德保尔大学

The Social and Cultural Foundations Program is committed to inquiry that examines the relationship of schooling, education, and educational policy to social justice and cultural democracy. The program is an interdisciplinary one, designed to appeal to students seeking alternatives to more specialized or technical programs of study in education. This program is designed to attract educators, leaders, and individuals with bachelor’s degrees who have broad interests in education but who may not be professional educators. This program anticipates that students pursuing this degree will come from a variety of educational and professional backgrounds involving different forms of educational work such as media, private foundations, museums, community organizations, labor unions, higher education, K-12 schools, and others. Students are attracted to this program for personal and professional enhancement, research for private foundations, adult education and training, or to prepare for doctoral work, careers in higher education, and other related areas.

The program provides students the opportunity to study education, not only as schooling, but also more broadly as a dynamic cultural and political force that unfolds in a wide range of shifting and overlapping sites of learning. Students will consider education as a dynamic process that shapes social identities and social life as well as the learning of values and beliefs, all of which are central to how people make cognitive and emotional investments and act in the world. As such, education is a significant force in creating, maintaining, and challenging assumptions of neutrality and hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual difference. From this perspective, education is an indispensable tool for creating conditions for social justice and democratic life. In this context, students investigate the pedagogical and cultural conditions necessary for supporting the flourishing of human agency and the redefinition of human engagement in social life.

Learning Outcomes

​Students will be able to:

• Apply theories within the humanities, social sciences, and psychological sciences within the disciplinary foundations of education to their understanding of educational phenomenon.
• Integrate methodologies into designing and conducting research in the disciplinary foundations of education.
• Analyze human development as a socio-cultural process that takes place over the lifespan and over historical time.
• Communicate, verbally and in writing, their understanding of the inter-relationship between identities and social relations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc. and use this information to examine issues of power, resistance, and social change.
• Apply the understanding of identity and social relations to examine issues of power, resistance, and personal and institutional transformation.