Undergraduate Teacher Preparation

Sample Course Descriptions

Literature: Exploring Lives Through Story
Students explore personal influences in the understanding of Americans by reading a variety of fictional stories and memoirs, listening to oral tales and writing personal stories. Selected readings broaden students' understanding of how personal narrative shapes and stimulates the American collective consciousness. As students find themselves captivated by the story, they are encouraged to integrate multiple and diverse voices through story in their classrooms. Students work on a collaborative project where they develop an instructional plan to bring a story unit into their future classrooms.

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.

The Joy of Writing
This course is intended to give the future teacher extensive experience in written composition. This class approaches writing as "a way of knowing and understanding the world" by requiring students to compose in a variety of genres.

Teaching Social Studies
Students learn to view social studies as a central interdisciplinary aspect of the curriculum that addresses the student as a present and future world citizen in a multicultural world. Attention is given to teaching methods that foster conceptual learning, inquiry and creativity.

Health, Fitness and Safety Education
This course surveys curricular scope and sequence concepts in health and physical education as well as appropriate instructional and assessment methods.

Mathematics I
This course, the first of a two-quarter sequence, involves the study of mathematics content for elementary and middle school teachers, and prepares students for courses in the methods of teaching K-8 mathematics. Based on national and state standards for school mathematics, the courses focuses on concepts, skills, and processes of number sense and algebraic sense with emphasis on problem solving and communication. Students use hands-on materials to solve problems as they develop stronger personal understandings of concepts such as number systems, place value, computation, patterns and relationships. A major focus of this course is to explore ways in which mathematics is an integral part of life and is accessible to all learners.

Classroom Management & Practice
In this course, students explore a broad range of management and discipline theories and strategies from the perspectives of researchers, administrators, teachers and others. Students examine the values and beliefs inherent within each system, especially as they pertain to populations that traditionally fare poorly in the public schools.