Social Foundations of Teaching and Learning

Catalog description

Teaching and learning are social phenomena that reflect and inform the aims, anxieties, and conflicts of the social contexts within which they unfold. Engagements in thoughtful and effective educational research and practice demand nuanced understandings of the complicated and evolving relationships between educational enterprises and the societies that shape them. In this course, we will examine the social foundations of teaching and learning. Specifically, through a series of theoretical lenses, we will question how social formations like democracy, capitalism, race, feminism, and networked publics have attempted to define the goals and substance of educational endeavors. Additionally, we will consider the implications of the social foundations of teaching and learning for our own work as educational scholars and practitioners.