CEPS Program Newsletter #054–December 3, 2014
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Cultural and Educational Policy Studies, Loyola University Chicago
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CEPS Students and Alumni-
Best of luck to all with your final papers and exams! There are a number of very important program-related announcements and requests below. First, faculty in the program are very pleased to announce a substantial revision and overhaul of our MEd program [A.1.]. Current MEd students may elect to stay under the previous existing guidelines, or they can elect to follow the newly redesigned requirements. Key features include replacing the disciplinary/depth specialization with a choice between an American Domestic Education Policy Track or a Global Education Policy Track. The new MEd also requires coursework in program evaluation and an engaged learning internship experience. Additional info below! Also note the request [A.2.] for input on when we should try to schedule the CEPS Theory and Method Reading Group during the Spring Semester, as well as the request [A.3] for students who have presented at professional conferences of the Fall to forward their presentation details so that we can feature all of this in the next issue of this newsletter. Please also note two fine events coming up on campus related to education in Evanston IL [B.1.] and Honduras [B.2.]. As usual, if you know of events or opportunities that can be shared via this newsletter please send them to my graduate assistant, Mike Hines at mhines2@luc.edu.
-Noah W Sobe
~CEPS Program Chair
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CEPS Program Newsletter #54– December 3, 2014
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Table of Contents:
A. CEPS AND LOYOLA NEWS
1. CEPS Announces new MEd Revision!
2. Request for input on Scheduling Spring 2015 CEPS Theory and Method Reading Group Times
3. Request for Information on Fall 2015 Student Conference Presentations
4. CEPS Spring 2015 Course Offerings (including descriptions of ELPS 458, 510 and 500)
5. CEPS Graduate Writing Tutor Available
6. Wellness Center Dissertation and Thesis Support Group, Fridays 2:00-3:15pm (LSC)
7. Upcoming University, SOE & Graduate School Deadlines.
B. UPCOMING LOYOLA EVENTS
1. CURL Friday Seminar on Evanston Public Schools, Dec 5, 10:30-noon Cuneo 417 (LSC)
2. Association for a More Just Society Presentation, Wednesday Dec 10, 9:30am-10:30am Corboy 301 (WTC)
C. CALLS FOR PAPERS AND UPCOMING CONFERENCES
1.Call for Proposals: Chicago Curriculum Studies Student Symposium, February 20, 2015 –Deadline: December 22, 2014.
2. Call for Proposals: American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS) Annual Meeting April 13-18, 2015 (Chicago IL)—Deadline: Priority Deadline December 7, 2014. Cut-off for Submissions January 4, 2014.
3. Call for proposals: Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) March 8-13, 2015 (Washington DC) –Deadline: December 8, 2014.
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A. CEPS AND LOYOLA NEWS
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A.1. CEPS Announces MEd Revision! In order to better differentiate our MA and MEd degrees and to provide a master’s degree specifically designed for people interested in education policy analysis at local and global levels, we have revamped our MEd degree to now offer the choice between two tracks as well as feature additional coursework in Program Evaluation and an engaged learning internship. The MEd remains a 30 credit program and existing MEd students may choose to continue under the previous existing requirements or to conform to the new requirements. Additional information available at http://luc.edu/education/medinculturaleducationalpolicystudies/ and http://luc.edu/education/programs/cultural-educational-policy-studies-med-curriculum.shtml
The following additional information will shortly be appearing online on the department’s FAQ page:
** What is the difference between the M.A. and M.Ed. in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies?
Both the M.A. and M.Ed. Degrees in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies similarly prepare graduates to recognize education’s cultural dimensions and leverage cultural analyses in their work to improve educational experiences and institutions.
The M.A. requires 24 hours of course work and has the distinct focus of preparing students to conduct original independent research, and it includes a master’s thesis requirement. In this regard CEPS M.A. students develop expertise in a focused discipline of study (history of education, international comparative education, philosophy of education, sociology of education) including specific skills and competencies needed to carry out research in that discipline.
The M.Ed. requires 30 hours of coursework, which includes a three-credit engaged learning internship requirement. The M.Ed. does not require a thesis but requires the student to prepare an electronic portfolio as a capstone project. In addition, CEPS M.Ed. students develop expertise in a focused domain of educational practice (domestic or global), including specific skills and competencies needed in work related to education policy. CEPS M.Ed. students become critical consumers of educational research.
**Is it possible to transfer between the M.A. and M.Ed. (or vice versa) programs?
Once admitted to either program, students may submit an application to transfer between master’s programs. There is an overlap in coursework between the two degrees though each has unique, individual requirements which makes transfer after the first or second semester more difficult and possibly result in additional course-taking requirements.
A.2. Scheduling Spring 2015 CEPS Theory and Method Reading Group times.
