Educational Policy Studies Launches New Anti-Oppression Education Course

EDPS 401 – Selected Topics in Educational Policy Studies: Anti-Oppression Education
LEC A02 - 57415
Fall Term 2021 – Tuesday & Thursday 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Instructor: Dia Da Costa, PhD

General Course Objective: Students will come away from the course with foundational knowledge of anti-oppression education that can inform approaches to challenge inequity and oppression in the diverse spaces in which education and learning take place, from day-to-day life and within communities to schools, universities, and other institutions.

Course Description: Anti-Oppression theory and practice confronts the structural violence and inequity that shapes our societies, from everyday practices at the interpersonal level to the harmful practices and policies of social institutions and the state. This course takes an anti-oppression approach that conceptualizes the world in its complexity and relationality, allowing students to place themselves in that world so as to understand how to transform it. The course is organized to build an anti-oppressive praxis among educators working in diverse societal spheres where learning takes place, from classrooms and schools to state institutions and non-governmental organizations. Anti-oppressive praxis connects knowledge and theory to action in a dialogical, reflective manner attentive to the significant foundations upon which oppression/inequality/violence operate in our lives, institutions, and broader social relations. The course approaches oppression as an outcome of interlocking structures co-constituted by race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and age among other sites of historical and contemporary inequity, focusing on the ways in which these compound and shape each other. Ultimately, identifying the structures and histories of oppression as they shape social contexts of education aims to understand how we might approach the transformation of the conditions that produce inequity and violence.   

Professor Dia Da Costa has been with the Department since 2015 and teaches in the Social Justice and International Studies in Education specialization. Other courses taught by Dr. Da Costa focus on topics such as qualitative research frameworks and methodologies, feminist theories and epistemologies, education and social change, cross-cultural studies in education, and international development education.