Urban Education

    The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) is the focal point of the collaborative research activities of the Graduate Center. It promotes interdisciplinary research, partners with GC Research Centers, Institutes and Interdisciplinary Committees, connects the research activities of CUNY faculty at the Colleges to GC research programs and seminars, and provides a home for outstanding visiting scholars to collaborate with faculty and students. ARC offers support to GC doctoral students pursuing research as well as to postdoctoral students who have completed their initial projects.

Urban Education

Introduction

The Ph.D. Program in Urban Education aims to provide the research base needed to help solve the urgent problems of urban education. Its primary research focus is the study of urban education as an interdependent system of social institutions across many scales of organization: the family and neighborhood community; classrooms, schools, and partner institutions; school districts and larger-scale political and economic institutions.

Program Inception: 2000

Course Emphases

The program of study emphasizes the interdependence of reasoning about curricular and instructional issues and reasoning about policy issues, as well as the interconnections between critical reflexive research methodology and sophisticated disciplinary and epistemological understandings.

Four core courses are required: Historical Contexts of Urban Education; Introduction to Research on Urban Education; Pedagogy and the Urban Classroom; and Educational Policy. First-year students are required to take a one-credit core colloquium in which they reflect on their experience with urban education and are introduced to the rationale and expectations of the program as a whole, the research interests of faculty, and the process of conceptualizing, carrying out, and writing up research on the scale of a Ph.D. dissertation.

Studies Specializations

Students are required to complete course work in one of three studies specializations: Arts, Humanities, and Social Studies in Urban Education; Science, Mathematics, and Technology in Urban Education; or Urban Education Policy Studies. All students are required to pass a minimum of 9 credits of advanced research methods courses beyond their core studies and satisfactorily complete 24–39 credits of interdisciplinary program seminars. These elective studies are selected in conjunction with an advisor and may include relevant courses offered by other doctoral programs. To ensure that students achieve a high level of disciplinary sophistication within at least one professional specialization, they are guided in their post-core course work by a Studies Committee consisting of their advisor and two or more faculty with expertise in their area of concentration.

Executive Officer

Professor Anthony G. Picciano
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
1.212.817.8280
Email: urban_ed@gc.cuny.edu