Curriculum and Course Schedule

Cognitive and social science theories of how people learn to understand, reason, and solve problems. Implications for the design of classroom learning environments; learning in real scenarios for investigating central issues in cognitive science. Learning in mathematics, science, reading/writing, and informal reasoning.

This course is designed to explore how the ways that we live culturally provide strengths for teaching, learning and design. The course draws from the interdisciplinary study of sociocultural, linguistic, and contextual influences of education, as well as perspectives from learning, teaching, research and policy. Candidates will examine how issues of power and privilege as they pertain to race, ethnicity, language, class, gender, sexuality and identity politics shape and are shaped within our education system. Candidates will be asked to consider their own schooling experiences, and deeply evaluate their beliefs, thoughts and assumptions about the influence of various legal, historical, socio-cultural and linguistic factors on their ideas about teaching, learning, and schooling. Special attention will be given to the major trends that influence contemporary landscapes of PK-12 education and the potential systemic benefits and harms associated with them. Candidates will produce an autoethnography that considers the impact of personal formal and informal learning experiences rooted in racial, cultural and linguistic identity on their life view, as well as how they move through the world as advocates for justice.

This course can be applied towards endorsements in English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education on a Professional Educator License and carries 15 clinical clock hours of experience.

Teaching and education are complex, intellectual, and iterative endeavors. Skilled educators continually take experiences from the field in the form of observations, curiosities, and challenges to inform structured inquiry—with the purpose of improving conceptual and pedagogical understandings for themselves and their students. This sequence is grounded in a model of action research. In our view, action research is not distinct from the work of teaching and educating, rather when done well it drives the work of teaching and learning. Data we use in action research is precisely that which we encounter in our educational settings on a daily basis—we are responsible for mining and learning from them. As a result of these courses you will not only have designed and conducted action research— your Master’s Project —but more importantly, you will have a set of stances and tools to embark on a career as an educator scholar who continues to notice various aspects of teaching and learning, ask important questions, and engage in meaningful, guided examinations of practice to evolve learning.   

The goal of this sequence is to help you become informed educators who are able to turn curiosities and challenges from your settings into potential areas of structured reflection and research. The basis of the course is the model of action research — of studying our own settings around questions we are passionate about, for the purpose of improving our students and colleagues learning as well as our own practice. Action research is not distinct from the work of teaching, rather the data we use in action research is precisely that which we encounter in our educational settings daily. As a result of these courses you will not only have conducted action research— your Master’s Project —more importantly, you will have the tools to embark on a career as an educator scholar who continues to ask important questions and embark on meaningful, systematic examinations of teaching and learning in your selected setting. 

MS_ED 482-1 & 2 are two 0.5-unit courses, to be taken sequentially. 

The MSED ProSeminar in Educational Studies and the Learning Sciences serves as a companion to program courses with the goal of helping students to bring together the threads from across their coursework and program experiences. In particular, this course emphasizes and makes explicit key ideas that connect to the MSED Guiding Commitments.    

MSED 482-1 will support the understanding and development of mutually beneficial, community-engaged partnerships as students explore and onboard to a practicum site.  A professional and career development component will focus on self-assessment, career exploration, and connecting to Northwestern resources that will support this work. 

MSED 482-2 is designed to support the connection between the practicum site and initial development of the Master’s Project. The course will help students understand how to work with, and support, their practicum sites, while developing their research question, engaging important site-specific protocols that govern research, and identifying appropriate sources of data that are available to investigate the research question. A professional and career development component will focus on deepening understanding of possible career paths, building professional networks, and connecting to Northwestern resources that will support this work.

This course will explore the use of tangible interaction to create innovative learning experiences. It will review both theoretical and technological foundations of the field. Topics include creative expression, embodied interaction, cultural forms, and design frameworks.

Building the skills and knowledge necessary to support the design of educational experiences. Exploration of general design principles and learning sciences theoretical perspectives through examination of existing cases of instructional design. A design project involving needs analysis, specifying learning objectives, and designing a new educational experience.

