Note: The minor does not provide eligibility for a New York State teacher certificate, but helps prepare students for further study and teacher certification at the graduate level.
Below are the course descriptions and options of courses students can take in the minor:
In this service-learning course, students design, plan, implement, and manage a mentoring program in art education for middle or high school students. Activities include designing and developing a curriculum, creating and curating artwork, and managing and evaluating the program. Includes an eight-week residency at a local middle or high school, culminating with a public presentation of artwork created by the students.
A survey of various teaching methods in second language instruction. Students become familiar with the theories of language learning that underlie these methodologies. Open to all students interested in second language teaching methods.
Helping others to read and write better improves one’s own reading and writing dramatically. In this course, advanced students improve their own writing and gain tutoring experience by serving as peer tutors in first-year courses. In addition to meeting once weekly to study writing pedagogy, each student is attached to a College Writing section and serves as a peer mentor/tutor, attending classes and working closely with the instructor.
What is education? What is its nature? Its value? How can it help, and how can it harm? Students read and debate the answers to these questions offered by Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, and others, and critically analyze the positions and policies of contemporary educational policymakers and activists.
An examination of the special relationship of education to other American institutions. Topics include the declining support for public education, attempts to privatize public education (vouchers), and race and class issues in public and private education.
Incorporates service learning and examines immigration and the U.S. school system. Combining hands-on work within local schools with academic readings that address children of immigrants in schools, this course emphasizes applied sociology. Throughout the course, students analyze how school structures, peer networks, relationships with teachers, and familial interactions influence the incorporation and educational trajectories of first- and second-generation immigrants.
Considers the ways in which children and childhood differ across cultures, what those cultural differences mean, and what childhood means in a larger developmental and cultural sense. Among other topics, students examine children as active social agents, independent of families, and incorporate ideas around children as products, childhood innocence, and children in need of protection.
Additional Courses (permission of instructor is required for students not majoring in Psychology)
PSY2450: Learning and Memory PSY2520: Personal and Social Relations PSY2650: Child Development PSY2745: Psychology of Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination