2017 Innovation in Teaching Award Recipient

The "Innovation in Teaching Award" recognizes faculty who have created original, cutting-edge teaching plans that enhance both the goals of the American Cultures requirement and students’ learning in the classroom.The applicant pool was highly competitive, so much so that awards were presented by the selection committee to two faculty.

Professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla - Education 182AC, “The Politics of Educational Inequality”

About Professor García Bedolla:
Professor García Bedolla’s research focuses on how marginalization and inequality structure the political and educational opportunities available to members of ethnoracial groups, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her current projects include an analysis of how technology can facilitate voter mobilization among voters of color in California and a historical exploration of the race, gender, and class inequality at the heart of the founding of California's public school system.

About Education 182AC:
Education is often framed as the “great equalizer,” our society’s engine for social mobility. This frame stands in contrast with the deep and historic inequalities that exist within our nation’s schools. Education 182AC, ‘The Politics of Educational Inequality’ attempts to address this apparent contradiction by asking students to start at the beginning, exploring the establishment of the Common School system (which later became public schools) and the justifications used for why the American nation-state should pay f­or its children to be educated. Students learn that the dramatic expansion of Common Schools in the 19th century coincided with the expansion of white male suffrage and the United States’ move to become an empire. By and large, public expenditures for education were justified bythe exigencies of democratic citizenship. But what would that mean for the majority of the U.S. population – women and people of color – who did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship? The students learn the ways in which the social constructions of those groups, often in reference to their role within U.S. democracy, in many ways determined whether they had access to public education, and, if they did receive an education, the quality and content that they received.

AC Awards & Undergraduate Library Prize Ceremony - 2017