Curriculum, Culture, and Communities (MEd)
The MEd in Curriculum, Culture, and Communities (3Cs) is designed within a social justice framework across schools and communities to prepare educators, community organizers, faith-based leaders, policy-makers, and others to take on new challenges as socially-just curriculum specialists in institutions of higher education, schools, and communities.
MEd in 3Cs is designed for an applicant who has less than 5 years of professional experience with BA/BS. Applicants with BA/BS with 5+ years of professional experience are eligible to apply for both MEd and Ed.D. in 3Cs. Those students who complete an MEd in 3Cs will have an option to matriculate into an Ed.D. program if they are in good academic standing.
Enduring Understandings & Program Outcomes
MEd & EdD in 3Cs is founded upon six enduring understandings (EUs)
EU1: Theories and Practices about Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Policy
- Students will develop understandings of curriculum, pedagogy, and policy and apply knowledge on transformative curriculum and pedagogy for innovative policy in the local, state, national, and international educational contexts to advocate with and for students, families, and communities.
EU2: Ecology of Communities
- Students will understand that effective educators comprehend the historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural realities and funds of knowledge of local communities as well as relationships, practices, and systems. Further, students will understand that effective educators seek to engage multiple stakeholders toward creating that promote equity and social justice of society’s most vulnerable groups.
EU3: Research, Evaluation & Change Practices
- Students will understand and use appropriate and rigorous research methods (e.g., qualitative, mixed, quantitative) and research types ( e.g., basic, action, evaluation) to investigate critical questions that contribute to the development and improvement in instructional practices, transformative curriculum, and the improvement of relationships across school, community and university settings. Emphasis will be placed on the use of participatory and collaborative research approaches.
EU4: Critical perspectives on Language, Culture, and Literacy
- Students will understand and apply an approach to language and literacy that is heteroglossic, a view of language and literacy as dynamic, and an understanding of the acquisition of language and literacy as a process that occurs within and is influenced by cultural systems and structures including (but not limited to) those of the family, the school, and the surrounding community.
EU 5: Collaboration and Partnership
- Students will understand that effective teaching and learning is situated in local and globalized communities and incorporates assets of students, families, and broader communities into learning. Students will understand that transformative learning engages in collaborative, mutually beneficial, and sustainable relationships among school, communities, and multiple stakeholders to ensure the academic success and social & emotional learning of all students.
EU6: Principles and Practices of Social Justice
- Students will develop their ability to apply principles and practices of a social justice lens in relation theories and practices of schools and communities by focusing on transformative teaching and learning, university-school-community collaborations, mitigating inequities and disrupting power structures and practices that have contributed to the marginalization of communities and people around the world through research and pedagogy.