Arts, Leadership, and Learning Concentration

In this course, students will explore major concepts related to developing partnerships and communities of learners. Course topics include the change process, forms of school and community governance, school culture, the concept of collaboration, and agencies and organizations involved in community programs and initiatives. Special attention is focused on planning and implementing system-wide and building-level networks. Students will develop and evaluate a framework for collaboration and demonstrate systems thinking. Typically the first course completed in the CAGS program.

This course focuses on the development of a self-renewing capability inherent in professionals and organizations. Students will discuss the notion of transformation in the context of knowledge base, self-reflection, and the socio-professional processes in educational change. Students will explore the integration of ecological perspectives within a changing society and the demand for greater tolerance of human behavior in the context of learning. Students will demonstrate an understanding of the need to keep student learning and development as the central core of educational change. Prerequisites: EP 7020 and EP 7040.

The purpose of this course is to develop effective collaborative planners. This course presents the major stages in the process of developing a strategic plan, including forming a mission statement, crafting and implementing the plan, and evaluating plan performance. It provides a theoretical and practical overview of the skills, strategies, and resources required through each stage of the systemic planning process. (Prerequisite: EP 7020).

This course addresses qualitative research methodologies with a particular emphasis on constructing grounded theory. Candidates will engage in the process, design, and critique of qualitative inquiry and research. Organizational and community issues will be explored and discovered through the analysis of patterns of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors within interpersonal and intercultural contexts. Descriptive analysis of initiating the inquiry, gathering and picturing the data, recording and analyzing data, and evaluating the study. (Prerequisite: EP 7020, EP 7030, and a course in research design).

To be an advocate of the arts must mean in some degree to have given thought to the very nature of the arts and their function in human development and culture. This course attempts through reading, discussion, writing, and forms of "doing art" to broadly circumscribe the nature of the arts and their function within the human experience. The readings will help facilitate seminar discussions designed to explore a variety of views about how the arts, once identified and defined within human experience and culture, contribute to human flourishing by opening up a more encompassing range of choices and possibilities. To be an advocate for the arts in this sense is to realize the intimate connections that the arts evoke, as well as to encourage the expansion of social vision through public forms of conduct and communication.

This course is designed to provide candidates with the arts leadership skills necessary for designing, implementing, assessing, and sustaining arts integration models in diverse school settings. The course will focus on the multiple roles of the arts as mediation tools offering languages for learning and methods for instructions. This course will provide candidates with theoretical and applied knowledge of comprehensive interdisciplinary multi-arts integration supporting learning in, with, and through the arts. Candidates will be introduced to the research based Integrated Instructional Model, which incorporates the components of community, problem-based learning and arts integration. Candidates will explore the use of the arts and artistic methods through hands-on activities modeling arts-infused learning and instruction. Candidates will apply individual and group understandings to considerations of site-specific school change and sustained systemic professional development.

This course is designed to provide candidates with the arts leadership skills necessary to effect and sustain changes in current educational settings toward a greater emphasis on improving the quality of arts education. Candidates will explore major concepts related to shaping policies and practices in arts education, while examining current educational systems with an eye toward systemic change. Connections will be made to the importance of sustaining and developing curriculum, sustaining arts advocacy projects and programs and transforming educational systems to embrace learning with, about, in, and through the arts.