evolution and guiding myths. The course utilizes firsthand accounts of the leadership experience in an effort to understand the world of leadership from the point of view of the leader and not simply of the outside observer. Taking place over the Winter Block, this course examines qualitative research methods that are descriptive, field-based, interpretive, and discovery-focused. A two-day long “shadowing” experience with local educational leaders, both school-based and non-school based, provides real-world opportunities for experiential learning and investigation.

EDU 503 examines the social, historical, and philosophical foundations of contemporary schooling. The course explores the metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and political problems that educational philosophers have grappled with for centuries in their efforts to answer the question: What knowledge is most worth having? Beginning with the classical texts of Socrates and Confucius and concluding with such modern theorists of education as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Jean Piaget, and the Japanese educator, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, the course traces the changing relations of theory and practice, philosophy and rhetoric, speculative thought and applied knowledge in the historical evolution of education worldwide. Systems of thought variously described as positivistic, naturalistic, holistic, historicist, humanist, constructivist, empirical, relativistic and pragmatic have provided the basis for extensive argument and discussion in the social sciences, humanities, and more recently education. The course makes a thorough study of these and other ideas in the early development and contemporary expression of the history and philosophy of education and leadership.

EDU 504 introduces students to the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological questions and concerns that have animated scholarship and practice in the field of comparative and international education from its mid-twentieth century beginnings. While students consider the history of borrowing and lending educational ideas and best practices, the primary focus of the course is contemporary. Seminal questions to be examined: How do ‘global’ economic forces impact K-18 education? What are the transnational concerns surrounding culture? Who are the actors and institutions that educate for 21st century Learning? Course topics may include the internationalization of higher education; international testing regimes; neoliberalism and its varied reform motivations, meanings, and structures; and a constellation of counter-discourse developments attached to education for sustainable development and educational wholeness. These seminal questions provide the opportunity to pursue fundamental questions of purpose, theory, method, and various empirical logics in international and cross-national inquiry in educational policy studies.

EDU 505 explores the theory and practice of leadership across a variety of cultures, genre, perspectives, and individual cases, where the kind and degree of leadership is essential for achieving educational objectives that promote peaceful human development. The history of modern thought about leadership is one of debate about the most effective ways of influencing behavior, whether for the sake of individual happiness or to bring about beneficial societal change. Nowhere is this problem felt perhaps more acutely than in schools and other educational institutions, where students, educators and, administrators form the nucleus of a socialization process the outcome of which affects all of us. As aspiring educational leaders and administrators, students conduct research on the most challenging and controversial issues within school systems, familiarize themselves with research-supported best practices in school leadership, and become intelligent consumers of research as it impacts the theory and practice of leadership generally. Course topics include Leadership Development; Effective School Leadership; School Reform and Restructuring; Organizational Development; Curricular Administration and Student Achievement; Resource Management; Preparing to be a School Leader; and Effective Professional Development.

EDU 506 examines movements of democratic change, historical as well as contemporary, that have resulted over time in new institutional and organizational forms that in turn contribute to shaping the educational process. Political democracy describes a tension between individual rights and community responsibilities, between freedom and equality – and the resolution of those tensions through peaceful, democratic means. Students study the process of organizational change under conditions of democratic rule, in which in theory decision-making is a transaction among and between competing group, institutional, and individual interests. The course introduces students to the work of such early and contemporary democratic theorists as Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Archon Fung and Erik Olin, Lawrence Goodwyn, and Christopher Lasch. Course topics include the role and function of teacher unions; setting academic standards in a democracy; the limits and possibilities of classroom and workplace democracy; excellence and inclusion; school choice; problems of democratic elitism; and building a democratic movement culture in our schools.

EDU 507 introduces a critical and pragmatic examination of leadership through key legal and policy contexts that govern daily and long-range ethical decision-making by educational leaders. The course examines the law and policies that govern educational organizations in relation to the cultural, social, economic and political standards embodied in state and federal codes, case law, and the policies that educational leaders encounter in their day-to-day work. Addressing the following seminal questions, the course takes a two pronged approach of law and the policies it produces framed by the ethical educational leader: Whose right to an education? What does it mean to be educated within policies and laws? How should we think about school, success, and opportunity in a democratic society? What is the pragmatic stance for the ethical school leader with educational policy? Law and policy development is undergirded by the relationship between a leader’s values and decision making.

