The Emancipatory Education graduate minor is focused on encouraging P-20 educational leaders across all sectors (e.g., teachers, faculty, administrators, and policymakers) to develop liberatory approaches to education. The overarching goal of the minor is to encourage students to be active participants in seeking transformative educational praxis, which involves moving beyond identifying problems and challenges and toward creative approaches to improving educational systems and practices. The Emancipatory Education minor invites students to actively question, interrogate, and envision new educational horizons, rather than reproducing the increasingly inequitable ground upon which education has been built.
The courses that comprise the Emancipatory Education graduate minor seek to accomplish this vision through a transdisciplinary approach to the process, practice, and study of education. Specifically, classes in the minor will address topics including, but not limited to:
- Race, racialization, and antiracism
- Antiblackness
- Indigenous methodologies
- Activist- and action-oriented theorizing and research methods
- Critical and postmodern (and decolonial) approaches to understanding gender
- Liberatory models of education across K-12 and postsecondary contexts
- Migration, borders, nationality, and Indigeneity as they influence education
- Critical approaches to disability and its resultant effects on education
- Culturally-responsive and culturally-sustaining pedagogical and organizational praxis
It is also worth noting that even students without any previous experience in education could be successful in this new minor and all classes are designed to be accessible to students coming from various disciplinary backgrounds.
