Educational Studies M.Ed
Are you a liberally educated, but untrained novice in the education profession with a social conscience that implores you to learn more about education’s problems and possibilities? Or are you an experienced and concerned professional educator who risks adventurous practical experimentation, reads voraciously, and thinks both critically and imaginatively not just about methods and techniques, but also especially about the purposes, meanings, and values of your work? Or are you such an educator in a cultural setting whose educational consequence has escaped professional acknowledgment somehow? In any of these cases, Educational Studies may be well suited to develop your own insights and capacities for intellectual and moral leadership in education.
As the oldest field in the modern education profession, Educational Studies was initially grounded in philosophy and the experimental pedagogies of the Progressive era’s kindergarten, social-settlement, and laboratory-school movements—later also in history, sociology, anthropology, arts, and religion as well as progressive higher education, comparative and international education. Scholars in the Educational Studies tradition analyze, evaluate, and construct educational narratives, artifacts, archives, concepts, values, purposes, theories, policies, pedagogies, and curricula as well as experimental institutions of learning. The contemporary field’s educational inquiry claims its sources and standards of evidence, conceptual frameworks, analytic techniques, evaluative tools, rules of critical engagement, and pedagogical protocols directly from the arts, humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences—rather than from the behavioral sciences that now frame other fields’ methods of educational research and standards of educational expertise. Such interpretive, critical, and normative inquiries on education may concern any age group or the whole human lifespan, any or all subjects, many aims, diverse cultural contexts, various institutional settings, and even different historical periods.
For further information about the Educational Studies program and advising with regard to preparation of your application for admission, contact the faculty member below whose specialties and approaches most closely match your own interests.
The Educational Studies program offers graduate students in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education an option for academically rigorous interdisciplinary learning, pragmatically designed to suit their own individual gifts, backgrounds, and goals as educators. Distinctively grounded in arts, humanities, and social sciences, the Educational Studies field aims to impart practical wisdom and purposeful imagination to the moral work of educating for social justice, nonviolence, and democratic life—wherever such educating may occur, locally or globally.
More than just required courses, Educational Studies graduate programs at the University of Oklahoma offer a variety of learning experiences to compose a coherent, practical, and scholarly apprenticeship in the field, tailored to each student’s own special interests and talents. With extensive experience as teachers and leaders in schools, colleges, universities, and other public-service settings, Educational Studies faculty members mentor their graduate students as apprentice scholars developing personally meaningful and morally purposeful programs of original inquiry with topically diverse emphases in philosophy, history, and sociology of education.
Most Educational Studies graduate students work professionally as teachers, professors, community educators, and educational administrators—and engage in scholarly self-examination of such work—while pursuing the M.Ed. and Ph.D. A weekly Friday afternoon colloquium brings Educational Studies graduate students and faculty together informally for discussion of challenging issues and readings as a professional community of learning and inquiry led by students. Graduate students in Educational Studies practice statewide stewardship of the field and participate in professional development activities through the Oklahoma Educational Studies Association http://www.ou.edu/oesa/, for which they also provide democratic leadership. All are encouraged also to become professionally active as scholars in OESA’s national sponsor-organization, the American Educational Studies Association http://www.educationalstudies.org/, as well as in other relevant groups, such as the Organization of Educational Historians http://www.edhistorians.org/, History of Education Society http://www.historyofeducation.org/index.htm, Philosophy of Education Society http://philosophyofeducation.org/, Association for Moral Education http://www.amenetwork.org/, Society of Philosophy & History of Education http://sopheconference.com/, International Society of Educational Biography http://www.isebio.org/, International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry http://www.icqi.org/, National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in Higher Education http://www.ncore.ou.edu/, and Society for Educating Women http://www.educatingwomen.net/.