Graduate Courses of Interest — Spring 2025
We offer many courses that may interest students from other colleges, departments, and programs across the University of Minnesota. Check out some our offerings for Spring 2025!
This course is designed for graduate students who are interested in examining and unlearning colonizing approaches to educational leadership. Students will benefit from a historical and foundational discussion of educational and social oppression; critical analysis of leadership identity and positionality; rethinking educational leadership theory and praxis; and co-generating anti-oppressive approaches to leading educational systems, organizations, and communities.
In this course we will center the expertise of historically oppressed communities to: examine the historical context of education-based inequities; understand contextual realities of historically disenfranchised students and families; analyze the sources of oppressive educational leadership practices; and explore the culturally responsive, anti-oppressive approaches to liberatory leadership praxis. To support these aims we will center Dr. Muhammad Khalifa’s Culturally Responsive School Leadership; the collective expertise of course members; and knowledge from educational and community leaders and scholars. This course will be seminar style; we will draw on the legacies of Black, Indigenous, LatineX and APIDA communities by centering our collective knowledge construction.
This course gives every student a chance to learn about theory and research in intercultural communication and then apply this information to projects and topics directly related to the student's interests. The course provides a background to the history, approaches, theories, and applications in the field of intercultural communication. Students have worked on integrating intercultural communication into their literature review, developed community based projects, designed intercultural training workshops, and/or researched a specific theory they want to learn more about for future projects -- and even launching a podcast! The course is interactive with guest facilitators and great discussions.
Why is college so expensive? Is a college education a public or private good? In this course we explore how and why we finance postsecondary education in the United States. We examine the historical foundations of financing higher education, the underlying reasons why costs rise, the strategies states and the federal government use to subsidize those costs, and how students pay for college. We apply various conceptual lenses to help explain the causes and consequences of these trends, including critical and interdisciplinary approaches. We discuss how these trends affect educational opportunity and equity, as well as professional practice and policy. Through this course, students will gain content knowledge and build skills for evaluating and researching higher education finance policies.
This in-person course focuses on the integration of career development theory and practice. Using a combination of small group discussions, case studies, lectures, and guest speakers, students will learn how to apply career development principles and theories to applied settings, including academia and industry. Students will explore "career" holistically across the lifespan. Emphasis will be placed on both individual and organizational career development contexts. Students will also have the opportunity to apply class concepts to their own professional development. This class is intended to be of interest for students across different disciplines and programs.
This course is for anyone interested in a critical analysis of histories of the American educational systems. There is no prerequisite: anyone can take this course, even if you have not taken Part 1. This course entails a deep dive into the U.S. education system beginning with a deep interrogation of Jim Crow of the North and the South’s fight for desegregation via the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka Kansas decision. From this point, the class will include a semi-chronological, topical collection of materials and discussions which situates U.S. educational policy and leadership against Black, Brown and Indigenous backdrops in a post-1954 (desegregation context). We will explore the tensions related to the fight for school desegregation; we will examine the critical intersections between housing policies, urban development and schooling. More specifically, this course pushes students to think about the ”subtractive” implications of schooling for Black, Brown and Indigenous students and communities. We will ask what was lost with school desegregation? What was the impetus for suburban schooling? Why did school resegregate? Further, what are the historical mechanisms which maintain separate and unequal schools today? This course situates more modern histories to critically examine the ways that race and space significantly shape today’s public school-communities.
Contemporary stories are powerfully told through image and video. Social media are, in the words of Elizabeth Soep and Sunaina Maira (2006), contemporary “youthscapes,” where young people and educators create stories and build community around the content they produce. This methodology class is designed to foreground the ways in which images may create narratives and to explore their knowledge-making potential. The point of departure for our work is that youth narratives and visual artifacts carry with them possibilities for broader, collective explorations of contemporary sociopolitical and cultural meanings, as well as deeper examinations of intimate everyday life. Through techniques and examples from recent participatory visual storytelling projects with youth, guest speakers, and workshops, this course provides students with an introduction to participatory visual research, its relation to critical narrative inquiry and counterstorying, as well as the ethical, aesthetic, and relational considerations that accompany this inquiry approach. Students will produce their own short films with their participants as a final project in the class.
Principles and Methods of Program Evaluation is a course in the use of systematic methods for judging a program's worth or merit. It provides a conceptual and practical grounding in program evaluation, considering the theory, purposes, types and strategies of evaluation. One common evaluation research method, the survey, is studied in greater depth, including sampling, designing questions, and overall survey design.
Quantitative research methods offer powerful tools for advancing educational equity. The concepts and methods you will learn in this class will help you think through important questions such as: How can outcomes that we care about be measured, and how can the effects of equity-advancing efforts be documented? What policies and practices are – or could be – effective at advancing equity goals, either in general or in specific contexts? In this class, you will learn foundational concepts in quantitative research (such as statistical inference, internal validity, external validity). You will learn how to analyze data using common data analytic techniques for answering basic questions in education (one- and two-group significance tests for means and proportions; ANOVA; correlation; simple and multiple linear regression). Emphasis is on conceptual learning and applications with data using basic R coding.
This interdisciplinary course draws on scholarship in not only the field of education, broadly, but also from sociology, performance studies, history, anthropology, queer and trans studies, cultural, and gender studies to explore lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer complex identities, identifications, and the social, political, historical, and cultural problems underpinning these constructions with particular emphasis on and connection to past and current issues for queer and trans people in higher education. Through a consideration of the history of campus and community-based queer and trans activism, this course will explore ways of being, thinking, and doing for queer and trans people and provide scholars and practitioners with tools to advance difficult dialogues around issues or concerns related to the queer and trans community. Specifically, this course will explore queer and trans identities, queer and trans peoples’ experiences on college campuses (e.g., students, leadership, climate, etc.), and situate these issues in sociohistorical and cultural contexts. Students will utilize critical policy approaches to engage with campus and state policies including anti-queer and trans legislation and policies (ACLU, 2024), anti-discrimination statements, campus climate assessments, Title IX, queer and trans studies, and campus housing and bathroom policies. Finally, this course will provide a space for current and future scholars and practitioners to examine and interrogate how institutional programs and culture may influence the experiences of queer and trans people in higher education.
*I purposefully use the terms queer and trans to capture a broad inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer individuals.
This seminar focuses on issues of race and ethnicity in higher education. Grounded in US postsecondary education, we will investigate theories, concepts, and research related to race and racism, explore how they may or may not explain what we see in US colleges and universities, and how our own experiences intersect with these different explanations. Scholarly literatures from higher education, history, sociology, psychology, and elsewhere are critically reviewed to address multi-level theoretical, methodological, programmatic, policy, and practical issues that shape higher education contexts.