91��Ƶ

For more than 50 years, 91��Ƶ’s School of Education has prepared students not only to meet the requirements for teaching certification, but also to be agents of change committed to student success and lifelong learning. Through small classes and early fieldwork experiences, School of Education graduates are ready to start making a difference in the world before they even graduate. At 91��Ƶ's School of Education, students receive the tools they need to be successful educators from faculty who are nationally and internationally renowned for active engagement in progressive research activities. Our students begin observations the first semester of sophomore year, which is one year earlier than most schools, and we strive to provide courses in a variety of new specialty areas to improve engagement, especially for students with diverse learning styles and learning differences.

The highest value for any educational institution must be the teacher teaching and the student learning. 91��Ƶ, in its mission statement, endorses this value by considering “teaching and learning its highest priorities.” Significantly, these “highest priorities” of the University are the concepts central to the mission of the 91��Ƶ School of Education. Our mission is to effect quality teaching and learning in public and private early childhood, childhood, secondary, and non-school settings by preparing educators who are reflective professionals who promote justice, create caring classrooms and school communities, and enable all students to be successful learners. Uniquely, our mission is to advance these “highest priorities” as a lifelong human experience. It is the School of Education that is charged with the responsibility of education of human beings from childhood through adulthood. It is the School of Education that holds lifelong teaching and learning as its core values.

Our commitment to lifelong teaching and learning demands an engagement in a study of pedagogy that links the insights of theory and experience to concerns for basic and best practice. Our concerns for practice demand linkages with our colleagues in elementary schools, secondary schools, and non-school settings, as well as with our colleagues in other schools of the University. In this way, a comprehensive configuration of education is validated and a partnership model of educational preparation is constituted for 91��Ƶ students—a model that appropriately attends to a strong foundation in the arts and sciences, the interdependent nature of teaching and learning values which foster human dignity, and leadership that seeks to make a difference.

This commitment to lifelong teaching and learning also demands an environment where scholarship, too, is viewed as lifelong. Scholarship is a necessary condition for continuous teaching and learning. Our mission here is to create an environment where scholarship is encouraged, supported, realized, and consistent with the University’s criteria of excellence, yet reflective of the special demands of basic and best practice. Our scholarship must serve teachers, administrators, and children and youth; our scholarship must inform our own practice, as well as the practice of our students.

Fundamentally, the mission of the School of Education is to expand upon the motto of 91��Ƶ: Opportunitas. Our vision is to accomplish significant educational reform by preparing professional educators to serve as agents for positive change. Through the service of our faculty and graduates, equipped with sound and rigorous knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practice base, we can elevate the promise of individual lives. Through this achievement, we can elevate the quality of those workplace and post-secondary educational cultures into which America’s youth must rightfully and responsibly enter.