This course intended to provide students with practical knowledge to understand obesity epidemics in the U.S., and an overview of federal, state, and local policy approaches and national initiatives for preventing obesity, promoting healthy behaviors, and providing care to obese citizens. There will also be extensive discussion of evidence for the impact of policies on child and adolescent overweight, including ethnic/racial and socioeconomic disparities. Students will be provided with an opportunity to develop an intervention targeting any perspective of obesity.

This course explores past and present disability advocacy in American society. Drawing on both the work of disabled self-advocates and oral history interviews with leading figures in the disability rights movement(s), this course introduces students to major political, conceptual, and theoretical approaches to disability as well as to strategies for creating a more socially-just, inclusive, and accessible world.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a general introduction to research in education. Some of the topics that will be addressed are problem-finding strategies, types of educational research, quantitative and qualitative methodologies in education, and ethical principles in research. The course emphasizes the use of scientific research to study education. Educational research is viewed as a form of disciplined inquiry.

An examination of the various public images and uses of history and issues confronted by historians working in museums, historic sites, oral history, historic preservation, archives and documentary film.