The Department of Educational Foundations serves the College for Education and Engaged Learning as a locus for inquiry into the broader goals, motivations, traditions and ideologies, not only of education in general, but also of teacher education itself.
It is a major aspect of our mission to problematize such notions as “professional,” “national standards,” or “enculturation,” concepts which are found within the CEEL mission statement itself. We consider this form of problematization to be an essential skill for critical, reflective educational practitioners committed to continual educational reconstruction. Our broadest aim is to help develop in educators the skills, dispositions and knowledge that equip them for collaborative transformation of educational structures and institutions. This requires the capacity to discern the larger forces and configurations that have shaped and continue to shape educational theory and practice. These forces and configurations can be analyzed in the languages of a number of disciplines–history, philosophy, sociology and psychology. An educator who is able to think in these multiple languages is able, we hold, to respond both dialogically and transformatively to a changing educational universe.