Issues in designing and studying innovative learning environments. New models of classroom interaction, particularly using technology to enable new cognitive and social roles for students. Topics include simulations, tutors, computer-mediated communication, project-based learning. Theoretical motivations in cognitive and social-interaction learning theories, empirical studies evaluating their effectiveness, and prospects for propagation of such innovations.

In this course we examine what role engineering education plays, has played historically, and could play in mediating dynamics of power, in(equality), and (in)justice in society across global contexts. A wave of recent scholarship has examined the nefarious impact of new technologies on racial equity (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018), social and economic justice (Eubanks, 2018), teaching and learning processes in schools (Watters, 2021), and on the health and survival of the planet itself (Crawford, 2021). Learning about the politics of technologies, and the technologies of power, is thus emerging as one of the most significant needs in education. Building from Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives, in this course we shift our analytic focus to the politics of engineering education institutions (Lucena, 2013; Riley, 2003). What are the historical, cultural, and political forces operating on these institutions? How do they cultivate particular kinds of engineering identities? We will ground these inquiries through case studies of specific engineering education institutions in diverse global contexts (Indonesia, India, Denmark, Iran, Chile, Kenya, and the US). Across the cases, we will carefully examine how themes such as modernization, globalization, nationalism, and militarism have shaped the content, character, and ontology of engineering education. Ultimately, we will work towards a critical, global understanding of the power, responsibility, and possibilities for socially just and ethical engineering education.

In this course we will examine the role of computational tools in the design of transformative teaching and learning environments. Grounded in perspectives from the Learning Sciences and Computer Science Education, we will cover topics of equity and inclusion, pedagogy, creative applications of computing, and the integration of computational ideas across multiple disciplines. We have cross-listed the course in Teacher Education, Learning Sciences, and Computer Science in order to foster cross-disciplinary dialogues that consider the affordances of computational ideas for designing learning environments that are asset-based and supportive of multiple routes to understanding various subject-matter.

Contact the department for further information.

Students' relationships with one another and with teachers in school and nonschool settings. Implications for classroom instruction of social learning theory, student diversity, classroom climate, cooperative and competitive goal structures, and processes of attribution and achievement motivation.

This course looks closely at the categories, assumptions and frameworks used to analyze educational inequality in the United States from the 1950’s to the present. Our goal is to think carefully about 1) the historical, political and educational consequences of various approaches to analyzing poverty, race, schooling/education and inequality, and 2) critical interventions that emerged from a range of disciplines and the resources they provide for growing a more complex theoretical and ethical vocabulary. The course moves historically and privileges primary texts, focusing on the development and critiques of the “culture of poverty” both as a theoretical idea (Oscar Lewis, 1950’s) and as a framework for key social and educational policies (1960’s and beyond). We will also re-envision an educational system that treats learning not as an individual possession, but as a nuanced barometer of the multi-layered relations between persons and their environments. This requires treating the forms of critique, resistance, educational self-determination and political imagination nurtured and sustained by marginalized communities themselves as our teachers.

What is unique about the U.S. approach to teaching and learning? Why are schools organized the way they are? What does the day-to-day school experience look like for students, teachers, and families? This course will explore the development of schools in the United States by understanding the ideologies and decisions (pedagogical and political) that have shaped schools over 200 years. We will use Illinois and Chicago as case studies of the development of schools in urban, suburban, and rural communities, with a particular focus on Chicago, where public, charter, private, independent, and home schools all exist side by side. Students will explore their own schooling experience while also researching current school issues. Guest speakers from Chicagoland schools and virtual visits to some of those schools will ground our work in the realities of American education today.

MS_ED 410-0 Foundations of Learning in a New Language The Foundations of Learning in a New Language course engages pre-service teacher candidates in exploring historical, political, sociocultural, philosophical and educational practices that impact linguistically and culturally diverse learners in American schools. Topics include historical and current federal and state laws regarding the learning of English as a new language, foundations of first and second language acquisition, child development, sociocultural theory, and comparative international language instruction. Research and evidence based instructional models are discussed, with a deepened appreciation for factors contributing to sustained student achievement, including, but not limited to the psychological, cognitive, sociological, and cultural factors that impact student learning.  An emphasis is placed on the standards for initial Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Pre-K-12 Teacher Preparation Programs and the WIDA Language Development Standards.

