Course Descriptions

Additional teaching experience detailed in full CV.

Economic and racial inequality have always been defining characteristics of the U.S. school system. The intersection of racial and economic segregation is particularly damaging for young people who are denied adequate educational resources by a highly stratified economy, a slim social safety net, and institutional racism. Among other causes, parents’ decisions about and roles in their children’s schooling are an important factor in the perpetuation of educational inequality. This module seeks to understand how inequality is (re)produced through complex, and often opaque, intersections between social structure, culture, and individual agency and decision-making. To do so, we 1) deconstruct how parents’ relationships with schools are constrained or enabled by social, political, and economic factors and 2) examine how parents’ identities – including but not limited to gender, race, class, and national origin – influence the decisions they make about their children’s schooling. We rely on critical lens to interrogate the role of race, class, gender, and power in these processes, drawing on empirical work in education, sociology, and anthropology. Because childcare and managing children’s schooling remains gendered work still carried out mostly by women, we examine how gendered expectations affect parental orientations towards schools. The class relies on discussion, with flexible assignments designed to accommodate a diverse range of interests and goals related to research and practice, including doctoral and master’s students. Through building a community of learners and engaging deeply with theoretical and empirical literature, this class will illuminate the power and potential of parents as individual decision-makers within our collective quest for more equitable, just systems of education.

It is possible to spend a lifetime studying questions of race, racism, and ethnicity in education and still have more to read and write and do. Our aim is to introduce you to some of the theoretical lenses and empirical cases that help make sense of how questions of racial and ethnic identity, racist power, and racial inequalities impact our schools and our communities. We hope these texts engage you personally and intellectually, though we know that each of us comes to this course with a different set of lived experiences, perspectives, and aspirations. We are eager to dive in together and to learn in community alongside you throughout the course.

* Co-taught with Dr. Daphne Penn

In this course, students will engage with a spectrum of school reform efforts in the United States. Making use of a diverse array of text and media, students will engage in conversations regarding the promise of education as a tool for learning, critical consciousness, and remedying inequalities as well as the stubborn reality that schools too often reflect and reproduce societal injustices. The structure of the course session and activities prompts students to learn about and experience challenges that students and teachers face in the classroom as well as alternative educational possibilities.  Working both collaboratively and individually, students will explore scholarship and cases in educational anthropology, sociology, history, and critical theory, while questioning the purposes, processes, and products of schooling.

Building a community within this class among students and the instructor is central for mutual learning support and debate. Students will have opportunities to explore their own educational experiences. This course is designed to foster a learning stance that centers critical hope and engages with the ideal that communities can organize to define and demand a humanizing, liberatory education.