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.

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.

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

This graduate student course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of African Political Economy. While the course is grounded in the discipline of history, it seeks to prepare students to actively engage with the social sciences, in particular economics, political science and anthropology. The study of Africa's economic past has moved through many different waves, after an initial burst of scholarship, during the 1960s and 1970s, which dealt with questions such as how Africa was integrated into the world economy, and the causes of wealth and prosperity, the field began to grapple with questions of governance in the 1990s. These questions took two forms. The first approach from political science argued that an analysis of the behavior of political institutions held the key to understanding Africa's economic performance, and the second approach coming out of anthropology questioned the legitimacy of the development discourse itself. Within the last ten years economists have returned to the study of Africa's past, borrowing a focus on African states' institutions to tackle long running questions such as why Africa is poorer than other regions of the world.


The renewed interest in questions of Africa's long run economic performance has created new spaces for African historians to write economic and political history. It has also made it imperative for historians to investigate the production and nature of the economic facts we possess, in order to better assess what we do and can know about the economic past of Africa. This course seeks to introduce students to the main approaches to the study of political economy in Africa and at the same time to elaborate on the main thematic and temporal topics in pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary African history.

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 treats some important aspect of African American literature and culture. Topics vary. Recent topics of the course have included: "Afro-American Women Writers," "Three Afro-American Writers: Ellison, Gaines and McPherson," "Afro-American Autobiography," and "Afro-American Literature: Black Music Among the Discourses." See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.


Songs of Dissent: African American Poetry in the 21st Century The present moment constitutes one of the most exciting periods in the nearly 300-year history of African American poetry. Never before has there been such an incredible range of approaches to form, aesthetics, and subject-matter. This seminar will endeavor both to historicize and contextualize the African American poetic project. We will begin by looking at the issues generated in a single poem and move onward to full-length volumes of works by African American poets. We will move to an examination of several important anthologies, in particular Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton s Every Shut Eye Ain t Sleep and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, Arnold Rampersad s Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, Aldon Nielsen s Every Goodbye Ain t Gone, and Charles H. Rowell s Angle of Ascent, in order to engage issues of periodization, canon-formation, and categorization as modalities that constantly shape our understanding of what constitutes a black poem.


In the latter stages of the course, our attention will turn to individual poets, as they manifest a poetic vision through individual volumes of poems and essays on poetics. There will be several guest lectures by visiting poets, as well as class trips to poetry readings in and around Philadelphia.