Faculty and students in the Cultural and Educational Policy Studies program meet every several weeks to discuss classic and cutting-edge scholarship on theory and method that relates to studying educational policy and practice. Additional info and past readings are available here: http://blogs.luc.edu/ceps/educational-policy-theory-and-method-reading-group/
Recognizing that no time will perfectly suite all, to help us identify optimal times to meet in the Spring 2015 semester please indicate your general availability and campus preference on the following survey
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NZ92M27
A.3. Students who presented papers at professional conferences at any point since the beginning of last summer are kindly requested to forward titles and conference information (such as one would list on a CV) do Professor Sobe’s Graduate Assistant Mike Hines (mhines2@luc.edu) so that we can feature these many great accomplishments in the next issue of the newsletter. If you have any conference photographs that you are comfortable having us post online please send these along as well. Deadline: Dec 15th.
A.4. CEPS Spring 2015 Courses — In Spring 2015 CEPS will, as usual, be offering a set of first-tier courses in our various areas of specialization as well as two advanced seminars.
* ELPS 405 Intro to Educational Policy Analysis (Jules) WTC Mondays 7:00-9:30
* ELPS 412 Sociology of Urban Education and Policy (Phillippo) WTC Tuesdays 4:15-6:45
* ELPS 420 Philosophy of Education (Shuffelton) WTC Wednesdays 7:00-9:30
* ELPS 444 History of American Education (TBD) WTC Thursdays 7:00-9:30
* ELPS 458 International Education (Jules) WTC Mondays 4:15-6:45
This advanced seminar, which is both theoretical and applied, introduces students to issues and institutions involved in international educational development. This course will provide students with a deep understanding of the changing role of educational development projects in light of the post-2015 development agenda, post-financial crisis and global recession, post-Ebola epidemic, and post-Arab Spring periods. Students will spend time exploring and understanding how these many ‘post-contexts and settings’ are changing the nature of development and the educational responses that are now coordinated across different scales and spaces (at national, regional and global levels). With the aid of class readings and paying particular attention to endogenous and exogenous challenges that Africa and the Middle East confront, discussion will be framed through a comparative and international educational perspective that exposes students to the ways that different theories of education and development influence policy, priorities, and programs of international, national, and local institutions in these regions.
* ELPS 510 Sociology of Education Seminar: Sociology of Teaching (Phillippo) WTC Tuesdays 7:00-9:30
This discussion-oriented seminar will address a range of topics related to the application of sociological perspectives to the understanding of the practice and profession of teaching. Topics addressed will include: *Historic and current day social and organizational conditions of teaching and how these impact teachers’ practice *Power and control as it manifests in tensions over who directs and evaluates teachers’ work and different ways in which teachers relate to students *The status of teaching as a profession, using sociology of the professions literature *Teacher workforce issues, specifically teacher turnover and workforce development *Teacher unions and teacher activism–special attention to social justice unionism, CTU contract negotiation this spring and the Vergara case (California) *Media representations of teachers *Teachers’ emotional labor *Sociodemographic characteristics of teachers and the teaching profession, including race, class, gender and age *Teacher effects on student learning, with an emphasis on value-added measurement (VAM) and teacher evaluations *The boundaries of teaching, including efforts to expand teachers’ roles and define teachers’ turf.
* ELPS 500 Immigration and Education Cross-SOE Seminar (Sobe with other SOE Faculty) WTC Thursdays 4:15-6:45
Together with Counseling Psychology Professor Anita Thomas, Professor Sobe will co-lead an interdisciplinary seminar for doctoral and advanced master’s students on the topic of Immigration and Education. They will be joined by professors from across the School of Education who will come in across the semester to lead particular class sessions (including Professors Phillippo and Shuffelton from CEPS). Please note that in addition to drawing on faculty resources from across the SOE, we intend for this course to enroll students from across the SOE and thus each program area will be restricted to putting forth 2-4 students for the ELPS 500 Immigration and Education seminar. If this is something
you are interested in please bring this up with and discuss with your advisor by Friday Nov 7th as the faculty will be making selections of CEPS students after the 7th.
A.5. Samantha Deane, a CEPS PhD student, has joined Loyola’s Writing Center as a volunteer graduate writing tutor. Tutoring sessions can be scheduled between 4:00 and 6:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and are available to anyone, regardless of your writing prowess or stage in the writing process. This is not a place for copy-editing; rather it is a place for a conversation about your ideas and how to communicate them. Whether you consider yourself a writing expert or novice, love writing or hate it, tutoring sessions seek to push your ideas and your writing to new levels. In order to sign up for a tutoring session go to https://luc.mywconline.com/ to first register an account, and then sign in. When you sign in, select Corboy Law Room 811, Graduate from the pull-down menu. This will ensure that they can sign up with a graduate writing tutor rather than an undergrad. You may (always) sign up to work with any tutor, but if you’d like to work with Sam please look for her name in the left column and sign up for an available slot.
