Department News and Updates

The Bi-Co Education Program proudly introduces one of our Spring 2023 classes,”Inquiries into Black Studies, Language Justice, and Education,” (EDUC 308),  co-designed and co-taught at Bryn Mawr by Sabea Evans (HC ‘18), and Maurice Rippel (HC ‘19).

The Education Department is glad to announce the publication of Believing Each Other -- a guide to mentoring, building trust, and igniting change!

Written by 5 Posse Scholars, now Bryn Mawr College alum - co-editor/writer Jada Ceasar and writers Alexis Giron, Torr Mundy, Princes Jefferson, and Kathryn Gonzales - and Professor Alice Lesnick. 

The authors hope this guide will serve people doing and preparing others to do this work of mentoring, trust, and change.

Read Professor Alison Cook-Sather's Spring '23 publication in Faculty Focus, describing the Bi-Co Education Department's practice of Accountability Partners. Learn what accountability partners are, how to incorporate them within a course, and how students experience this structure.

To whom and for what are students accountable in higher education? The language of “holding” students accountable connotes a kind of control faculty wield over students, carrying the threat of consequences if students do not answer to the demands placed on them. But what if we as faculty thought about “holding” in a different way—as holding space for students to take agency and as holding students as they took that agency? And what if we thought of “accountability” as the ability of students—the opportunity and the capacity—to articulate for themselves, and for others to witness and support, how they are taking responsibility in their learning?

Eight students pursuing the minor in Educational Studies—Emma Adelman (BMC ‘25), Kat Erickson (HC ‘25), Claire Ford (BMC ‘25), Joanna Gu (BMC ‘23), Olivia Harkins-Finn (BMC ‘23), Isabel Martin (HC ‘23), Sunny Martinez (HC ‘24), and Thea Risher (HC ‘24)—undertook an independent study with Alison Cook-Sather in the Fall-2022 semester to conceptualize and write a proposal for a major in Education Studies. The proposal was approved on the 1st of February 2023 by Bryn Mawr College’s Curriculum Committee, who lauded it as a “detailed and thoughtful, intellectually engaging proposal.” The major offers students the choice of five specializations. All five entail studies of how knowledge, culture, language, and power interrelate and bear on teaching and learning across contexts. Each is studied within the overarching frame of Research, Policy, and Practice, and focused in one of the following arenas: Elementary Education, Secondary Education, Secondary Education with Certification, Higher Education, and Out-of-School Contexts. The option to complete a minor remains, both for those students seeking secondary teaching certification and those seeking a more general preparation for lifelong teaching and learning. We join peer institutions, including Barnard, Amherst, Wellesley, and Wesleyan, in creating new majors in Education Studies, affirming that this is an important moment for studying, practicing, and advocating for education.

Four Ed Department minors—Ebony Graham (HC ‘23), Olivia Harkins-Finn (BMC ‘23), Theo Smith (HC ‘23), and Kayo Stewart (BMC ‘23)—are drawing on their experience as SaLT student consultants to support more that 20 student partners who are working with faculty members across disciplines at McGill University. Each of these Ed Department minors has been hired as an independent contractor to meet regularly with small groups of McGill student partners to provide the kind of support and guidance they offer one another in weekly SaLT student consultant meetings in the Bi-Co. Ebony, Olivia, Theo, and Kayo are crafting, while still undergraduates, a new version of this kind of partnership, which was pioneered by three Education Department graduates through post-bacc fellow positions: Sophia Abbot, independent major in education (Educational Identity and Empowering Pedagogy, BMC ‘15) and Khadijah Seay (BMC ‘16) and Mia Rybeck (HC ‘17), both Ed Department minors. See “Creating Post-Bac Fellow Positions to Support the Development of Pedagogical Partnership Programs” for a discussion of Sophia’s and Khadijah’s work and “Building Partnership through Partnership” for a discussion of Khadijah’s and Mia’s work.