HGSE offers enriching and transformational courses. Even remotely, students are completely engaged in the virtual classroom. We asked several students to share their favorite class so far at HGSE. See their responses below!
Carina Traub
What has your favorite course been at HGSE? This January term I took Equity and Opportunity: Dis/ability in Context with Professor Jenna Gravel. The course takes an asset-based approach to disability rights and justice. We have explored the role of ableism in both society and education, as well as discussed intersectional ways to disrupt and dismantle ableist beliefs and practices in order to strive for more inclusive schools and communities.
What is your favorite memory from the course? One class, the former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, Thomas Hehir, joined us for some questions and discussion. He had been our professor’s advisor, and had worked closely with Judy Heumann, a disability rights activist we had studied in the course. When he joined our class, it felt a bit like a family reunion that welcomed us into both the discourse and the community.
Why was this course valuable to you? This course has been immensely valuable to me because it energizes me and motivates me to work harder towards creating an equitable and just society. My classmates have such important perspectives, and the community we have cultivated has made me feel both excited about the content and validated as a person.
What skills did you learn? Professor Jenna Gravel and our teaching fellow, Zach Smith, designed the course carefully using Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and they have been generous in sharing their process and thinking with our class. I will incorporate UDL principles into my future facilitations, which will support children and adult students in accessing the content and expressing their learning. Beyond that, I will hold onto my energized feeling and channel it to work towards a more inclusive and equitable world.
Aaron Appleton
What has your favorite course been at HGSE? I loved Karen Brennan’s course called Designing for Learning by Creating. This course explored constructionism, which is a learning theory focused on how knowledge is built most effectively through the process of creating tangible artifacts.
What is your favorite memory from the course? My favorite part of this course was how interactive and collaborative it was. There were many opportunities to engage with Karen, teaching fellows, and classmates. I learned so much when my classmates shared the projects they were working on, and loved the moments I was able to receive insightful feedback from them to help improve my own project.
Why was this course valuable to you? This course was valuable because of the freedom of choice it granted to pursue any project that I was most passionate about. This was highly motivating, and resulted in the creation of a product I’m calling 3”D” Design for Learning — which is a physical tool for guiding cross-functional design teams through a playful process of Discovery, Development, and Delivery of educational products. This is a product that will have real-world application for me, as I will be using it with design teams I lead.
What skills did you learn? This course has inspired me to think differently about how educational products can be designed through a constructionist lens, and has given me the skills to be able to do this. Whether it’s for traditional educational settings, customer-facing learning platforms, L&D departments, or EdTech products, constructionism can be an effective and highly motivating approach to engage learners.
Romie Williams
What has your favorite course been at HGSE? My favorite course so far at HGSE is A024: Politics and Education Policy. This course discusses the inherent political nature of American education. We discussed different court cases, legislation, and political debates that shape the current system of education. We also brainstormed policy alternatives and wrote policy memos proposing new systems to reform education.
What is your favorite memory from the course? My favorite memory from the course was when Dr. Howard Fuller was invited as a guest speaker. We were studying school choice and Dr. Fuller is a proponent of charter schools. He gave a riveting and inspiring talk about how charter schools help some of our country’s most marginalized students.
Why was this course valuable to you? This course was valuable to me because I am interested in pursuing education policy, and this course provided the perfect foundation for that. It exposed me to the world of educational politics, and provided me with information that I needed to know prior to entering the field.
What skills did you learn? I learned how education legislation is passed and how court cases can change the face of education. I also learned how to propose legislation alternatives and consider all of the implications of the proposal.
Sarah Brashear
What has your favorite course been at HGSE? It’s so hard to choose, but my favorite course was A305 “Deeper Learning for All” with Jal Mehta. The focus of the course is exploring how to make a system-wide shift from the current status quo of rote instruction in classrooms to deeply engaging, life-worthy learning for all students.
What is your favorite memory from the course? At the beginning of each class we went around and each shared something “good or new” that had happened in our lives that week. As simple as this check-in sounds, my classmates shared both hilarious stories and vulnerable pandemic-related updates. These check-ins brought us closer and genuinely made our small class feel like a tight-knit community.
Why was this course valuable to you? This course totally shifted my thinking about who has the power to really impact student outcomes. I used to think that change had to come from the top down (through new policy or better curriculum, for example). But now I think that teachers are the ones who are best positioned to get us ‘off the treadmill’ and really shift the status quo in education.
What skills did you learn? Through our Design Project, we learned principles of design thinking (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). This is a deeply reflective process that I will take with me into future problem-solving endeavors.
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