Learning & Education Studies: Educational Equality & Cultural Understanding

Overview

Educational Equality & Cultural Understanding will prepare students to better understand the role of education in enabling equality and cultural understanding in domestic and international perspectives.  Focusing on equality, diversity, and cultural understanding will give students a unique perspective on the historical place of education in both challenging inequities and helping to justify social divisions.  Understanding how education as an institution operates to perpetuate social and economic stratification will give students a perspective on the challenges of creating a more equitable distribution of education.  Classes will cover a wide range of disciplinary approaches, including history, social science, educational policy analysis, and theory.  Students will understand the contemporary and historical barriers to the distribution of education and examine recent human rights-based demands for extending education to people of all social classes, regions, ethnicity, language groups, and genders.

Students in this concentration will:

• Apply their basic understanding of such processes to more local and detailed contexts, like shifts in the U.S. that have extended public schooling and higher education opportunities to historically marginalized populations such as people of color, immigrants, women and citizens from low socioeconomic status
• Understanding the role of education in fostering the expansion of universal human rights will enable students interested in international business and NGOs to explore the problems and potentials of policies intent on improving conditions in the United States and abroad
• Cover basic definitions of educational justice and educational equality, survey international minorities in the United States or minorities in other countries in relationship to education, and explore political, economic, and social contexts for education 

Who should apply

Undergraduate students who want to:

• Understand how principles of learning can be applied in the classroom, at work and home, and diverse settings of daily life
• Acquire flexible problem solving skills that can be broadly applied in diverse contexts
• Prepare for a wide range of jobs that involve designing, analyzing, and evaluating learning environments, as teachers, policy makers, analysts, and professionals in government, healthcare, business, and nonprofit organizations

Programs Offered

• On Campus Bachelor of Science (BS)