The Education Department is introducing several new courses this spring that invite students to engage with questions of language, equity, and educational innovation. Through seminars, community-engaged learning, and hands-on experimentation, these offerings reflect the department’s interdisciplinary approach to education.
Additional details about these courses, including enrollment information, are available through Courses at Brown.
EDUC 0890: E pluribus unum: English and Engaged Citizenship in the United States
Instructor: Tricia Kelly
What are the impacts and implications of naming English as the U.S. official language? How does an official national language serve to unify or divide a linguistically diverse nation? This course will examine official English language policies and English language practices in multilingual communities of the U.S. Students will investigate relationships between English language proficiency and concepts of engaged citizenship in legal, educational, and community spaces. Students will trace the use of English and other languages in U.S. history from colonialism through today, will investigate how waves of English-only policies have impacted K-12 schools throughout history, and will explore both domestic and global alternatives to monoglossic policies and practices.
EDUC 1185: Developmental and Educational Journeys of Students in Immigrant Families
Instructor: Yoko Yamamoto
This seminar course explores developmental and educational experiences of students in immigrant families in the United States, from early childhood to late adolescence. Students will examine family socialization, various domains of development (language, academic, socioemotional, and identity), cultural maintenance and adaptation, and home-school dynamics. Through readings and discussions of research from interdisciplinary social science fields, such as psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, students will gain a deeper understanding of immigrant-origin students’ experiences and how social, school, and family contexts and practices influence their developmental and educational journeys. The course highlights assets and agency that immigrant families and students bring as they navigate educational systems, as well as the barriers and challenges they face in the U.S. This course also incorporates community-engaged learning.
EDUC 1350: Education as Freedom?: Educational Access and Immigration Activism in the US South
Instructors: Andrea Flores and Kevin Escudero
This course explores the political, pedagogical, and practical efforts to expand educational access to minoritized groups in the U.S., with special attention to the U.S. South, both in the recent past and present. Course texts will include research in Africana studies, anthropology, history, education, and ethnic studies as well as first-person narratives of students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders living, learning, and working toward equity in the region over time. Students will have the opportunity to hear from community partners in Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia—cities with storied histories in both the Civil Rights and contemporary immigrant rights movements.
EDUC 1775: Education for the Future: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Scale
Instructor: Saloni Gupta
This seminar is both a study and a lab: students will examine research evidence on educational innovations and case studies of educational entrepreneurship, while also creating a space for students to test their own ideas with peers. Working in small teams, students will choose an education pedagogy and use it to teach weekly readings in a round-robin format. Each team will refine and redeploy its pedagogy across the semester, iterating based on peer feedback and evidence. By the end of the course, teams will have developed an educational innovation or venture concept and will pitch how it could scale—whether through startups, institutional adoption, or policy reform. Weekly readings provide the theoretical foundation in the economics of innovation and entrepreneurship, complemented by research evidence on educational policies and innovations from around the world.