This course can be applied towards endorsements in English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education on a Professional Educator License and carries 15 clinical clock hours of experience.

Major theories and current empirical research concerning cognitive and social/emotional development of children. Interaction of internal maturational factors with effects of families, peers, and schools.

Biological, cognitive, and social development during adolescence. Social institutions and policies that affect the well-being of adolescents.

Concepts, theories, and research on development and adaptation from early adulthood through aging: age periods, transitions; cognitive, moral, and faith development; psychosocial and ego development; defense mechanisms; death and dying.

This course will offer a critical perspective on child and adolescent development as it is shaped and experienced in various social contexts with special application to the world of the school. Psychological, interpersonal, social, cognitive, moral, and physical development will be studied within the contexts of family, peer group, and school. Theoretical perspectives will be explored in relation to empirical research, field studies, first person accounts, and imaginative works. Special emphasis will be given to the individual's subjective experience and to the remembered accounts of our own childhood and adolescence.

Contact the department for further information.

This course is a hands-on practicum in designing and building technology-enabled curricula and learning environments. We will use many rich software toolkits designed to enable novice computer users to get their “hands dirty” doing iterative software design. In addition to the hands-on component, the course is also designed to introduce you to the Constructionist Learning design perspective - first named by Seymour Papert and greatly influenced by the work of Jean Piaget - a perspective that is very influential in the Learning Sciences today.

Coding background required.

The Linguistics Informed Approaches to Literacy course supports students in analyzing the aims of linguistic science as well as how linguistic concepts apply to teaching in a variety of settings (including with multilingual students, monolingual students, and bilingual classrooms). Students will think about the complexities of language and how they connect with identity, culture, power, and schooling. Students explore topics like syntax, phonology, morphology, semantics, and cognates as they develop their own metalinguistic awareness in support of facilitating effective teaching and learning. A focal area will be supporting the development of students’ literacies. Content-area reading topics include but are not limited to pre-reading, post-reading, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

This course can be applied towards endorsements in English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education on a Professional Educator License and carries 15 clinical clock hours of experience.

The Assessment of Linguistically Diverse Students is a course that engages pre-service candidates in learning about a variety of assessment approaches, (including but not limited to standardized, formative, diagnostic, performance-based, etc.)  with special attention to how assessment of English-Language Learners has been conceptualized within American historical and contemporary sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts. Issues of legality, bias, non-discriminatory policies, and ethical considerations that must accompany decisions about standards and practices used in the assessment of culturally and linguistically diverse students will also be explored. Candidates will be asked to examine policies facing educators of linguistically diverse learners over the last century, and articulate multiple perspectives associated with the issue drawing from course readings and outside research. 

This course can be applied towards endorsements in English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education on a Professional Educator License and carries 15 clinical clock hours of experience. 

What is “social studies”? The National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) has established a key principle which states: Social studies is composed of deep and enduring understandings, concepts, and skills from various disciplines, and emphasizes skills and practices as preparation for democratic decision-making.

This course will create opportunities to connect social studies content to the NCSS Framework, as well as to Illinois State Standards. The primary goal for this course is for future elementary and secondary educators to fulfill social science content-area licensure requirements, specifically with regards to Civics, Economics and Geography. Additionally, arts, humanities, and history content will also play an important role in developing understanding of social studies content and concepts. In the process, students will explore ways to deliver content, design assessments, and create classroom cultures that promote vibrant learning. By the end of the quarter, students should feel comfortable with and possess a working knowledge of Civics, Economics and Geography content.

This course is designed to support the development of practices and methods for equitable teaching in both informal and formal settings. These settings can include museums, libraries, out-of-school programs, enrichment opportunities, classrooms, and other educational spaces. Central to this work is understanding inquiry as a pedagogical approach that can inform equitable work as an educator.

This course is designed for students to come to understand and utilize the complex web of elements that are involved in learning and the development of equitable learning environments. Key activities in the course are for students to: 1) experience and reflect on their own learning; 2) examine the learning of others through close observation and field work; 3) situate/ ground their learning in the context of existing research, theory, and practice; 4) examine equitable methods and design in order to create their own designs for equitable learning and teaching.