Welcome!

Our goal is to prepare students to become skilled and reflective teachers who can effectively respond to the learning needs of diverse learners, and create supportive and intellectually stimulating classroom communities. We are committed to strengthening public education and addressing issues of equity and social justice, particularly in urban schools.

The program is open to all undergraduates at Columbia (BC, SEAS, GS, CC) who are interested in becoming certified teachers, working with young people in human service agencies, or preparing for careers related to education.

Students develop a critical lens for looking at the issues facing public schooling, learn to create innovative curriculum, gain experience observing, tutoring and teaching a diverse range of children and young people, develop confidence in their role as teachers who can promote fair and inclusive school practices, and graduate with certification to teach in New York. (Note: we are part of an interstate agreement for reciprocal certification with 41 other states.)

We are registered by the New York State Department of Education and accredited by the New York State Regents.

Our MISSION is to prepare skilled and reflective teachers who:

• Commit to fairness and justice in their classrooms and schools
• Recognize and act on patterns of inequality in access and opportunity to learn
• Provide high quality, engaging curriculum for all learners
• Care about their students and convey through their actions their belief that all students can learn
• Inspire in their students a passion for learning and a capacity to act in the world

Guiding Principles:

• Teaching is a moral and political act: Teachers have a moral responsibility to understand economic, social and political factors that affect their students and the schools they attend. Teacher curricular and pedagogical decisions have an impact on students' sense of efficacy and access to ideas, knowledge, cultural capital and material, intellectual and technological resources that support learning.
• Teaching is grounded in an ethic of care: Learning is more likely to occur in a safe and supportive environment in which people from all racial, cultural, socio-economic, gender and ability groups are treated with dignity and respect.
• Learning is an active process requiring engagement: Curriculum and pedagogical practices should involve students as active participants in the learning process, as constructors of knowledge and as agents of their own lives.
• All students are capable of learning: Teachers should be responsive to their students' needs, interests, cultural meaning making systems, and aspirations. Teachers who demonstrate that they believe in their students' capacities as learners and hold them to meaningful, high standards make it possible for all to develop their intellectual, moral and social capacities.
• Literacy is a civil right: All learners, especially those from marginalized communities, have a right to learn to read the word and the world; to master and use the tools of mathematics, science, social studies, literature and the arts to understand their lives and to act as citizens of their communities and the larger society. Without this basic right, students will be unable to fully utilize their other rights as democratic citizens.