Course Description

[Official course description goes here. This is a very tentative outline of how a secondary section might look.]

State Mandated Components

Field Observation--Three hours a week for ten weeks in course related sites, including but not limited to public schools. Students complete field observations outside course meeting times, and submit periodic journals of their experiences. Field experiences inform class discussions of thematic units.

Literacy--Develop teachers as competent expository writers. Consideration of writing in relation to human development, with survey of print literacy in history and in the media age. Course is writing intensive, with [bi-]weekly[?] response papers and/or field journals, to be promptly marked and returned with feedback. Cumulative growth is the objective, with opportunities for rewrites. Writing lab available in person and/or online. Examination of public school student writing in field experience, with journals taking note of teacher developed writing projects that contribute to language and learning.

Special Education--Inclusion as emerging model in public education. Norms and deviations of development in advanced technological societies. Shifting definitions of intelligence.

Technology--All students maintain communication with one another and the professor via email. Course papers involve some online research. Final projects/papers include an electronic portfolio to be posted on the course website. All students participate in designing, presenting, and evaluating electronic portfolios.

Bibliography

I. Theories of Human Development

Jon-Roar Bjorkvold, The Muse Withing: Creativity and Communication, Song and Play from Childhood through Maturity (1992)

Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (1993), and/or No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1992)

*Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution's End: Reclaiming the Potential of Our Intelligence (1992)

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (1982, 1998)

Gilbert Voyat (ed.), The World of Henri Wallon (1984)

II. Intelligence and Stupidity

C. A. Bowers, Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture: Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies (1995)

Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (1993)

*Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, and Leila E. Villaverde (eds.), Rethinking Intelligence: Confronting psychological Assumptions about Teaching and Learning (1999)

Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (1978, 1998)

III. Urban Schooling in America

James Comer, et al, (eds.), Rallying the Whole Village: The Comer Process for Reforming Education (1996)

Michael S. Knapp and Associates, Teaching for Meaning in High Poverty Classrooms (1995)

*Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995), and/or Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991)

IV. Adolescence and Popular Culture

Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (1992)

Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (1997)

Louise Carus Mahdi, Nancy Geyer Christopher, and Michael Meade, Crossroads: The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage (1996)

Mike A. Males, Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (1996)

*Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe, Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (1997)

Marie Winn, The Plug-in Drug: Television, Children, and the Family (1985)

V. Shifting Literacies

Lisbeth Dixon-Krauss, Vygotsky in the Classroom: Mediated Literacy Instruction and Assessment (1996)

Jean Piaget, The Language and the Thought of the Child (1955)

*Barry Sanders, A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (1994)

David Schaafsma, Eating on the Street: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society (1993)