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Berea College

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The mission of the Berea College Education Studies Department (BC EDS) is to prepare teachers and educational professionals who believe in the worth, dignity, and potential of all learners, who include all members of the community to construct a more just society, and who engage in the continual learning of the process and practice of teaching.

Mission Statement

The goal of education is to help people become reasonable, just, compassionate, and creative human beings who will seek to determine what is of constant value in the world and to live accordingly. This goal may best be described as the development of a permanent disposition: a disposition to ask questions and to seek understanding with reason and wonder; a disposition to search for truth through ongoing inquiry into our common and differing experiences as human beings; a disposition to think for ourselves while knowing that it is through engaging in the pursuit of truth with others that we find hope and strength to work toward good for all.

Goal of Education

Education in a Community of Inquiry. We find the community of inquiry an appropriate model for our teacher education department 
because we share its assumptions about the nature of human beings, the nature of knowing, and the nature of knowledge.

Philosophical Model 

Human beings are born with the capacity for wonder. Human beings are social beings who learn from and with others. 
Human beings construct their understandings over time 
by connecting the new to what is already known. 
Human beings have a multiplicity of intelligences. 
All knowledge is connected. 
Wisdom comes from the way in which knowledge is held. 
Thinking is central in coming to know. 
Communicating is the matrix of thinking. 
Teachers are also learners, and students are also teachers. 
All students can learn.

Assumptions

The goal of the teacher education department at Berea College is to prepare teachers who will manifest the values and commitments, the understandings and knowledge, and the skills and abilities necessary to cultivate the disposition of judicious inquiry in themselves and in their students.

Department Philosophy