(1-99) Primarily for Undergraduate Students

ED 10a Introduction to Teaching and Learning
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Priority enrollment given to first year and Education students. Cannot be taken for credit by students who have previously taken ED 100a or ED 100b.

A hands-on, interactive, and collaborative exploration of a host of introductory topics in teaching and learning. We’ll engage in and analyze teaching and learning strategies, zooming in on small teaching and learning moments (micro) and zooming out to understand how these represent big ideas in education (macro). We’ll reflect on our own experiences as students and imagine the experiences of students who are different from each of us. All of our work will be guided by the four themes of teacher education at Brandeis: Teaching for Social Justice; Teaching for Understanding; Teaching—and knowing—All Learners; and Teaching as Inquiry.

Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms. Usually offered every year.

ED 21a Reading Teens: Learning from Young Adult Literature
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Why YA? Young Adult literature isn’t always taken seriously, but it raises serious questions about crucial social issues. It wrestles with questions of identity and equity and what it means to be human. Plus, dragons. Voracious consumers of YA often don’t see themselves as “readers,” and yet they bring sophisticated strategies to their reading—strategies that could be leveraged for a lifetime of reading across genres. In this course we’ll explore a host of questions about the genre, including: What is it about YA lit that keeps teens reading? How might YA lit expand the traditional English curriculum in schools? What is the role of YA lit in the classroom and in students’ lives? What can we learn by leaning into YA lit? This course involves a LOT of reading—some of it scholarly, and much of it curl-up-on-the-couch delicious. Usually offered every second year.

ED 60a Supervised Fieldwork in Education

Prerequisite: Concurrent enrollment in one of the designated education courses that offers a fieldwork option. Yields half-course credit. Open to all, but required for students pursuing teaching licensure.

Through this course, students engage in supervised fieldwork in a classroom in order to apply what they are learning in Education courses and apprentice themselves to experienced educators. Students spend one full day or two half days (approximately 8 hours) per week assisting in a PK-12 classroom, under the guidance of an experienced host/mentor teacher. ED 60a students are expected to be very hands-on and engaged with PK-12 students, though they do complete observational assignments as well. All fieldwork students meet together several times over the course of the semester in order to share their written reflections and learn from each others’ experiences. Usually offered every semester.

ED 75b Waltham Speaks: Multilingualism, Advocacy, and Community
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Grounds community-engaged and service learning in Waltham within theoretical frameworks and practical skills from education and the social sciences. Educators (broadly speaking, in and beyond schools) integrate perspectives from history, policy, psychology, and sociology with teaching pedagogy. Through reflective, responsive, and empathetic learning, students will learn how English learner populations have shaped a community's organizations, schools, and identity. Waltham's school system and service organization leaders will teach students about their work in shaping a responsive and inclusive community. Through interviews, reflective essays, weekly discussions, and a semester-long service project, students will grow habits of mind and practical skills for work in education and beyond. Usually offered every second year.

ED 89a Applied Learning Seminar and Internship
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Instructor permission required. Can be taken in the spring after or concurrent with the Applied Learning Internship, as long as the internship and seminar have been approved—in writing, in advance—by the internship coordinator/instructor.

This course offers a structured opportunity to apply classroom learning to self-directed, community based, or experiential learning. The seminar serves to help students: learn from each other’s internship experiences, broaden their visions of education, and connect the internship to frameworks, principles, and practices that they have learned in their Education Studies coursework. Usually offered every year.

ED 92a Education Internship and Analysis

Usually offered every year.

ED 98a Individual Readings and Research in Education

Usually offered every year.

ED 98b Individual Readings and Research in Education

Yields half-course credit. Usually offered every year.

ED 99a Senior Thesis

Seniors who are candidates for degrees with honors in education studies must register for this course in their final semester and, under the direction of a faculty member, prepare an honors thesis on a suitable topic. Usually offered every semester.

ED 99b Senior Thesis

Prerequisite: Instructor permission. Students are expected to have completed ED 165a by the end of their junior year and prior to starting a senior thesis.

Seniors who are candidates for degrees with honors in education studies must register for this course in their final semester and, under the direction of a faculty member, prepare an honors thesis on a suitable topic. Usually offered every semester.