A.6. The Wellness Center encourages graduate students working on a thesis or dissertation to make use of its Dissertation and Thesis Support Group. Do you find the research and writing process isolating? Are you dealing with writer’s block? Are members of your committee steering you in five different directions? Are you smoking more cigarettes than ever before? Are you procrastinating so much that your kitchen has never been cleaner? Completing research projects is difficult work—but you do not have to be in it alone! Please attend a weekly group facilitated by Wellness Center clinical psychologist David deBoer. Members of this ongoing interactive group commit to support, cajole and encourage one another in overcoming the blocks to productivity and moving forward with your project. The group is open to graduate students at any stage in the process of completing either a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation. This group meets Fridays, 2:00—3:15 p.m., beginning Friday, Sept.26th, at the LSC Wellness Center, Granada Center, 3rd Floor. To request group membership or for further information, new and returning members please contact Dr. David deBoer at ddeboer@luc.edu or by calling (773) 508-2546.
A.7. Upcoming University, SOE & Graduate School Deadlines
*December 6, 2014. Fall Semester classes end
*December 8-16, 2014. Final Examinations
*December 15, 2014. Last day to file a Late Application to Receive a Degree for May 2015 degree conferral ($25 late fee applied)
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B. UPCOMING LOYOLA EVENTS
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1. The CURL Friday Seminar on December 5th will feature Megan Klein, Sociology Graduate Student at Loyola University Chicago presenting on “The Foster School Paradox: Institutional Integration and the Disintegration of a Black Community in Evanston.” Her talk explores how integration has happened in Evanston over the last century. Through interviews and archival data, Megan will focus on the construction of the historically Black community, the closure of Black neighborhood institutions for the purpose of integration and the recent failed referendum to build a new neighborhood school in west Evanston. Friday, Dec 5, 10:30-noon Cuneo 417 (LSC).
2. During the Child Migrant conference held at Loyola in November panelist and journalist Sonya Nazario (author of _Enrique’s Journey_) made mention of the efforts of the Association for a More Just Society (AJS) (http://www.ajs-us.org/) to improve the living conditions in Hunduras. Jill VanBeek, Director of Operations for The Association for a More Just Society (AJS), will be at Loyola on Wednesday December 10th and will provide an overview of the organization. This organization is also connected with a study abroad program sponsored by Calvin College in Justice Studies (http://www.calvin.edu/academic/off-campus/programs/honduras-justice/). AJS is a Christian organization that, as a result of its fearless efforts to stand up for victims of violence, labor- and land-rights abuses, and government corruption in Honduras, is increasingly being recognized – both by Christian groups and secular agencies such as Transparency International and the United Nations—as a pioneer in the practice of achieving justice for the poor. AJS faithfully works in many areas to root out corruption in Honduras – including education. For the last decade, Honduras children have missed more than 1/3 of their education due to teachers not showing up in schools. AJS has worked to change this, and for the last 2 years Honduran kids have received more school than required by Honduran law! In addition to working to root out corruption, AJS is taking steps towards peace and public security on a national level through a public security reform process. Jill Van Beek, AJS Director of Operations, speaks on the current Honduran situation and what it means to be a brave Christian in today’s world.
Wednesday December 10, 9:30am-10:30am, WTC Corboy Law Center 301.
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C. CALLS FOR PAPERS AND UPCOMING CONFERENCES
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C.1. The University of Illinois at Chicago seeks proposals for its 3rd annual Chicago Curriculum Studies Student Symposium, which will take place February 20, 2015, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This one-day program is designed to bring together students, educators, and scholars from Institutions around Chicagoland to share research projects in progress in collaborative dialogue sessions.
The theme of this year’s symposium is works-in-progress. Instead of the usual conference format of formalized readings of finished research papers, this conference is designed as a place to present professional work that is still coming into form, in order to create a place to discuss, question, expand, stretch, and explore. This year’s program is dedicated to the life and legacy of Professor William H. Watkins, a beloved teacher, compassionate justice worker, and visionary scholar. We especially invite proposals that speak to the current issues that Dr. Watkins’ work is a continuing platform for investigating including intersections of sociology, education, political economy, and race; the struggle for public education; protest thought; the struggle over school knowledge; education in the pursuit of peace and justice; and other contemporary curriculum issues.
Any graduate student, inquisitive educator, community activist, or cultural worker, whose work in education poses questions about curriculum, teaching, and knowledge is encouraged to submit an idea. To submit a proposal, please email your key question and 100 words elaborating on your work-in-progress, plus 50 words about you to chicagocurriculumstudies@gmail.com.
Deadline: The Deadline for submissions is December 22, 2014.
