Requirements for Minor
- Foundations course: PHI3515/What is Education? (4 credits)
- Three Elective courses (12 credits)
- EDG3995/Internship/Practicum (4 credits)
* The Internship Practicum includes experiences such as Campus Learning Assistantships, Neuberger Museum of Arts and Performing Arts Center internships, The Purchase College Children’s Center internship and the Great Potential Program.
For more information on internships, see this page.
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.
Provides a global overview of the field of museum education and community-based learning. Museum education is examined in relation to its constituent learning communities, including K-12 classes, tourists, and life-long learners, among others. Topics include: the educational role of museums; participatory approaches to learning; teaching from objects; program creation, implementation, and assessment; and exhibition tour development and execution.
Provides students with a variety of methods and strategies for teaching history to middle and high school students. Classes are focused on developing lessons that make historical content relevant to adolescents and training them on how to write and discuss history. The course also provides an introduction to working in a public K-12 education setting.
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.
This course is designed for students interested in pursuing a career in teaching literature. Topics include how to teach different genres (poetry, prose, and drama), how to sustain classroom conversation, and how to design syllabi and writing assignments.
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.
Behavioral and cognitive approaches to the study of human and animal learning are discussed. Topics include classical conditioning, motivation, cognitive models of memory, and applications outside the laboratory.
An examination of both interpersonal relationships and the relationship between the individual and society. Topics include social development, situational and cultural influences on individual functioning, social support networks, interpersonal attraction, and intergroup relations.
A broad survey of human development from conception through childhood. Topics include prenatal development and birth, cognition, language, parent-child interaction, peer relations, moral development, and sex role development.
Examines the cognitive representations and processes involved in human memory. Topics include short-term and working memory; encoding and forgetting processes; implicit, semantic, and eyewitness memory; reconstructive processes and alterability of memory; and memory for text.
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.
Students will explore art materials and processes to broaden their artistic practice and develop learning experiences for a variety of settings including the tradition classroom, museum spaces, community centers, and pop up events. Through individual and group projects, students will exercise problem solving, leadership, organization collaboration and communication skills necessary to successfully teach hands-on art projects.