Our Program
The Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program centers on teaching and learning as fundamental to human life and growth, and fundamentally connected to struggles for understanding, liberation, and justice. With a primary focus on relationships, facilitation and change as the heart of the study and practice of education, we address our students as past, current and future stakeholders of public education systems as well as participants in many other systems and structures, as well as prospective teachers, school leaders, researchers, policy makers, activists, artists, and theorists. Our philosophy is rooted in a conception of knowledge as co-created and of everyone as both a teacher and a learner, bringing needed insight and needing others’ insights. Our practice is always to bridge academic and community-based learning, and we teach our students to value and to access learning wherever and whenever they are teaching. Defining teaching and learning as social, political, and cultural as well as personal activities, the Education Program challenges students to explore the relationships among schooling and other contexts of learning,human development, and social change as they gain knowledge and skills of educational theory and practice.
Students who complete one of the Education Program options -- a minor in Educational Studies or in Teacher Certification (secondary level) are prepared to collaborate, act, research, reflect, and work to challenge and transform oppressive educational systems into joyful and just ones. In keeping with the philosophy of the program, each course includes a field experience—from two hours each week to full-time practice teaching—through which students learn to integrate academic and experiential knowledge.
"So, every day, I’m challenging myself, 'What are you doing, bell, for the creation of the beloved community?' Because that’s the underground, local insistence that I be a fundamental part of the world that I’m in."
—bell hooks
