Swarthmore College (CorruptED)

The Swarthmore College’s Department of Educational Studies features content such as critical pedagogy, power, and teacher activism. Course texts include Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The Department of Educational Studies’ website states that it is “committed to anti-racism, social justice, and sustainability.” Their mission is to combat “structural racism and other intersecting system of oppression.”

The Department’s goals include an exploration of “education in relation to social justice” and the students’ ability to “use antiracist, liberatory and disability studies and critical race theory frameworks.”

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COURSES

EDUC 014: Pedagogy and Power: Introduction to Education

The course EDUC 014: Pedagogy and Power: Introduction to Education includes topics such as Black Lives Matter Week of Action, critical pedagogy, power, and teacher activism. Course texts include Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

This course intends for students to “develop a range of frames for thinking about educational equity in processes and institutions” and become “critical and reflective participant-observers in educational settings.

The course is required for Swarthmore’s Teacher Certification programs in Elementary Certification (Grades PreK-4), Secondary Certification (Grades 7-12), and World Language Teaching Certification (Grades K through 12). Additionally, it is a “first course recommendation” for Educational Studies minors and majors.

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EDUC 046: Race, Nation, Empire & Education

The course description for EDUC 046: Race, Nation, Empire & Education “examines race, nation- and empire building projects” and “explores the different ways in which education figures into nation- and empire-building projects.” This includes a study of “schools as institutions that create internalized colonized mindsets; intelligence as a discourse for rationalizing scientific racism; and institutions of higher education as products of imperialism and its role in the new imperialism of neoliberalism.”