(100-199) For Both Undergraduate and Graduate Students

AMST/ED 120a History of Higher Education in the U.S.
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Explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation's formation to the present. Readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities, as well as student life, institutional access, and visions of the relationship between excellence and equity. The course explores patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender and how universities served as sites where class was produced and contested. Students explore the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and recent movements to make college more affordable. The course also raises questions about the power universities came to hold as centers of knowledge-making networks and universities as sites of political activism. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ED 121a Education and Equity in Modern American History
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Focusing on educational inequities related to race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, this course examines twentieth century American efforts to make schools more equal, and in the process to make the social, economic, and racial order more just and fair. The course focuses on the ways Americans have addressed three core questions: What is educational equity? What is the relationship between school desegregation and equalization? Can equal schools create an equal society? By exploring how Americans thought about and sought to institutionalize their answers to these questions, the course investigates the promise and pitfalls of treating schooling as an egalitarian tool. Usually offered every third year.

ED 101a Literacy, Literature, and Social Justice (Grades PK-6)
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Prerequisite: ED 10a, ED 100a, or ED 100b. Open to all, priority for Ed Studies and teacher licensure students. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Focuses on principles and effective procedures for teaching reading strategies, writing process, and social studies in elementary classrooms. Students will study, practice, and reflect upon concepts in: writing development and assessment, reading comprehension strategies to meet needs of diverse learners, unit development via Understanding by Design pedagogy, and practice in teaching social studies in order to promote civic engagement and cultural awareness. Usually offered every second year.

ED 101b Teaching Science and History for Social Change (Grades PK-6)
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Prerequisite: ED 10a, ED 100a, or ED 100b. Open to all, priority for Ed Studies and teacher licensure students. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Focuses on principles and effective procedures for teaching elementary students inquiry-based science. Examines how art, creative drama, multicultural education, special education, and physical education affect teaching and learning. Usually offered every second year.

ED 104a Reimagining Teaching
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Ever have a teacher who made you love a subject (or loathe it)? Ever have a teacher who really saw you and knew you (or didn’t)? Imagine what it would be like if learning could be meaningful for all students.

Each year, this course focuses on a specific subject area—English, history, math, or science—and reimagines how it could be taught in middle school, high school, and college. Instead of thinking of teaching as "covering the content," we’ll focus on genuinely engaging students—students from all backgrounds and experiences. Participants will learn how to develop student-centered curriculum, instruction, and assessments that encourage students’ exploration and collaboration.

This course assumes a strong background in the subject area focus for that year and/or a previous course on teaching and learning. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms. Usually offered every fall semester.

ED 105a Structure, Concepts, and Best Practices in Mathematics: Elementary
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Prerequisite: ED 10a, ED 100a, or ED 100b. MATH 3a is recommended but not required. Open to all, priority for Ed Studies and teacher licensure students. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Current research, strategies, and philosophies in and about the learning and teaching of mathematics in elementary classrooms. Emphasizes understanding the important math concepts, best practices, and class structures that all help to build a solid and positive learning experience for all students. Usually offered every second year.

ED 110a Classroom Teaching Practicum

Prerequisites: Pre-practicum coursework and fieldwork at two different sites and advisor approval. Required for Massachusetts teaching license. Minimum 300 hours of supervised classroom teaching, assignments, and licensure documentation. Taken concurrently with ED89a, internship course and includes minimum 100 hours of full responsibility for classroom teaching.

Supervised teaching internship designed to help those in the final stages of earning their teaching license connect theory and practice. Students gradually build proficiency in teaching, adding responsibilities and skills over time. Students have guided opportunities to observe, plan, and teach core subjects, to manage classrooms, to get to know students and families, and to participate fully in the life of the school. Interns receive regular mentoring from school and university personnel. Usually offered every spring.

ED 114a Family Engagement in Schools
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Prerequisite: Prior completion of one education course, or instructor permission.

Examines various conceptualizations for family engagement in U.S. schools and how a range of actors, entities, and conditions shape the experiences that families have in schools. This seminar course also analyzes key sociohistorical conditions that shape the reproduction and contestation of inequities for families in U.S. schools. Usually offered every year.

ED 115a The Reading Wars: What is Reading and Why Do We Love to Fight About It?
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Recent media rhetoric has hyped up a supposed dichotomy between an imagined protagonist, who represent “the science of reading," and an enemy--those scholars of “balanced literacy” and their misinformed classroom acolytes who are anti-phonics and anti-science. This invented drama is replete with financial scandals, and the stakes are not only moral but also impact the very health and fabric of our society. And yet, the scholars of literacy themselves emphatically deny the entire dichotomy.

