The Cultural Studies in Education program provides students with the opportunity to study and engage education in its multiple relationships to culture, power and society. The work of program faculty speaks to local, national and global challenges in contemporary education and embraces such concepts as identity theory, borderlands theory, double-consciousness, agency, critical race theory, feminist theory, counter-hegemony, funds of knowledge, and social and cultural capital formation. Program faculty recognize the power of alternative epistemologies and pedagogies as developed by Indigenous and border-crossing North Americans, people of African descent, Latinas/os, Chicana/os, immigrant populations and others. This is reflected in our faculty hiring practices, in our research and publications, and in our course offerings.

Graduate training in the CSE program combines theoretical rigor with direct engagement in schools and communities. We produce graduates who are equipped to support and be a part of the best that they in incounter in education, but also to partner with others to transform those systems and spaces that contribute to the mis-education and under-education of students of color, economically disadvantaged students, and all other students who are marginalized by racist, sexist, classist, homophobic or xenophobic schooling practices.

Advanced training opportunities for CSE graduate students include sitting on the internal review board for Anthropology and Education Quarterly (the leading and oldest journal devoted to ethnography and education), serving as a project director for UT-ICUSP (the Institute for Community, University and School Partnerships), participating in the annual Abriendo Brecha conference on activist scholarship, and teaching the CSE signature course, Socio-Cultural Influences on Learning.