Graduate Minor in Critical Studies

The critical studies minor provides students with opportunities to explore and apply critical theories related to schooling, teaching and learning, and educational research. This critical analysis of education is centered on understanding cultural, institutional, and structural dynamics that create and perpetuate injustice, inequity, and oppression in education and schooling. Students will enact educational praxis that opens, develops, and sustains critical consciousness.You must be a graduate student in one of our graduate programs to be eligible to add the Graduate Minor in Critical Studies in Education to your degree.

This program is offered on-campus only. 

Student Learning Outcomes

1. Students will reflect critically on their own beliefs and values as they relate to commitments to equity and social justice in education.

2. Students will articulate and enact anti-oppressive (e.g., anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-transphobic, anti-heterosexist, anti-misogynist, anti-xenophobic, anti-imperialist, anti-ableist, anti-classist) perspectives in education.

3. Students will understand and apply critical theoretical perspectives from education, humanities, and social sciences scholarship to analyze and critique systems of oppression, domination, marginalization, exploitation, silencing, and subjugation.

4. Students will design, carry out, and communicate the results of research conducted in the scholar-activist model in educational settings.

5. Students will critique oppression at the systemic and institutional levels, recognizing the complex interactions between systems and institutions and the individuals who work/reside in those systems and institutions.

6. Students will understand interconnected power dynamics that shape local, state, and national educational policy discourses, educational practices, and research methodologies, and learn how those methodologies interact with individual educators’ beliefs, values, and actions.

7. Students will develop pedagogical, conceptual, and methodological skills relevant to transforming educational practices, structures, and institutions towards equity and justice.