Newest minors include Computing, Society and Policy, forthcoming Education Studies

The Program in Teacher Preparation (TeacherPrep) is beginning to build a minor in Education Studies, hoping to provide an alternative pathway for students to study education without pursuing the program’s traditional intensive fieldwork.

TeacherPrep will continue to exist as the program that hosts education studies courses, but the certificate will transition into the minor in Education Studies. TeacherPrep Interim Director Ashley Taylor Jaffee said the minor will make way for a more interdisciplinary approach.

“You might have seen that our faculty executive committee here at TeacherPrep includes a diverse group of faculty from across subject areas,” Jaffee told The Daily Princetonian. The TeacherPrep website lists professors spanning Psychology, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and Spanish & Portuguese, among other departments. “I think that [diversity] is really representative of who might be interested, faculty-wise and student-wise, in this potential new minor,” she said.

Faculty Director of the Education Studies Minor Professor Jennifer Jennings ’00 also noted substantial student interest as a motive for creating the minor. “There’s been consistently a large population of students who are really excited about studying education, more broadly [than] an interest in classroom teaching,” Jennings said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’

Additionally, this fall, students are enrolling for the first time in the Computing, Society and Policy minor. Course requirements for the minor include one machine learning or AI course, two core technology policy courses out of six offered across the Computer Science and Sociology departments as well as the School of Public and International Affairs, and two elective courses.

Through this array of courses, Program Director Aleksandra Korolova said the program hopes “students gain knowledge of the fundamental principles behind the computing technologies that have impact on individuals and society, including things like foundational knowledge of AI machine learning and data science.”

This recently instated minor follows Center for Information Technology Policy’s previous Technology & Society certificate, which had been introduced last fall. Speaking on the transition from certificate to minor, Korolova said, “There’s both enough momentum in student interest for topics such as computing, society and policy … and also there is enough momentum among the faculty to be able to support that minor.”

“We’ve certainly been talking about this for a very long time, and the transition to the minor system provided the perfect opportunity to ultimately carry this out,” she added. The University began transitioning from certificates to minors beginning with the Class of 2025. While new minors no longer need to be interdisciplinary, many programs have still chosen to be interdisciplinary — including the coming Education Studies minor.

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Karen Villanueva ’27, co-vice president of the Princeton Education Society (PES) this semester, told the ‘Prince’ that she “first heard about the possibility of an Ed[ucation] Studies minor soon after PES was formed around the spring of 2024.”

After hearing the news, Villanueva said she knew “a lot of people were excited, because it just opens up so many more opportunities for people to be exposed to careers in education and the ways that education is important and something that should be discussed more in our classes.”

Jennings added, “I imagine a future in which we’re able to make these learning opportunities available to a larger number of students on campus, and … a lot of really positive cross pollination happening between folks who are doing radically different majors, but remain interested in education.”

Haeon Lee is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Brooklyn, N.Y. and can be reached at hl1389[at]princeton.edu.