EDU 508 is a first-year graduate-level survey of quantitative and mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research methods commonly found in educational studies. The general content base of this course is twofold: 1) research planning and design and 2) data analysis and reporting. Through reading published empirical research, as well as class activities and discussion, students will recognize the theoretical, practical, and sociocultural constraints on all parts of educational research, from questions and design to analysis and interpretation. Students gain an understanding of common and differentiating features of typical research designs; ethical, legal, and diversity considerations in research studies in education; descriptive statistics and basic inferential statistics including measures of central tendency, dispersion, correlations, and group comparisons; basic measurement concepts including validity and reliability and the role of measurement in inquiry; planning and integration techniques for mixed methods analysis; and quality indicators in published research.

Students work on their MA Thesis Proposal under the supervision of a principle faculty advisor, building on the knowledge base acquired in EDU 502 and 508 to equip students with the research skills they will need to complete their MA Thesis. Work includes evaluating the quality of published research; discussing the implications of various studies in view of the strengths and weaknesses of the research; and using library-based secondary and primary sources in addition to online sources as tools for conducting and/or evaluating research studies.

EDU 512 takes advantage of the Winter Block to bring to campus a series of distinguished practitioners – leaders who have made a discernible difference in a school, a district, at the state and/or national level to advance humanistic, community-based education and learning – to explore with students the special themes and concerns of the MA Program in Educational Leadership and Societal Change. Five to six visiting practitioners rotate through the class for two days at a time over a three and a half week long seminar designed to provide the benefits of time and place-tested professional judgement and experience, including insights into the special challenges to successful and effective educational leadership not only as it impacts schools but the entire society.

EDU 513 examines the issues and trends surrounding what schools teach and why. Central to the course is the student viewpoint that examines how young people at various levels of schooling experience the curriculum. By examining historical and current debates on what an educated citizen should look like, what a general education is for, and what kind of education is most worth having, students form and articulate their own views on these considerations. The course introduces the basics of curriculum mapping and planning, while also exploring the dynamics of the curriculum-making process at institutional levels – who or what decides which courses will be taught, selects the material to be taught, and sets proficiency standards for achievement. Over the course of the class, students engage with common themes from curriculum research such as the professionalization of teaching and the teacher-proofing of the curriculum; cultural conflicts and the impacts on curriculum making and choice; the hidden versus the explicit curriculum; how access to the curriculum is impacted by class, race, and gender; the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge; standardized learning for standardized testing; and textbooks and the consumption model of education.

EDU 515 explores the psychology of learning with a focus on how theoretical and empirical knowledge about human cognition, emotion, and attitudes can be applied in schools and other educational settings. As an interdisciplinary blend of psychology and education, it necessarily addresses both theoretical and practical issues. As a branch of psychology, it investigates the science of human behavior, especially the behaviors connected to motivation and learning. As education, it emphasizes practice and applied knowledge that inspires positive individual development and social change. Students gain an understanding of key concepts in the areas of human development, learning theory, and motivation; explore applications of concepts in contemporary educational settings through case studies and other activities; and consider contemporary issues in the field from various individual perspectives and cultural contexts.

EDU 517 offers a critical review of types, purposes, procedures, uses, and limitations of assessment strategies and techniques. Students are introduced to emerging trends in assessment, various assessment techniques and models, and how the assessment process is used to evaluate individuals, programs, and institutions. Students consider how to determine appropriate assessment tools for different educational contexts, and how to recognize the implications of these assessment decisions for social justice and social change. Students gain not only the assessment competencies they will need as educational leaders but the communicative skills to convey the results of assessment to their publics clearly and effectively, helping build support for schools and for initiatives that educators wish to carry out. As a final class assignment each student writes an assessment report, utilizing concepts and tools learned in the course.

Students spend the last semester of the Program preparing and completing their MA Thesis under the supervision of a principle faculty advisor.