Overview
What role can education play in a democracy as polarized as ours? Do we expect too much when we ask education to bear primary responsibility for mending seemingly deep divides? What realistic contributions can and should education to make? Join Dr. Michele Moses (Colorado Boulder) and Dr. Rachel Wahl (Virginia) for a timely discussion with OSU's Winston C. Thompson.
This colloquium will be held as part of the 2023-24 COMPAS Program COMPAS Directions: A Decade of Ethical Exploration. The in-person event will be open to the public with no registration required. This event will also be livestreamed.
Panelists:
Dr. Michele S. Moses (University of Colorado Boulder)
Michele Moses is Professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice, faculty fellow of the Center for Values and Social Policy and the National Center for Education Policy, and affiliate faculty of Ethnic Studies and of Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the Faculty Director of the professional Master’s program in Higher Education. After serving as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies of the School of Education from 2011 to 2018, she is now serving as CU Boulder’s Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.
Professor Moses teaches courses such as Higher Education in the United States, Theoretical Issues in Education Policy, Philosophy of Education, and Gender Issues in Education.
Professor Moses is a philosopher of education who specializes in philosophy and education policy studies, with particular expertise in policy disagreements that involve race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, moral and political values, and equality of educational opportunity. Her scholarship focuses broadly on issues of ethics, democracy, and education’s role in promoting the public good. In three current research projects, she is examining the complexities of political strategies to dismantle affirmative action in higher education admissions, what it means to opt out of public education, and the controversies and disagreements over free speech and the diversity of viewpoints on college campuses.
Although her work primarily has used philosophical inquiry, she also has used both quantitative and qualitative methods when the research questions have warranted broader inquiry and analyses. For example, she has collaborated to conduct research concerned with how voters understand race-conscious education policy, which used survey research, qualitative interviewing, and media content analyses.
Professor Moses has been a Fulbright New Century Scholar, was awarded CU Boulder’s Hazel Barnes Prize, and was selected as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. Her work has appeared in journals such as American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Higher Education, and Journal of Social Philosophy. She has presented her work in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United States. In addition, Dr. Moses is the author of Embracing Race: Why We Need Race-Conscious Education Policy (Teachers College Press, 2002), co-editor of Affirmative Action Matters: Creating Opportunities for Students around the World (Routledge, 2014), and Living with Moral Disagreement: The Enduring Controversy about Affirmative Action (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Professor Moses’ editorial experience includes a current term as Associate Editor for Educational Theory, a term as Associate Editor for the Section on Social and Institutional Analysis of the American Educational Research Journal, Reviews Editor for the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and the Editorial Advisory Board Member of Education Policy Analysis Archives. She currently serves on AERA’s Executive Board, AERA Council, and as a fellow of the National Education Policy Center.
Dr. Rachel L. Wahl (University of Virginia)
Rachel Wahl examines how ideas and ideals spread through education and advocacy, particularly in regard to state and civil society efforts to influence each other. Wahl'sfocus has been on how implicit philosophical beliefs about morality, justice, and human nature facilitate and undermine receptivity to dialogue, deliberation, and formal education. Wahl is especially interested in approaches to changing ideas and behavior that rely on voluntary learning in comparison to those that rely on various forms of public pressure.
Moderator: Winston Thompson (Educational Studies, OSU)
Winston C. Thompson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education and Associate Professor of Philosophy (by courtesy). He received his PhD (with distinction) in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Following this, he has been a faculty member in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. More recently, he was Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Thompson joined The Ohio State University in autumn 2018
