Education, Curriculum, and Instruction Ph.D.

The PhD program's arts in education track presents opportunities for students with experience in schools or other educational settings to develop necessary philosophical, theoretical, and methodological competencies to make scholarly contributions to the field of arts education and beyond. Working as researchers, scholars, policy makers, and practitioners, graduates become educational leaders in universities, colleges, K-12 school districts, museums, community arts organizations, and government agencies.

The culture and teaching (CaT) track engages the study of education as a cultural phenomenon and includes fields such as curriculum studies, educational studies, and teacher development. Students in CaT study a range of educational processes that take place both in and beyond the borders of schools, and explore alternative epistemologies and pedagogies. Faculty and students are dedicated to seeking better understandings of issues pertaining to equity and social justice in both research and teaching. The track is interdisciplinary and collaborative, so students' work will encompass many different approaches, methods, and perspectives.

The PhD program's elementary education track is designed to help professionals acquire and contribute to the advancement of knowledge and leadership necessary to address the dynamic challenges of contemporary education at the elementary level. Emphasized within the track are, for example, the following: a focus on interdisciplinary approaches to curriculum development, the use of inquiry as a key pedagogical approach, the importance of a strong understanding of diversity and its social and educational implications, and child development and learning theories as the foundation for research and teaching in elementary settings.

The PhD program’s Learning Technologies (LT) track prepares students for advanced research and practice in areas such as learning design, online teaching and learning, artificial intelligence in education, critical studies of educational technology, K-12 technology integration and digital literacies. LT coursework emphasizes systemic inquiry, exploration of emerging technologies, design of digital learning environments, investigations into the social and ethical dimensions of technology, advancement of research methodologies, and engagement with foundational theories of curriculum, instruction, and learning. Graduates obtain academic positions in higher education or become leaders of development or research within business, industry, and non-profit organizations.

The Literacy Education track helps students become literacy leaders. Working in schools and other educational settings, students develop an understanding of literacy as a set of socially and culturally situated practices. We take literacy to be plural and intersectional, defined by a range of skills that enable us to navigate multiple disciplines and thrive as lifelong learners. Faculty and students cooperate on projects that advance theory, research, and practice in the (overlapping) core areas of reading education, children's and adolescent literature, critical literacy, climate literacy, English education, translanguaging literacy, as well as multimodal, digital, and culturally-relevant literacies.

The doctoral program's STEM education track at the University of Minnesota is interdisciplinary, focusing on science education, mathematics education, engineering education or agricultural education. Students pursuing this track will choose an area of emphasis in one of the four specializations, while simultaneously participating in scholarly work that spans the STEM disciplines. The program is designed to prepare scholars to conduct thoughtful disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in STEM education in order to assume roles as university faculty members, educational leaders, policy makers, and researchers.

The PhD track focuses on the study of language use, teaching, learning, and policy across a range of educational and community settings, including programs that serve language minority and language majority learners: world language education, ESL/EFL, language revitalization and bilingual and immersion education. The PhD track is designed to assume roles as university faculty members, researchers, policy makers, and educational leaders. Independent scholarship is the cornerstone of the PhD.

The PhD program's social studies education track focuses on issues related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment in K-12 social studies. Full-time graduate students generally have opportunities to supervise student teachers, teach introductory social studies classes, and conduct and publish research with one or more faculty members. Doctoral students are required to complete a research internship with one or more of the faculty as part of their study for the degree. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to present research papers at professional conferences, specifically the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Educational Research Association. Recent PhD graduates have conducted research in the areas of intercultural relations, moral development, multicultural gender-fair curriculum, social studies instructional issues, and the standards movement as it relates to social studies education. Graduates have assumed positions as instructional leaders in the public schools, curriculum development specialists, social studies assessment specialists, and college/university faculty.