Master of Arts [M.A] [Educational Foundations] From Western Michigan University

Each student is encouraged to meet with a faculty advisor to design a program to study specific educational problems. Because educational issues tend to be complex, interdisciplinary inquiry is often a part of this concentration. The size of this program is controlled, providing students with a personally and professionally meaningful experience.

• Develop skills necessary for ongoing critical inquiry concerning ways that educational aims and practices reflect and emerge from taken-for-granted cultural assumptions as well as formal institutional and political policies.
• Develop an understanding of the ways professional aims and practices are embedded in institutions and reflect their socio-historical contexts and cultural assumptions;
• Increase awareness of historically pertinent and current issues related to schooling;
• Develop an understanding of moral and political assumptions that affect schooling, and how these shape political relationships, particularly with regard to social justice and environmental sustainability;
• Expand and refine academic discipline-based skills.