What is going on here? Why are kids not reading? What do we really know about how to teach kids to read? And why are we fighting about it, again? These questions will animate this course. We will approach this topic in three stages: (1) What is the media coverage of reading instruction, i.e., The Reading Wars; (2) what does the research really say about what works in teaching reading; and (3) what social and political theories explain the raging and endless debates? Usually offered every second year.

ED 120b Religion and Higher Education
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Examines the interplay between religion and higher education in the United States, both historically and during current times. Students will consider all facets of the higher education realm, from the laws and policies that govern it, to the diverse students and employees that make up its campuses. This discussion-based class will take the time to consider how people from varied religious, secular, and spiritual backgrounds experience higher education, and how Christian privilege impacts that experience. Finally, it will examine some of the most pressing issues related to religion and higher education in our time, including campus protests and free speech issues. Usually offered every second year.

ED 125a Special Education, Teaching for Inclusion

Yields half-course credit. May not be taken for credit by students who took ED 125f in prior years. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Participants in this course will explore characteristics of students who have moderate disabilities and learn how these students' learning can be supported. Participants will be introduced to the laws, technologies, and school structures that pertain to special education. They will practice analyzing, preparing, implementing, and evaluating Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Usually offered every second year.

ED 144a Look Who’s Talking: Student Voice and Classroom Discourse

Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Teaching is about students, who they are, how they learn, and what they bring to the classroom, that is: their funds of knowledge. While traditional teaching uses a "banking model" in which teachers “deposit” information into students’ empty brains; this course reimagines what that bank would look like if students were the ones with the funds. In this course, participants practice classroom structures in which students, rather than teachers, do the bulk of the intellectual work. The course examines small interactions in classrooms (micro) to understand big ideas about education (macro). Usually offered every second year.

ED 145a Making the Grade: Equity and Assessment

Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

The word “assessment” usually conjures images of standardized tests and educational inequity—but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this course, we’ll look at the ways that assessment has been used to reify inequities and also explore alternative, more equitable, approaches. Together, we’ll develop ways to create supportive learning environments in which assessments build on and support students’ existing strengths and skills. We’ll explore ways to "differentiate" for students' differing needs and learn how to create collaborative environments that embolden students to take academic risks. Usually offered every second year.

ED 150b Purpose and Politics of Education
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Focuses on the United States and introduces students to foundational questions in the interdisciplinary field of Education Studies. We explore competing goals Americans have held for K-12 and post-secondary education and ask how these visions have (or have not) influenced school, society, and educational policy. We pay particular attention to educational stratification; localism; segregation; privatization; and the relationship between schooling and equality. Usually offered every year.

ED 155b Education and Social Policy
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Examines conceptualizations for educational policy, schooling, and learning, and competing trajectories of key topics that drive U.S. K-12 education. Special attention will be paid to the following topics: post-Civil Rights legacies, standards/accountability measures, family engagement, and school discipline. Usually offered every year.

ED 161b Religious Education in America
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No principle stands more sacred in American public education than separation of Church and state. Public schools pride themselves as neutral playing fields when it comes to matters of religion. But this position belies a more complicated history. American public schools were initially founded by protestant leaders concerned with an influx of non-protestant immigrants during the middle of the 19th century. Indeed, despite lip service to ideas like separation of Church and state, American educational leaders long saw schools as a vehicle for promoting a Protestant inflected American culture. This course begins from the premise that American education and American religion have always existed in relationship. Religious groups have sometimes tried to use the public schools as vehicles to advance their religion, sometimes, they have created supplemental schools, and sometimes they have created whole parallel school systems. But in all cases, education and religion in America are intertwined. This course asks when education is religious and when religion is educational. It examines a series of case studies drawn from different faith communities including Judaism, Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam. Usually offered every second year.

ED 165a Reading (and Talking Back to) Research on Education
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Open to education studies majors only. May be repeated once for credit.

In this required capstone course for education studies majors, students will review quantitative and qualitative research through disciplinary lenses. Students pursue some topic of inquiry by either reviewing and synthesizing educational research, or conducting some empirical research. Usually offered every year.

