Beyond Equity and Schooling Syllabus
This Stanford Teacher Education Program syllabus (Education 299B) approaches issues of equity in teacher education. In this course, teacher candidates are asked to develop an ethnographic perspective on their personal experiences in schooling to understand local educational contexts through their perspectives, and in relation to wider cultural, political, economic, social, and historical power structures. By the end of this class, candidates have the beginnings of an ethnographic sketch of their current student-teaching placements by completing the following assignments: a positionality statement, fieldnotes based on participant observation, a historical analysis of their current school site, and an analysis of a cultural artifact. These assignments collectively offer teacher candidates an opportunity to reflect upon a uniquely personal understanding of a space and place, its cultural norms, and the implicit and explicit instantiations of power within it.