This course examines critical issues, problems, and perspectives in multicultural education. Intended to focus on access to literacy and educational opportunity, the course will engage class members in discussions around a variety of topics in educational practice, research, and policy. Specifically, the course will (1) review theoretical frameworks in multicultural education, (2) analyze the issues of race, racism, and culture in historical and contemporary perspectives, and (3) identify obstacles to participation in the educational process by diverse cultural and ethnic groups. Students will be required to complete field experiences and classroom activities that enable them to reflect on their own belief systems, practices, and educational experiences.

This course examines how K-12 education policy is designed and implemented in the United States. It uses a systems analysis as the framework for looking at who makes what kinds of demands on the education policy system, how these demands are placed on the policy agenda, the decision making process, and resulting education policies and policy outcomes. The course pays particular attention to the roles of federal, state and local governments in education policy, and the impact of our intergovernmental system on the design and implementation of policy. Students will also examine major education policies and debate key education policy issues that arise at each level of government.

How are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and various humanitarian assistance projects playing a role in the lives of people across the globe? While focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the African continent, this course will examine the rise of non-governmental bodies as political, economic, and social actors in an increasingly globalized, neoliberal world. Through a variety of theoretical discussions and case studies, we will discuss issues such as: the relationship of NGOs to governmental institutions, the ethical considerations of humanitarian assistance, the politics of "development," the ebb and flow of international aid money, the intersection of capitalism and NGOs, and the impact of humanitarian projects on local cultural processes. Students will leave this course with not only a better understanding of the complex webs of NGO interventions across the world, but will also cultivate a critical awareness of the potential problems raised by such institutions and their broader networks.

This is a course in the history of law and policy-making with respect to selected social problems. Discussion of assigned readings and papers will elaborate the role law, lawyers, judges, other public official and policy advocates have played in proposing solutions to specific problems. The course will permit the evaluation of the importance of historical perspective and legal expertise in policy debates.

Reading and discussion course on selected topics in African history.

Topics vary. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.

This course is designed to present quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying and evaluating developmental interventions for children and youth. Basic assumptions underlying the two overarching methodological orientations will be presented throughout the course as a means of determining which sets of methods to use for different types of research and evaluation questions. In addition to presenting quantitative and qualitative methods separately, the course also will present integrative or mixed-methods approaches.

This course is concerned with the context, and an aspect of the content and form of African Literature. It is based on a selection of representative texts written in English, as well as a few texts in English translation. BLACK ATLANTIC/BLACK DIASPORA: Drawing upon three centuries of writings, this discussion-based graduate seminar tracts the development and circulation of black cultural expression and thought in a range of slave narriatives, spiritual autobiographies, novels, captivity narratives,speeches, poetry, plays and polemics from the late eighteenth to to the early twentieth centuries. We will critically investigate the analytic shift from "roots" to "routes" as we read widely in the literatures, histories and theories of what Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hal variously describe as the productive inter-culture of the black Atlantic world.