Educational Studies

Overview

About Educational Studies 

Are you a liberally educated, but untrained novice in the education profession with a social conscience that implores you to learn more about education’s problems and possibilities? Or are you an experienced and concerned professional educator who risks adventurous practical experimentation, reads voraciously, and thinks both critically and imaginatively not just about methods and techniques, but also especially about the purposes, meanings, and values of your work? Educational Studies programme is offered at the the University of Oklahoma .

Scholars in the Educational Studies tradition analyze, evaluate, and construct educational narratives, artifacts, archives, concepts, values, purposes, theories, policies, pedagogies, and curricula as well as experimental institutions of learning. The contemporary field’s educational inquiry claims its sources and standards of evidence, conceptual frameworks, analytic techniques, evaluative tools, rules of critical engagement, and pedagogical protocols directly from the arts, humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences—rather than from the behavioral sciences that now frame other fields’ methods of educational research and standards of educational expertise. Such interpretive, critical, and normative inquiries on education may concern any age group or the whole human lifespan, any or all subjects, many aims, diverse cultural contexts, various institutional settings, and even different historical periods.

For further information about the Educational Studies program and advising with regard to preparation of your application for admission, contact the faculty member below whose specialties and approaches most closely match your own interests.

The Educational Studies program offers graduate students in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education an option for academically rigorous interdisciplinary learning, pragmatically designed to suit their own individual gifts, backgrounds, and goals as educators. Distinctively grounded in arts, humanities, and social sciences, the Educational Studies field aims to impart practical wisdom and purposeful imagination to the moral work of educating for social justice, nonviolence, and democratic life—wherever such educating may occur, locally or globally.