Global Perspective: Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning Environments

In an increasingly interdependent world well prepared educators will move beyond nationalist perspectives to deeply examine global perspectives about how to be an effective teacher, what constitutes a valued and engaging curriculum, and how learning occurs across environments. This course will challenge students to move beyond what is familiar to consider and perhaps adopt new perspectives that will benefit the learners they serve.

Curriculum Theories, Practice, and Designs

The overarching objective for Curriculum Theories and Practice is to help course participants develop and clarify their philosophy of education, in particular, their beliefs regarding the purposes and processes of effective and equitable curricular organization. To do so, the class explores varied ways of conceptualizing a school curriculum, drawing on insights from major curriculum designers, both past and present, U.S. and international. Aiming to help course participants to thrive in the current, volatile educational and political climate, students will consider various approaches to multicultural education, anti-racist education, and inclusion practices that aim to transform the curriculum, attending to the needs of all students and overtly promoting equitable outcomes. In doing so, students will enact alternative strategies for assessment that provide multiple and authentic measures of student learning. Ultimately the course intends to help students consider how school curricula can be structured to promote social justice.

Globalization, Mobility, and Education

This course address political economic issues related to migration and education. Drawing on the anthropology of globalization and sociology of immigration, the course reviews major theories of immigrant incorporation and exclusion processes in schools, examines case studies of im/migrants, refugees, and displaced persons and their adaptation processes in countries in the Global North and the Global South, and considers educational practices and policies that develop to address mobility in diverse contexts. The course asks how cultural, social, political, and economic factors influence im/migrant incorporation, and how educators can facilitate im/migrant students' opportunities for learning through changes in policies, pedagogies, and curricula.

History of Jesuit Pedagogy

This three-credit, graduate-level online course examines the distinctiveness of the Jesuits' approaches to teaching and of their philosophy of education that have propelled their schools to unprecedented success over the centuries. One key to the unprecedented success of Jesuit education has been the tension between the recognizable mark of uniformity that long distinguished the methods, contents, and practices of Jesuit schools and their ability to adapt to different contexts and times. Both aspects—the uniformity and the adaptability—were explicitly supported by the "Ratio studiorum", the Jesuits' foundational plan of studies issued in 1599, which, despite the schools' many variations and complexities, has retained some influence over time. With the "Ratio" discarded, Jesuit schools had to clarify what made them distinctively Jesuit, reconciling their mission with the contemporary world. This three-credit, graduate-level class sketches the developments of Jesuit educational endeavors by focusing on both the permanent and changing traits of its distinctive pedagogy.

Social Justice in Jesuit Contexts

The Social Apostolate of the Society of Jesus has developed in a variety of ways over the centuries according the diverse contexts where Jesuits have operated as agents of "social justice." The course is designed to foster deep and meaningful conversation among students. It will include individual and collective readings and video-conferences with leaders and teachers of Jesuit schools around the world, deepening students' knowledge of current practices and stimulating dialogue.

Models of Teaching and Learning in Catholic Education

This course will examine past, current, and potential future models of Catholic schooling. Special attention will be given to the philosophical and historical foundations of Catholic schooling and how these foundations are lived out in pedagogical and curricular approaches used in contemporary Catholic primary and secondary schools. Additional time will be spent in analyzing how Catholic educational models are evolving to continue to carry out the mission of Catholic education in changing contexts.

Transforming the Field of Catholic Education

This course explores the history, purpose, current status, and possible futures of Catholic elementary and secondary schools. Students will become conversant with the body of scholarly literature, theoretical and empirical, that defines the field of Catholic education. Though the primary focus will be on Catholic schools in the United States, the course will explore how we can learn from the experience of other religiously affiliated schools here and abroad, and from the experience of Catholic educators worldwide. Special attention will be devoted to how the Ignatian spirituality and pedagogy can be a resource for educators in Jesuit and non-Jesuit schools.