Curriculum, Teaching and Professional Development

This area of emphasis offers the opportunity to gain pedagogical knowledge alongside content knowledge, helping educators grow professionally, making ideas accessible and meaningful to students. Educators will study, develop, and integrate these understandings across disciplines, educational contexts, age levels and learner differences, from multiple perspectives and fields of interest, for example: Arts & Aesthetics, Assessment, Curriculum Studies, English Language Learning, Language Arts, English, Foreign Language Education, Literacy, Multicultural Education, Mathematics, Science, Second Language Acquisition, Social Studies, and Instructional Technology. This includes the in-depth study of subject matter for teaching, the nature of learners and learning, curricular purposes and policies, the ethics of practice, and instructional and assessment considerations utilized to teach and learn in formal and informal educational settings. Scholarship in this area examines the intersections between curriculum and instruction, offering tremendous potential for educators to transform content knowledge into forms that are pedagogically powerful and yet responsive to diverse student abilities and backgrounds, and to the particularities of teaching/learning contexts.