UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

Education is an institution at odds with itself: it's valued but never fully funded. Our goal is to prepare students for the future, but our teaching is rooted in the past. We want students to become independent, but we expect them to follow rigid rules. With all these contradictions it's no surprise that education doesn't 'work' for every student. This class will problematize education by examining our own experiences, looking at literary representations of school and learning, and putting both of them in conversation with what theorists and experts have to say. We will ask whether what we read can lead to a deeper understanding of our own experiences and our culture by examining themes such as gender, race and racism, socioeconomic and poverty, literacy and language and power structures. Working with critical concepts and terminology will enable us to reach a better understanding of how the writing we read works and will help us tell own stories more effectively. In the end you will use your understanding and your experience as a means to developing a potential solution to one of the problems of education.