Dr. Washington’s teaching interests broadly include topics related to educational reform, juvenile justice, community-based nonprofit organizations, sociology of education, critical pedagogy, ethnic studies, pro-social behavior, urban education and policy, community-engaged research, and critical ethnographic and qualitative methodologies.
COURSES
Managing Organizational Change in the Nonprofit Sector. The course is designed primarily for graduate students interested in public administration and nonprofit management as a career as well as those interested in it as a major field of study. The purpose is to expose students to the methods and techniques in the research and practice of organization development (OD). The course should help students develop their own research agendas and facilitate their professional development.
OD builds on various models developed in organizational behavior, psychology, public administration, and business. The purpose of OD is to provide a process by which organizations can engage in planned change for improving themselves, dealing with complex problems, and for increasing performance broadly conceived. In many ways, OD is applied organization theory, and some knowledge of organization theory/behavior will prove useful in this course.
Social Entrepreneurship, Policy and Systems Change: How to Drive Real Impact on Social Problems. This course is designed for students with a strong interest in social entrepreneurship who would like to explore how social entrepreneurs can affect policy and become systems-changers. The course will explore “action tanking,” combining the best of what a think tank does – generate and promote policy ideas and proposals – with what a direct service organization does – put ideas into action and achieve demonstrable results. The course also explores different models of collective action, coalition building, and movement building. As part of the course, students will be exposed to leading social entrepreneurs looking to engage the class about how to ratchet up impact. The focus of the course will be on community-based nonprofit organizations in the United States but will try to draw some insights from a few international examples. Students work ideally in teams or individually to produce an important written work product — a draft business plan for a social enterprise action tank that presents in some detail a “systems change strategy.” The course will culminate with presentations of these plans to peers and special guests for feedback and discussion.
Ethnic Studies-The Making of American Cultures: Africans, Europeans and Indian Nations. This introductory course in Ethnic Studies explores some of the historical origins and developments of racial and ethnic identities in the Americas. We look at some of the different ways that Europeans, Indian Nations and Africans—initially enslaved and eventually free—struggled and interacted, shaping what we now know as “American culture.” Our central focus is on these interactions as they grew in and shaped Milwaukee and Wisconsin history and culture.
This course works on the assumption that social identities take on meaning only because of historical circumstances. This approach is called social constructionism. We often find ourselves talking about “the social construction of identity.” This means the categories we think of as natural or physical, like “black” and “white,” “man” and “woman,” are actually social. They have been created over time by laws, resistance movements, popular culture, economic policies, in other words, by people.
To say that identity is socially constructed does not necessarily mean that it is easily disassembled. If “Indian” and “white” are socially constructed categories, it doesn’t mean we can choose to switch places. Taking a social constructionist approach, however, allows us to understand the histories of struggle contained in each of our identities.
The project of this class is to start seeing our own families, communities, and other social relationships a little differently—to understand them in a different context than we did previously.
Executive Leadership of Nonprofit Organizations. Today’s nonprofit executives (and board leaders) face many challenges in charting a course, marshaling people and resources, and “moving whole herd forward” – typically in an environment of rapid change, mind-boggling complexity, and pervasive ambiguity. This is hard work, and places formidable demands on nonprofit executives’ intellect, skill, stamina and character. These special topics course, Executive Leadership of Nonprofit Organizations, is a course designed to prepare students for a career in leadership roles in nonprofit organizations. This course is based on the notion that effective executive leadership of nonprofit organizations is characterized by behaviors and ways of thinking that are different from those of less effective leadership. This course is also based on the notion that leading nonprofit organizations are in some ways similar but ultimately very different from leading a business enterprise or public agency. Thus, a major goal of this course is for students to not just learn about leadership in general broad terms but for students to understand and develop their own capacity for nonprofit executive leadership. We will explore a wide range leadership issues through theory, interaction with nonprofit executives, exercises, and examples drawn from a range of organizations, industries, and sectors. We examine poor leadership as we hope to learn more about why things go wrong and what we can do about it, and leadership successes trying to learn from leaders who have achieved significant success, even though we see many differences among them. Along the way, we will continually ask what we can learn that applies to us as current and future nonprofit executive leaders and our organizations.
The Principles and Practices of Restorative Justice. This course focuses on the fundamental principles and practices of restorative justice. The course explores the needs and roles of key stakeholders (victims, offenders, communities, justice systems), outlines the basic principles and values of restorative justice and introduces some of the primary models of practice. It also identifies challenges to restorative justice – the dangers, the pitfalls – as well as possible strategies to help prevent restorative justice from failing to live up to its promise. This is done in the context of urban school leaderships understanding of equity for “at-risk youth.
The course is organized around the issue of punitive discipline leading to the school-to-prison pipeline. However, attention is given to applications and lessons from other contexts. Of particular interest is the contribution of traditional or indigenous approaches to justice as well as applications in post-conflict situations. Ultimately, the course explores restorative justice as a way of seeking justice in all contexts and as a way of life.
Educational Policy and Research Analysis. What are some of the disparities in the way in which educators teach? What should students be learning in the 21st century? What can we learn from alternative approaches to discipline? How can governments, non-government organizations and international institutions throughout the world support the work of teachers and school leaders in ways that foster the academic success and development of all students? How can a practical approach to discipline spearhead education reform? What can school leaders do to create a non-punitive environment? This course examines these and related questions about the theory and practice of education policy and progressive pedagogy.
This introductory course to education policy analysis reviews some of the main issues affecting the opportunity to access and learning in schools in several national contexts.