This course is an advanced undergraduate seminar in current issues and topics in education. Course will focus on specific issues or research methods in the multidisciplinary field of education. A major research project is required as well as class presentation. Topics change each semester.

Citizenship education is a topic of growing international concern among educational researchers, policy-analysts, and practitioners. Increased migration, globalization, socio-economic stratification, and the rise of politically and religiously motivated extremism, have posed significant challenges to the nation-state and to state education as they emerged from nineteenth century European nationalism into today's diverse democracies. This has led many educational decision-makers to reconsider the role that schooling might play in the cultivation of political identity, from arguments for fostering maximal forms of citizenship that require thick, even patriotic, identification with local or national cultures, languages, histories, and ideals; to advocacy of schooling in minimal sorts of citizenship concerned primarily with individual rights and the mechanics of government; to insistence that citizenship education should challenge accepted hegemonies in order to include those who have been excluded, empower the disenfranchised, and liberate the oppressed. Israel and the US offer especially interesting cases for exploring citizenship education, since they encompass many of the complexities confronted by diverse, multicultural, conflict-ridden societies. This course will explore the complexities of citizenship education from the lens of a comparison between these two instructive cases, and within the context of the international discussion of the issue among practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers.

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