Master's in Teaching Secondary English

When you apply to the Master of Arts in Teaching in Secondary English, you will begin a rigorous and comprehensive interdisciplinary program designed to provide you with the background, tools, and knowledge necessary to engage in effective and creative teaching in today's K-12 classrooms.

Program Overview

Two of tomorrow's teachers perfecting their craft on a beautiful spring day.

The Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in Secondary English is designed to provide prospective teachers with the background, tools, and knowledge necessary to engage in effective and creative teaching. The program also addresses interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary issues in education. Because the MAT is a professional degree in the art and science of teaching, it constitutes a broad base of content knowledge, teaching methodologies and techniques, and curriculum practices and learning strategies. The thesis or thesis research project provides students with the opportunity to research, investigate, and write about a significant issue in their content area.

The MAT program is designed to meet the needs of individuals with widely varying backgrounds of prior education and teaching experience. It is also designed for full- and part-time students

Objectives

The MAT Program in Secondary English is a rigorous and comprehensive one designed to acquaint students with the various theories and practices on teaching reading, writing, and literature and to apply these theories to practice in both the literature and the composition classroom.

The MAT Program covers the most current pedagogical methods and provides students with opportunities to discuss their own pedagogies and methodologies for teaching as well as their writing processes. It prepares students to teach both literature and writing at the secondary school level. In addition, it prepares them to teach the major literary genres as well as texts usually included in secondary English and college curricula. Students will examine the most effective ways of applying theory to practice. In addition to the traditional canon, students take courses that explore multicultural texts.

The program aims to help students develop their future careers as teachers.

MAT candidates in Secondary English complete a common course requirement of 15 core credits in education or education-relevant courses and 15 credits of courses in their content area. For specific courses, see the Degree Requirements page.

The MAT content field courses range from Curriculum Design and Implementation to Foundations of Education. The courses offered in the department of English range from Theory and Practice in Teaching Reading and Writing, historical approaches to teaching literature, to thematic and cultural approaches to teaching literature.

Finally, students take a departmentally-based methodology course and then investigate, research, and write a thesis or a thesis research project.