Fall 2020

U.E. 70200: “Historical Perspectives on Urban Education”

Prof. Stephen Brier ([email protected])

Prof. Judith Kafka (mailto:[email protected])

Class: On Zoom, Wednesday, 4:15 to 6:15 pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88327232488?pwd=UHlZQmsvUXQ1ZVBicHRaM2dyYnlpQT09

Office hours: By appointment via Zoom or telephone

Course Description

Official Course Description in the GC Catalogue: “This course will explore the emergence and transformation of urban public educational institutions–public and private, inclusive and selective, fee-paying and free, religious and secular–out of the dynamic interplay of individual, group, and larger scale intellectual, social, political, and economic factors. Students will study the formation of social identities in the history of education, specifically race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion, and the relationship of identify formation to current issues in education. The history of the politics of education also will be studied, especially as politics relates to defining educational mission, determining resources, including or excluding individuals and groups, providing equity of educational opportunity, and encouraging community participation in establishing and maintaining schools. The course will develop the concepts and skills of historiographical research through an examination of prevailing concepts of education and schooling, schooling and identity formation, concepts of childhood and youth, perceived missions of schooling, alternative school structures and governance, available technologies, teacher recruitment and student enrollments, contemporary pedagogies and curricula, and the resulting educational institutions and programs that emerge at a given historical moment.”

Our (somewhat different) Approach and Course Objectives: We will focus particularly on the history of urban and public schools and universities that first emerged in the United States in the early nineteenth century and then were transformed over the next two hundred years. We will look at the interplay of social, political, cultural, and economic factors and forces and intellectual and ideological ideas that reshaped and restructured U.S. society and, in turn, its educational institutions over those two centuries. We will study the history and political economy of public, urban education at the primary, secondary and college levels, using the lenses of race, class, gender, ethnicity, settler colonialism, and religion through which to see the relationship between current issues and problems in education and the historical developments and processes out of which they emerged. We will pay particular attention to issues of historical context, and the material, cultural and political conditions in which struggles for educational reform and transformation took place.

The course poses a series of key questions that have roiled American society over the last two centuries:

• What is the purpose/role of public education in a democratic society?
• Is the role of public education solely practical (i.e., job training to assure economic progress and social mobility)? Or is the role of education broadly political and/or ideological (educating students for their role in a democracy and teaching them how to be critical thinkers vs. inculcating students with notions of a capitalistic sense of order and discipline)?
• Which groups and individuals are included and which are excluded from the all-encompassing notion of the concept of “public” in public education?

By the end of the semester, we expect students will be able to:

• Explain in broad terms the history of public education in the United States, including many of its persistent tensions and contradictions
• Identify historical questions that remain to be answered in the existing historiography of American public education
• Describe how histories of the particular (including the education of social/ethnic/racial/gender/regional groups) help us to better understand the larger history of education
• Locate political and ideological roots of current educational movements and reforms in earlier eras
• Interrogate, research, analyze and effectively communicate about a historical question/aread of personal interest

As Orestes Brownson—a New England political activist, intellectual and labor organizer—framed the issue concisely in 1839: “The real question for us to ask is not, Shall our children be educated? but, To what end shall they be educated, and by what means? What is the kind of education needed, and how shall it be furnished?” This course will explore the ways the nation’s answers to these key questions changed over time.

Course Requirements

The course will encourage students to understand and develop the skills and methodologies of historical thinking and primary and secondary historical research and to demonstrate those skills and apply those methodologies to a historically-themed final project related to public education. Students will be expected to complete each week’s course readings (both the required secondary books and scholarly articles and the primary source materials, the quantity of which is, admittedly, heavy at times) as a necessary prerequisite for engaging and participating in class discussions. Doing the course reading and participating in class discussions on Zoom, both as a whole class and in breakout sessions, is a critical part of this course. There will be two shorter papers (4-5 pages in length), which will involve a critical evaluation of one or several scholarly analyses on subjects related to the history of public/urban education. Students will also be required to research and write a final paper of approximately 20 to 25 pages in length, which must use primary historical sources and include appropriate research citations using the Chicago Manual of Style 17 format (not APA). Details on the formal writing assignments will follow.

We have set up an Urban Ed History course site, with course information, assignments, and a class blog, as well as a “Group” on the CUNY Academic Commons (AC), which will allow you to communicate with one another and access the scanned readings for the class.

• Course Site: https://f20urbedhistory.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
• Group: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/fall-20-urban-ed-historical-perspectives-course/

(It’s a good idea to bookmark these two separate pages on your personal computer.)

You will receive a formal invitation before the semester begins to join both sites. If you have not done so already you will need to use your new GC (or other CUNY) email address to join the CUNY Academic Commons at: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu. Register on the AC as soon as you can, fill out your AC Profile, being aware that your profile is public and can be searched and seen, and let us know right away via email message if you encounter any problems gaining access to the Commons.

We will use the course blog extensively throughout the semester. You are welcome to post your thoughts on, reactions to, and criticisms of specific course readings and seminar discussions on the blog whenever you would like, to either extend a conversation we had in class, bring up newideas/thoughts/issues, or respond to a classmate’s post.

In addition, once the semester gets underway, one or more students will be responsible for starting off our class discussions each week and for posting a framing question or prompt for the blog based on the readings. You are expected to respond to another classmate’s framing questions/prompts at least four times throughout the semester, but you are welcome to do so more often. Blog prompts must be posted by noon on the Monday before class, and responses must be posted by noon on Wednesdays. We will develop the weekly schedule for posting and leading class discussions by the second week of class.

Your blog posts are “low stakes” writing; the goal is to get comfortable sharing your initial and second reactions and thoughts to the readings and to help develop a public, intellectual space for collaboration and exchange that extends beyond each week’s formal two-hour seminar discussions. The blog is also a great community bulletin board for the course on which you can post items of interest to your fellow students. Note that unless the class as a whole votes otherwise (we will discuss this in our first meeting), the course blog will be public facing, which means that what you post on the blog can be read by people outside of our class, in CUNY and beyond. The purpose is to help us understand that scholarship and intellectual engagement are public processes that we need to be aware of and committed to as scholars. The group site, however (where many of the readings will be posted), is private and only accessible by registered members of the class and any guests we formally invite to join the group site. The Forum on the Group site is a more appropriate place to post things you would only want members of the class to see or read about.

Grades for the class will be determined by assessing each student’s performance in all aspects of the course, including (in descending order of importance): the final research paper (40%); the two shorter analytic papers (15% each); participation in class discussions and clear indications in those discussions that the reading has been completed (20%); leading class discussions, blogging and commenting on blog posts (10%).

Engaging in peer review is a crucial part of academia and should become central to your writing (and later publishing) process. We encourage you to ask your peers for feedback on your thoughts and on your writing. To help you get in the habit, we will award up to 5% “extra credit” on any assignment that you get peer reviewed prior to submitting to us. We will distribute a protocol for you to use in the peer review process, which you will complete and submit to us along with your assignment.