C.2. The American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies seeks proposals for its 2015 annual meeting entitled “Alterglobal Dispossession and the Politics of Recognition in Curriculum Studies” which will take place April 13-16, 2015 in Chicago, IL, hosted by Loyola University Chicago. Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging in the world. Recognition refers to the visible status of a human being participating in a collection of communities. How can we work with, within, and in parallel to crowds of recognition, to protest dispossession through performative, transnational projects? How can we use commitment to alterglobal action in supporting complicated conversations that are recognized and that recognize? How can we nurture maker-communities of conviviality, designing, and committed aesthetics? How might this theme be interrogated by our task forces, on internationalization, practice and policy, and ethics?
Subthemes regarding politics of dispossession/recognition include:
-What problematics and potentials are related to exportation of Anglophone understandings of recognition politics based United Statesian civil rights movements?
-What problematics and potentials are presented by the study of alterity, indigenous traditions, and cosmopolitan sensibilities in the next moment?
-What problematics and potentials are inherent in Birmingham school Marxian understandings including, among others, the discourse on public pedagogies?
-How is transnational recognition “conjugated” in AAACS’ task forces on internationalization, ethics, and policy and practice?
-What public critiques are necessary given the unquestioned neoliberal globalizing strategies of “individual students,” “standards,” “accountability,” “mass testing,” and other assessments that enact epistemicides?
-What is the status of multicultural foundations based on nationalist concerns in an epoch that has clearly shifted to neoliberal globalization and capital movements that outpace nations and national politics?
The program is open to everyone’s curriculum studies conversations, and, while we always welcome any ongoing scholarship in our field to join us, in Chicago, we particularly encourage presenters to question how their work engages with work that weakens dispossession and strengthens recognition. All submission must be made through the AAACS Proposal Submission Site on Google forms.
Please follow the form provided in the submission site. Follow the link: http://goo.gl/forms/d0eS0K4LDv
Deadline: Priority Deadline December 7, 2014. Cut-off for Submissions January 4, 2014
C.3. The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) seeks submissions for its 59th Annual Conference, taking place from March 8-13, 2015 at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The 2015 CIES Planning Committee welcomes quality paper, panel, poster and workshop proposals relating to the conference theme. Proposals not directly related to this conference theme but addressing issues of relevance to comparative and international education may also be submitted for consideration. Generally, education systems continue to contribute to the reproduction of existing structures of socio-economic inequalities with respect to class, race, gender and other dimensions of social differentiation. As a result curricula, classrooms and community rarely intersect, especially in the developing world. “Ubuntu! Imagining a Humanist Education Globally” is the theme of the 59th CIES conference in Washington, D.C, March 8-13, 2015. The substance of collective ethos captured in Ubuntu is shared across the African continent and beyond. The specific term was popularized by various authors including the novelist, scholar, and journalist Jordan Kush Ngubane in the 1950s and more recently by public figures such as Nelson Mandela articulating a society and world of inclusiveness and equality.
This conference theme explores an imagined future where education is a moral enterprise that develops and shapes minds to embrace humanism that is separable from socio-economic equality, which defines the world as a complex whole, an interconnected and interdependent ecosystem of diverse humans, nature and the planet. This vision of humanist education is in harmony with Ubuntu, which inspires a multiplicity of worldviews, indigenous epistemologies and ideological schools of thought in a world that is inclusive while fostering autonomy and humanity. It is conceived to guide academics, policymakers and practitioners and learners in different locations. While education has been an instrument for reproducing certain inequalities as it may not encourage and enable people to struggle for social transformation, even carefully designed colonial education that was intended to subordinate colonized peoples in different parts of the world produced critical thinkers and activists who questioned and helped to topple formal colonial domination. More broadly, we should be able to imagine education that is designed to promote values of mutually beneficial cooperation whereby even competition would mean striving toward achieving the greater good to enhance our shared humanity. To imagine an education fostering a future that reflects Ubuntu is to engage in a process of deconstruction of the prevailing modernist epistemologies that tend to separate the heart and mind. The re-imagined vision of education will be the regenerative space for positive social change. The 2015 conference offers an opportunity to reflect on and contribute to the exciting possibilities of an Ubuntu-inspired education, embodying a philosophical, pedagogical and curricula framework that is emancipatory, cultured, transformative, localized and empowering for all humanity and the globe. As a professional society on education in its comparative and international dimensions CIES invites all participants including educators in general with a special call to researchers, policymakers, practitioners, representatives of international organizations, local and global non-governmental organizations and members of civil society to share their insights and experiences and offer forward-looking collective deliberations. We also urge participants to contribute to tackling theoretical, empirical, and practical questions in the critical examination of existing systems of learning and testing at the local and global levels, the limits as well as the possibilities of established quantitative and qualitative methods with careful consideration of indigenous epistemologies. Additional information at http://cies2015.com/call-for-proposals/
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