ED 166a Chopped, Screwed, and Schooled: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Educa
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Prerequisite: ED 165a.

Introduces students to the practice of educational research through hands-on engagement with both qualitative and quantitative methods. Rather than focusing only on how to read and critique studies, students will gain direct experience designing research questions, collecting data, and analyzing findings across multiple methodological traditions. Students will explore the logic, strengths, and limitations of each tradition, practicing core techniques such as ethnographic observation, interviewing, survey design, statistical analysis, and coding of qualitative data. We will then turn to mixed-methods research, focusing on how scholars integrate insights across disciplines and methodological traditions to address complex educational questions. Through hands-on exercises, collaborative projects, and critical reflection, students will develop the capacity to design and execute small-scale studies that combine methods and perspectives. By the end of the semester, students will not only sharpen their technical skills but also cultivate an interdisciplinary imagination through learning to see how layered approaches can generate richer and more nuanced understandings of educational phenomena. Usually offered every year.

ED 170a Race, Power, and Urban Education
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Examines the nature of urban schools, their links to the social and political context, and the perspectives of the people who inhabit them. Explores the historical development of urban schools; the social, economic, and personal hardships facing urban students; and challenges of urban school reform. Usually offered every year.

ED 171b Latinx-e K-12 Education: Challenges and Possibilities
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Examines conceptualizations of Latine/x families and communities in U.S. K-12 schools, and how a range of actors, entities, and inequities shape the experiences that Latine/x students have in U.S. schools. This seminar course also analyzes key socio-historical conditions that shape contemporary approaches toward Latine/x student learning and schooling. Usually offered every year.

ED 172a Race Theories and Education
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Examines how racial hierarchies are constructed, maintained, and challenged within the U.S. public education system. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from law, sociology, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and education, the course pushes students to interrogate the political, epistemological, and material foundations of schooling. While Critical Race Theory serves as an anchoring framework, a variety of theories will be explored not as static frameworks, but as living traditions engaged in ongoing struggle, resistance, and reimagination.

Students will be expected not only to understand these theories but to actively engage with them—to apply, extend, repurpose, and imagine their use in policy, curriculum, pedagogy, and community action. Additionally, students will reflect on their own educational experiences and those of communities historically excluded from power. Together, we will analyze how schools function as both instruments of racial stratification and sites of possibility. Usually offered every year.

ED 173b The Psychology of Love: Education for Close Relationships
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Students will be selected after the submission of a sample of writing on adult loving relationships.

What is love? How does it develop? How do psychologists study how people think, feel and behave in close relationships? These questions will guide our inquiry and inform our guiding question: how can we educate young people to better care for their friends, lovers and intimates? Usually offered every year.

ED 175f Teaching Multilingual Learners

Yields half-course credit. May not be taken for credit by students who took ED 175a in prior years. Students are encouraged, though not required, to engage in fieldwork through ED 60a while taking this course so that they can apply their learning in real classrooms.

Examines the intersection of culture and language and the process of second language acquisition. Participants will discuss specific issues confronting bilingual students, including testing, family involvement, and a variety of challenges facing children who enter American elementary, middle, or high schools. Through the study of cases, classrooms, and children, participants will observe, analyze, and reflect upon the teaching and learning of English Learners. Participants will analyze linguistic and cultural demands of lessons and become familiar with instructional strategies for teaching English Learners. Usually offered every second year.

ED 192a Education Internship and Analysis

Usually offered every year.

ED/HRNS 168a Summer Camp: The American Jewish Experience

How did American summer camps evolve? How did Jews appropriate this form for their communal needs? How did leadership develop and what are the pressing issues of today? These questions will be examined from historical, educational, and managerial perspectives. Usually offered every second year.

ED/NEJS 170b Inside Jewish Education: Language, Literacy, and Reading
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Combines autobiography, classroom videotapes, curriculum investigation and fieldwork to explore the purposes, practices and effects of contemporary Jewish education in its many forms and venues. Usually offered every other year.

(200 and above) Primarily for Graduate Students

ED 251 Leadership, Authority, and School Change

Yields three semester-hour credits.

Focuses on a developmental model of teacher development, instructional and institutional leadership in schools, modeling and building of professional learning communities, and reflections on the challenges and opportunities of teacher leadership. Usually offered every second year.

