The M.A.T. curriculum focuses on strengthening your skills as a teacher of English through theoretical learning and field opportunities, including a three-month student teaching experience in the spring. This 12-month program consists of 48 credit hours over three semesters (normally 16 hours per semester).
Summer Semester Session I
EDU 610: Understanding Learners (4)
Theories of cognitive development (Piaget, Vygotsky, information processing); Learning theory (research in cognition and memory, behaviorism, constructivism, schema theory, conceptual change); Motivation theory (attributions, intrinsic vs. extrinsic, affect).
English 600: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature (4)
Using critical and cultural theory to teach literary texts. Critical methods that enrich understanding of classic and modern literature and help provide instructional units for effective classroom presentation. Special attention to Reader-Response, historical and cultural (feminist/gender, multicultural, and/or post-colonial) theoretical approaches.
Summer semester I: 8
Summer Semester Session II
EDU 611: Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education (4)
Using concepts and forms of analysis from the social sciences and philosophy, the course examines the challenges and possibilities of transformative education. Emphasis is placed on the purposes of education, the nature of knowledge as understood and practiced in schools and the tensions between the role of schools in the transmission and transformation of values. Field experience required. Prerequisite: EDU 610
EDU 611L: The Opening of School Experience (0)
Students attend a middle or high school for one week during the opening of the school year. They will observe, assist the cooperating teacher in various ways and complete any tasks assigned in advance by the instructor of Education 611. Note: Separate credit for this experience is not awarded though it is noted on the student's transcript. A student's performance is evaluated as a concomitant of Education 611.
ENG 650 American Dreams (4)
This course is designed to prepare graduate students as literature teachers. It will explore the pervasive national myth of the American Dream, focusing on works central to the current secondary school American literature canon and treating these works in the context of historical documents, documentary films, and other works outside this central canon. Readings will include texts by such figures as Walt Whitman, Zitkala Sa, Standing Bear, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sterling A. Brown, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Edward Albee, John Updike, Chester Himes, Adrienne Rich, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Martin Espada, and Sherman Alexie.
Summer semester II: 8
Summer session total: 16
Fall Semester
EDU 612: Curriculum Development in Secondary Schools (4)
Higher level thinking (problem solving, metacognition, critical thinking, questioning); classroom environment (community, physical arrangement, behavior and discipline); classroom assessment. Includes field experience.
EDU 680: Teaching Exceptional Children (4)
Introduction to special needs, including child development and intelligence, major areas of exceptionality, identification of learners with special needs. Introduction to other learner differences including race, class, gender, ethnicity and first language. Adapting curriculum and instruction for diverse needs. Includes field experience.
English 608: The Study and Teaching of Language (4)
The contemporary structure and historical origins of American English, its standard and popular varieties and its social and historical contexts, with a direct focus on the needs of classroom teachers.
English 610: Writing Teachers' Workshop (4)
An intensive workshop for advanced writers in the theories and practice of teaching writing at the secondary level. Emphasis on writing as process, teaching grammar in context, evaluating student writing and designing scholarly and creative writing assignments for both individuals and groups. Special sessions on the uses of technology in the English classroom.
Fall semester: 16
Spring Semester
EDU 630: Student Teaching (10) (taken over a three-month period, starting in early January)
Full-time supervised experience in a public school.
Prerequisite: EDU 610, 612, 680.
EDU 631: Seminar in Teaching (2)
Provides individual and group problem-solving sessions to focus on issues and situations related to the student teaching experience.
Corequisite: Education 630.
English 680: Current Issues: Study and Teaching of English (4)
Focus on issues of current controversy in the profession: cultural literacy, ideology and teaching, race and gender in literature, cultural criticism, and technology and learning. Emphasis on the philosophical dimensions of educational practice and the political realities of public education. (4 weeks)
Spring semester: 16