Whether you are motivated by your love of a discipline, enthusiasm for students, or a broad commitment to human development, the Department of Education at Rice seeks to engage you in a series of conversations and courses that will enable you to leave Rice with both the necessary intellectual and practical preparation to make a lasting contribution to contemporary youth, their schools, and our society. Texas and all of the other states in the United States require public school teachers to be certified to have passed a series of courses that will prepare teachers to understand students well, to develop challenging and creative curricula, and to work respectfully and collaboratively with parents and a school's broader community. Recognizing the importance of a solid foundation of knowledge in teachers' major disciplines, the Department of education at Rice encourages undergraduates to achieve breadth of study in the liberal arts and depth in two different disciplines that can become the students' areas of teaching concentration. The sequence of courses in the Department of Education packs a wealth of philosophical, historical, and applied perspectives on teaching and learning into an 18-hour course sequence followed by students in their junior and senior years at Rice. Twelve of those hours prepare undergraduates to teach, and six of those hours are earned by students who actually do teach for two consecutive summers in the six-week program of the Rice University Summer School for Middle and High School Students .
Students acquire extensive field experience in Houston's impressive variety of schools.
The Summer School teaching experience enables undergraduate student teachers to design courses which emphasize creativity, small group work, and alternative forms of assessment. There is some flexibility in this schedule for example, you may elect to take Education 312 in your senior rather than your junior year, and, it is possible to begin the program in the senior year but the above schedule is followed by the majority of our undergraduate students. In addition, there are supplementary requirements such as passing state-mandated tests and maintaining a strong grade point average which all students must fulfill to be recommended for certification by the Department. In addition to course work leading to teacher certification, the Department also offers research seminars and colloquia on major issues in contemporary education. In the following, we seek to provide you with an overview of the important work of our Center for Education as well as the full range of scholarly activities that our faculty pursue.