ED 253 Understanding and Improving Classroom Teaching and Learning

Yields three semester-hour credits.

Focuses on the theory and practice of becoming an instructional leader. Participants will experience and then practice key leadership skills which can support their work with individual teachers and with groups. Usually offered every year.

ED 256 Core Practices of Teacher Leadership

Prerequisites: ED 253 and ED 258. Yields three semester-hour credits.

Enables students to learn core practices to support their work as teacher leaders in their schools and to use a collaborative online space to gain feedback on their teacher leadership initiatives. Usually offered every year.

ED 258 School Organization, Culture, and Change

Yields three semester-hour credits. Enrollment limited to participants in the Teacher Leadership program.

Lays a conceptual and practical foundation for assuming responsibilities related to improving instruction as well as the overall functioning of the school as a learning environment for both teachers and students. Usually offered every year.

ED 259 Using Data to Drive School Change

Prerequisites: ED 253 and ED 258. Yields three semester-hour credits.

Strengthens students' understandings and skills related to curriculum and assessment and provides a collaborative online space for feedback and problem solving related to their teacher leader initiatives. Usually offered every second year.

ED 285 Action Research for Teacher Leaders

Prerequisite: ED 253 and ED 258. Yields three semester-hour credits. Enrollment limited to participants in the Teacher Leadership program.

Teacher leaders learn how to be practitioners who bring an inquiry stance to document efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in their schools. Masters students develop a research plan, review relevant literature, and collect and analyze data. Usually offered every year.

ED 286 Inquiry as Professional Development

Prerequisites: ED 253 and ED 258. Yields three semester-hour credits. Enrollment limited to participants in the Teacher Leadership program.

Enables teacher leaders to develop their inquiry stance so that they can find the best ways to foster teacher learning in service of student learning and asses the effects. Usually offered every year.

ED 291 Principles and Practices of Professional Development

Prerequisites: ED 253, ED 258 and ED 259. Corequisite: ED 251. Yields three semester-hour credits. Enrollment limited to participants in the Teacher Leadership program.

Examines the central focus of teacher leadership-- working with colleagues to improve the quality of instruction in schools. This course will deepen your skills as an observer of teaching and learning, a mentor to novice teachers, a practitioner of action research and a leader of professional learning. Usually offered every year.

ED 294 Experiential Teacher Leadership Practicum

Prerequisites: ED 253 and ED 258. Corequisite: ED 256 or ED 259. Yields three semester-hour credits. Enrollment limited to participants in the Teacher Leadership program.

Enables teacher leaders, working with their coaches, to learn key skills and tools to support their teacher leader initiatives and the development of their new professional identity as a teacher leader. Usually offered every semester.

ED 298a Independent Study

ED/HRNS 390a Independent Study

ED/HRNS 391a Independent Study

Yields half-course credit.

ED/HRNS 391f Independent Study

Half-semester course. Yields half-course credit.

ED MINOR Core Courses

AMST 150a The History of Childhood and Youth in America
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Examines history, cultural ideas, and policies about childhood and youth, as well as children's literature, television, and other media for children and youth. Includes an archival-based project on the student movement in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.

AMST/ED 120a History of Higher Education in the U.S.
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation's formation to the present. Readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities, as well as student life, institutional access, and visions of the relationship between excellence and equity. The course explores patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender and how universities served as sites where class was produced and contested. Students explore the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and recent movements to make college more affordable. The course also raises questions about the power universities came to hold as centers of knowledge-making networks and universities as sites of political activism. Usually offered every third year.

AMST/ED 121a Education and Equity in Modern American History
[ deis-us ss ]

Focusing on educational inequities related to race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, this course examines twentieth century American efforts to make schools more equal, and in the process to make the social, economic, and racial order more just and fair. The course focuses on the ways Americans have addressed three core questions: What is educational equity? What is the relationship between school desegregation and equalization? Can equal schools create an equal society? By exploring how Americans thought about and sought to institutionalize their answers to these questions, the course investigates the promise and pitfalls of treating schooling as an egalitarian tool. Usually offered every third year.

ECON 59b The Economics of Education
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Prerequisite: ECON 2a or ECON 10a.

An introduction to economic analysis of the education sector. Topics include the concept of human capital, private and social return on investment in education, cost-benefit analysis of special educational programs, and issues in the financing of education. Usually offered every second year.