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Last spring, Professor Anita Chikkatur co-taught the Educational Studies senior seminar with a community partner, Marika Pfefferkorn. As part of the course, the six seniors created public facing final projects. You can find more information about the course and the students’ final projects on this website.

Professor Anita Chikkatur gave a talk through the Carleton Connects program to Carleton alums about participatory action research that included perspectives from community researchers in Faribault, MN, and from Professor Ryan Oto, class of 2009, currently the Visiting Assistant Professor in the department. 

On Saturday September 30th, Professor Chikkatur and students from her A&I seminar [Let’s Talk about Race: Race in Higher Education] went on a Dakota Sacred Sites tour organized by Minneapolis Community Education and led by Reverend Jim Bear Jacobs. They were joined by CCCE staff members Emily Seru and Marcy Averill. The trip was funded by the Educational Studies Department and the Lilly Bayard fund.

Professor Anita Chikkatur and Educational Studies Alumnus Peter Sang ’17 at the State Capitol on Monday, February 27th, 2023. Anita and Peter were both there in support of the “Our History, Our Schools” campaign coordinated by the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition and to show support for the Ethnic Studies for All bill (HF1502 Sencer-Mura, SF1476 Kunesh), which will require ethnic studies instruction in all K-12 schools in Minnesota. Peter is currently teaching a critical ethnic studies course at Washington Technology Secondary Magnet in St. Paul.

Teachers and librarians are contemporary heroes, caught in the crossfire between challenges of books from the political left and the right.

To teach or not to teach “Of Mice and Men”? If it’s taught, how do teachers do it? What about trigger warnings, in the news recently when a Muslim student complained about seeing a picture of the Prophet in an art history class at Hamline University? Do we handle “cancel culture” by simply making challenged books disappear? And what is all this anger about books doing to our young people’s’ abilities to learn from literature?

These are the big questions that Deborah Appleman tackles in “Literature and the New Culture Wars”

Deborah Appleman’s new book is “Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture and the Teacher’s Dilemma.”

By Laurie Hertzel Star Tribune

The timing of Deborah Appleman’s latest book could not be better. The Carleton College professor of educational studies writes about the classroom experience, both that of teachers and that of students. And as we all know, the classroom experience is getting more and more fraught. Her new book, “Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture and the Teacher’s Dilemma,” poses the question “Can educators continue to teach troubling texts?” Might as well ask, can they continue to show troubling paintings in an art history class? The culture wars are complicated, and questions and resistance come from all directions.

Appleman has two appearances coming up in the Twin Cities. She will be in conversation with Artika Tyner at 7 p.m. Jan 30 at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, and she will speak at 6 p.m. Feb. 7 at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul.

Education Week unveiled the 2023 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the university-based scholars in the United States who did the most last year to shape educational practice and policy. Carleton’s Educational Studies Professor, Jeff Snyder, and History Professor, Amna Khalid made the top 200!

Read Deborah Appleman’s article ‘I’ve Become a Reluctant Warrior Against Cancel Culture’

Madness and Mayhem: Current Issues in EducationPresentation by the Educational Studies Senior Seminar

Read Professor Snyder’s op-ed in the Star Tribune.