This masters project seminar uses reflective analysis to reconsider pedagogical dilemmas emerging from student teaching. In professional collaboration, students explore questions relating to culturally responsive teaching: What does it mean to be a culturally responsive and antiracist practitioner? How do my experiences and intersectional identities impact my cultural responsiveness? What actions can I take to interrogate my biases and social location and to contribute collaboratively to the ongoing work of equity?

The central work of this course is to center race as a lens for understanding education and miseducation in American schooling. Students engage the ongoing process of confronting and unlearning socialized assumptions about race and how these manifest in classrooms and in their own racialized identities. Students reflect on classroom teaching and learning experiences to develop and apply strategies and action steps that promote racial equity in learning contexts, engaging the following questions: How do I define my racialized identity?

This course provides students the opportunity to assume the role of an elementary/secondary teacher for a 15-week period during the Spring semester. Students work cooperatively with a selected mentor teacher, with supervisory support from the University. Pass/fail only.

This course aims to prepare secondary teacher candidates to better understand adolescent experiences within and beyond school, using a variety of critical lenses and perspectives. The course emphasizes engagement with diverse student communities, and seeks to interrogate common assumptions surrounding student abilities, motivations, and literacies. Participants work with adolescents throughout the term, engage readings, complete case studies, and work toward curriculum and instruction that more consciously includes every learner.

This 1-unit course is designed to support your professional development and growth as a reflective teacher in secondary content area classrooms. It focuses on the many variables that impact teaching and learning and invites students to consider a range of questions, stances, assumptions, practices, and tensions that inform teaching and learning in secondary schools. Students learn important general methods related to teaching in content areas with adolescents - including notions of inquiry, equity based instruction, differentiation, grouping, and assessment.

This instructional methods course provides an opportunity to explore issues and strategies related to current models and trends in literacy teaching and learning. Creating inclusive learning communities characterized by equity, access and social justice requires the continued development of all students’ capacities to use language and construct meaning through print. A foundational assumption of this course is that literacy is not a ’subject’ but a tool for social, cultural, and academic engagement.

In this course students engage in reflective cycles of teaching practice. Using their teaching internship as a source of inquiry, students make their practice public, share teaching issues, and problem-solve through collegial dialogue. Participants critically reflect on curriculum, student learning, and student identities by posing questions, surfacing assumptions, reframing issues, and developing action steps to transform their teaching.

This seminar involves weekly meetings in which students examine a range of issues emanating from school-based experiences. In addition, the course fulfills specific Washington Administrative Code (WAC) requirements for teacher preparation. Students hear selected speakers on professional topics related to sexual harassment, appropriate relationships and touch in school, school contract law, IEP/504 students, and child neglect/abuse.

This school-based field experience accompanies the elementary and secondary curriculum and instruction courses. MAT students observe and participate in elementary and/or secondary classroom teaching and learning experiences.