Communication and Education (Ed.M)

专业详情

This program uses methods of the social sciences, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of communication and education. It asks in particular how education and other social systems change under the impact of new media. Faculty members and students pursue three broad areas of inquiry, enabling them to: 

• Reflect on the historical effects of media and on the cultural uses of developments such as face-to-face speech, writing, printing, photography, film, radio, television, computers, and networked multimedia; 
• Use anthropological and linguistic methods to study how the diverse forms of communication, literacy, information processing, and cognition condition educational practice; and
• Explore positive and negative effects of media on social relations and develop strategies for using information and communication technologies to improve conditions of education and life.

In the course of completing a degree, the student should expect to attend closely to both technical artifacts and human activity; that is, both to material systems of communication in which technologies are the primary interest and to interpersonal, direct communication dynamics in which unmediated exchanges, face-to-face, are the subject of inquiry. A major theme for continuous reflection should be the diverse ways in which the modes of communication condition the meanings actually, and potentially, communicated—particularly through the wide variety of digital means available to us.

An Ed.M. degree represents roughly the equivalent of two years of full-time study. It serves for some to mark progress toward a doctorate and for others to initiate intermediate professional qualifications for students who have previously completed a master’s degree at Teachers College or another institution. Up to 30 points of graduate credit earned elsewhere may be counted toward the minimum point requirement. Ed.M. candidates who have completed an M.A. in CMLTD or an equivalent program should select further courses to broaden and deepen their mastery of the field. Those who are transferring a significant number of points from a different specialty toward the Ed.M. should include a selection of CMLTD core program courses in their remaining coursework. In addition to completing the minimum course requirements and developing a skill specialization, candidates for the Ed.M. degree culminate their work through a research or development project submitted to the faculty.

Master of Education (Ed.M.) programs are offered in Communication and Instructional Technology and Media. In each of these Ed.M. programs, students must take coursework totaling at least 60 points.