Core Seminar: Reckoning in the Educational Commons (ED-0207)

Fall 2026 · ED 0207 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

This seminar is intended to help students in the Educational Studies Program develop their conceptual repertoire around issues of education, culture, and society, as well as the critical thinking, reading, and analytical skills necessary to thrive as scholar-activist-practitioners. Foregrounding inquiry as a stance in community, we tend to the “big questions” of education we bring based on our varied positionalities and experiences. As such, this seminar will be a fecund site to collaboratively explore what it means to do work in the field of educational studies in the current sociopolitical landscape. While we will examine traditional academic discourse and writing, we will also highlight alternative knowledge productions or epistemologies that have been largely occluded due to political projects mobilizing around hegemonic orientations, notably white supremacy. Together, we will work on writing as a method for inquiry and probing our embodied stories that mediate our understandings of self and Other. Through analyses of a wide range of recommended texts, including our own, we will consider how scholars-activists-practitioners develop holistic and meaningful reading, writing, and research practices. We underscore the experiential and collegial nature of this seminar to think through the inherent intersubjectivity of our work. Students will work collaboratively and have opportunities to: (1) critically locate identities and articulate visions within the field of education; (2) explore academic writing, advocacy, and activism as complex social practices; (3) read and write in a variety of scholarly genres; (4) analyze and synthesize multiple perspectives on educational issues and educational research; (5) develop and support original contributions to the field; and (5) receive, interpret, and integrate feedback on writing and facilitations; (6) define and participate in a “community/wisdom of praxis.” This seminar provides the formalized structure for students to cohere learning across their classes in the Educational Studies Program.

Course codes: ED-0207, ED 0207, ED0207, ED-207, ED 207, ED207

Course Discovery