Graduate Teacher Preparation

Sample Courses

Children with Special Gifts and Needs
This course addresses several special needs areas including: gifted education, special education and diverse ethnic and cultural issues. Class participants consider curricular designs for meeting diverse students’ needs.

Educational Foundations
This course surveys the social, philosophic and historical traditions that have shaped American education. Issues of diversity and inequality are explored, as are the social, political and moral dimensions of classrooms, teaching and schools.

Elementary Methods: Mathematics I
The emphasis is on how people think mathematically in schools and in society. Students focus on mathematics as a holistic cultural experience and design realistic integrated curricula in which mathematics can serve an essential role.

Human Development
Effective instruction is dependent upon teachers' knowledge of the students they teach. This course investigates:

• Specific theorists and themes in human development

• Possibilities for individual change

• Complexities of an individual's life at any given time

• Influences of environment, culture and schooling

Students explore development from diverse schools of thought — behavioral, psychoanalytic, social, contextual and cognitive theories — and from several dimensions of experience, including physical, emotional, social, moral, cognitive, aesthetic and spiritual.

K–8 Methods: Integrating the Arts
What are current perspectives about blending arts such as dance, drama, music and visual art into academic disciplines? How can the two create synergy, motivation and deep understanding of the interlinking concepts, skills and knowledge of each to help empower the learner? How does the creative process transform the classroom? Integrating the Arts explores these questions with methods that are a lively fusion of practice, theory and possibility, all grounded in an experiential context.

Multicultural Education
This course acquaints pre-service teachers with the theories, domains and possibilities of multicultural education in schools. Diverse interactions with educational organizations and other human services systems form the basis for exploring comparative race, class and gender issues. Students focus on culture as the basis of meaning-making and multicultural education as the basis for teaching all children.