The College of Education offers undergraduate and graduate programs as well as most school credentials. The Department of Education Leadership offers the Preliminary Administrative Services Credentials. Typically students obtaining these credentials work in school administration in K-12 settings as principals or other policy makers. A Masters of Arts degree is offered in K-12 educational administration and credential programs.
The department also offers a doctorate in Educational Leadership (Ed.D. The intent of this degree is to produce educators who will be transformational leaders grounded in an abiding belief that children and families can transform their lives and communities through education. These transformational leaders will relentlessly pursue a vision of education that inspires creativity, critical thinking, civic engagement and academic success.
Not all SJSU education students attend classes at the main campus. There are a sizable number of students enrolled in Web-based classes or television education classes or satellite locations such as Sacramento, Monterey, etc.
The University Library serves as the main resource for this subject.
The King Library houses the Learning Resources Display Center (LRDC) on the 7th floor, sponsored by the California Department of Education. The LRDC is a cooperative endeavor between San Jose State University and the Santa Clara County Office of Education. It contains K-8 print instructional materials adopted by the State of California. Students in this department begin to examine the adopted textbook process from an administrator viewpoint, rather than a practitioner (classroom teacher) view point.
Recent acquisition of comprehensive education databases has strengthen the library’s education resources.
The liaison for this area works in tandem with the Elementary Education and Psychology liaisons; other liaisons are consulted as necessary. One education liaison is a voting member of the College of Education Curriculum Committee—a committee comprised of one representative from each of the eight departments, College leadership and others. Membership on this committee allows proactive participation in changing the curriculum, offering new courses and obtaining new resources necessary to support the College of Education.
Materials are purchased in the format that most effectively delivers the information needed by the discipline.
The strength of the education collection is the growing number of electronic resources available to support the on and off campus programs. During the past few years, funds have been used to change from print resources to web-based resources. This is due to heavy faculty and student demand for off campus access to research and resources. Some of the resources used by the education faculty and students are shared with other disciplines. Most notably, PsycInfo, Taylor & Francis Education Collection, SocIndex Full Text and Education Research Complete support the wide variety of topics researched by education faculty and students. The periodicals collection has been enhanced by the addition of full text databases to the collection.
Weaknesses in supporting the doctoral program in educational leadership include urban education settings needs materials emphasizing urban education, multicultural and intercultural education. The second emphasis is on public policy; social justice, etc. and needs more research materials. While these are not necessarily new areas, our current materials are aimed at Master of Arts student needs. Doctoral student needs are currently supplemented through Interlibrary Services requests, however collection weakness cannot rely on Interlibrary Services and must be augmented. With many of the doctoral students located off campus, e-books should be considered first in growing our collections.
Resources for the Educational Leadership collection are selected after consulting with the faculty. Recommendations from the faculty and the students are the first priority. The ALA EBSS listserv, which is a listserv dedicated to education and social science library issues, is another source of recommended library resources. The database CHOICE, sponsored by ALA, is another frequently used resource to identify important educational resources.
