Tips for Potential Grad Students: Education

There are three important questions to consider when thinking about graduate work in education:

1.  What is it about 'education' that intrigues you, fascinates you, or piques your curiosity?  An answer to this question will enable you to situate and contextualize your studies.  For example, are you interested in pedagogy?  Curriculum?  Are you interested in working with young children?  Adults?  Etc.  Your answers to the first question are important in responding to the second.

2.   Once you have begun to articulate an area or areas of interest, it is important to do some reading in those areas to see what might already exist, the authors who are writing in those areas, and the nature of the scholarship being undertaken.  This is important for beginning a conversation (see #3) about the possibilities for graduate work in that area or those areas.

3.  It is then useful to begin a conversation, electronic or face-to-face, with some professors in that area (or areas) at one or two of the institutions that you are thinking of applying to.  For example, if you are interested in Language Education, I think it is useful to write to the Graduate Advisor in the Department that specializes in that area and ask the Advisor if there are faculty members working in the area (or areas) that you are interested in, and whether the Advisor can suggest one or two professors that you could chat to as you construct your application for graduate study at their institution.

Anthony Clarke, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, and 3M National Teaching Fellow.

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