Message from our Department Chair

A NOTE FROM THE CHAIR:  DOCTORAL EDUCATION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Welcome to the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where our primary mission is to prepare graduate students for positions as university professors, testing and measurement specialists, researchers, evaluators, and counseling psychologists. As noted in a recently published collection of essays sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education, preparing graduate students for the twenty-first century means more than simply helping them acquire the depth of knowledge that comes from carefully studying a discipline and developing their ability to do independent research to solve theoretical and practical problems in education.

Graduate education also means learning to be a critical thinker with the capacity to thoughtfully scrutinize one’s ideas and those of one’s peers. It means learning to work productively in interdisciplinary teams to tackle complex social problems that are not solvable through the conceptual or methodological resources of a single discipline. It means being able to convey to a variety of audiences the social value of the kind of knowledge one is acquiring. It means learning to practice with the kind of moral sensitivity, moral awareness, and the capacity for moral-practical reasoning demanded in a multicultural, global society. It means developing a sympathetic and appreciative methodological outlook, recognizing the value of studying the social and educational world through multiple methods. It involves learning the obligations of a professional to the wider public, exploring issues of what the knowledge we acquire in graduate education is for. It means learning how to produce the kind of high quality scholarship that influences educational practice and advances the fields of educational research.

This is what we are about here in the Department of Educational Psychology and in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We offer broadly based and individually tailored programs of study. Through courses, weekly brownbag seminars, one-on-one meetings with professors, participation in research teams, and teaching assistant opportunities we aim to create the conditions that foster the development of intellectually engaged, creative, inventive, graduate students who will enter professional careers and over time help shape for the better those professions of which they become a part.

Come join us in the venture. Explore what we have to offer here in the department and the college. Please contact us at edpsy@uiuc.edu or 1-888-843-3779 to discuss your interests and how we might be the place for your graduate study.

Thomas A. Schwandt
Professor and Chair, Department of Educational Psychology