Our academic programming views the learning pathway as part of a broader transdisciplinary framework of development and well-being. Conditions associated with education and youth development represent a problem space where persistent engagement and planning across political boundaries, health care providers, youth serving organizations, and educational institutions are critical.
The Department of Education offers undergraduate and graduate degree options in Teacher Education with Elementary, Middle School, and Secondary specializations. Our students develop the ability to look at educational policy and classroom decision making from multiple perspectives and to raise fundamental questions about the purposes, processes, and inequities of the current system. In addition, they act in ways based on a solid rationale rooted in research, ethical standards, and personal experience, and then reflect upon that practice in the interest of all of their students. The following goals define our conceptual framework:
Teachers act on the belief that all students can learn and use a variety of strategies to promote the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance capabilities of all students.
Teachers have a command of content knowledge so they can co-construct learning experiences with their students. Their instructional repertoire allows them to create multiple paths to the subjects they teach, and they are adept at teaching students how to pose and solve their own problems.
Teachers understand histories of participation and critically examine their language and practice. As active members of learning communities, they seek to expand their repertoire, deepen their knowledge, sharpen their judgment and conduct research in their classrooms and communities in order to better support the educative experiences of their students.
Carol Camp Yeakey, the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences, contributed to a recent Washington University in St. Louis interdisciplinary initiative that has sparked a wave of faculty research and the publication of a new book examining the incidence of cancer among low-income women of color in St. Louis and the Metro East communities of Illinois, including East St. Louis.
