Graduate and doctoral coursework in humane education includes five foundational courses and, depending on which degree students are pursuing, a mix of electives.
Students are often given the opportunity to participate in a one-week immersion course (Humane Education Residency) held at IHE’s oceanfront campus in Surry, Maine. All courses other than Humane Education Residency are taught online and include research, reflection, group and individual activities, film festivals, field trips, online forums, video-conference discussions, faculty mentoring, peer support, and a final project.
Meaningful narrative assessment is used in place of grades.
Doctoral degrees require additional research, independent study, and dissertation work.
These five courses create an interconnected foundation, with each course building on and reinforcing the others to form a comprehensive understanding of humane education principles.
This course explores the principle of doing the most good and least harm to people, animals, and the environment and applies this ethic with innovative thinking and action to the field of education. The course looks at humanity and the world through a historical lens and offers a vision for a better future that relies on reason, compassion, evidence-based optimism, and systems awareness to bring about positive long-term change.
This course addresses some of the most pressing environmental issues in the world. Topics include climate change, endangered species, pollution, habitat destruction, environmental racism, and resource depletion. The course offers a solutions-oriented approach that balances analyzing problems with identifying strategies to create sustainable and restorative systems. It also examines how we might learn and teach about environmental issues in a way that encourages people to focus on solutions that work for all people, animals, and the Earth.
This course covers a wide range of issues including animal agriculture, experimentation, hunting and trapping, companion animals, and animals used in entertainment. The course explores different philosophies regarding the inherent rights of sentient animals to be free from exploitation and abuse and encourages students to grapple with and determine their own ethics regarding nonhuman animals. The course further examines ways in which we can protect humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems for the good of all. Coursework helps students develop techniques for learning and teaching about complex issues in a manner that invites dialogue and solutions.
This course explores issues of human rights by analyzing critical challenges and envisioning possible solutions. Specific issues include modern slavery, child labor, human trafficking, racism, gender inequity, poverty, and power and privilege. The course also examines acts of human courage, collaboration, systemic change, and global citizenship. It invites students to find in themselves and others sources of deep humaneness and to develop models of compassion, integrity, and courage. Coursework helps students learn to educate in ways that address conflict effectively and eliminate oppression.
This course explores the many ways in which cultural norms influence ideas, beliefs, and actions and examines how changemaking happens. Covering social psychology, consumerism, media, economics, and politics, this course provides a foundational overview for understanding the ways in which people are shaped by their cultures. Coursework focuses on critical analysis of cultural systems, the role of cultural conditioning in our lives, and strategies for educating effectively and creatively about these issues. By recognizing the ways in which our thoughts and behaviors are molded by culture, students gain the ability to live and educate more mindfully, and to help bring about transformative cultural change.
For students in the MA & MEd programs.
Pedagogy in Practice: In this course, students learn to bring a solutionary process to their work as educators and to apply what they’ve learned in the five core courses in Humane Education (Introduction to Humane Education, Environmental Ethics, Animal Protection, Human Rights, Culture and Change) to create a praxis for integrating humane education into their classroom and/or other educational settings.
The Humane Education Practicum is an individualized course with objectives specific to each student’s goals. With the help of their faculty mentor, students develop a 150-hour project or program designed to help them practice the way in which they hope to manifest humane education in the world. The practicum can take the form of an internship, a creative project, a school or community-based program, the launching of a non-profit organization or social business, to name a few. Students are required to have taken at least 12 credits of foundational coursework or receive their advisor’s approval before enrolling.
This culminating course in humane education is a supported individualized course through which students develop and present in a public forum a synthesis of their learning.
Choose electives to deepen your expertise in specific areas and tailor the program to your interests and goals.
This course offers students the opportunity to build their own solutionary practice, both to better their solutionary thinking and action as well as to gain skills for educating others to be solutionaries. Students will put into practice a rigorous solutionary process based on the Solutionary Guidebook. This process includes problem identification; research; critical and systems thinking; stakeholder investigation; devising and evaluating solutions; planning; implementation; presentation; and evaluation.
This one-week humane education immersion offers an experiential, hands-on opportunity for students to observe and practice foundational activities in humane education. Participants create and deliver solutionary-focused presentations; apply critical systems, strategic, and creative thinking to a variety of issues; and co-create an in-person community of learners that supports change-making through education. Held at IHE’s campus in Maine, this course also offers the opportunity to build abiding in-person relationships with fellow students. No prerequisites. Attending Humane Education Residency early in your studies is strongly encouraged.
In this course, students explore issues of intersectionality, racism, and racial justice within the specific context of veganism. Through structured conversation as well as research, reflection, and practical application, students learn how to educate effectively and seek solutions that address overlapping systems of racial injustice and animal exploitation.
The decision to have children or not is arguably one of the most important decisions we make in our lives. It is largely regarded as a personal and isolated decision and a natural rite of passage into adulthood. But how personal really is our decision to have a child? Pronatalism – a set of socio-cultural, ethno-political, religious, and patriarchal pressures that encourage, promote, or coerce reproduction – remains largely absent from our family planning discourse. Human population has doubled in the last 50 years, growing from approximately four billion in 1970 to almost eight billion currently. This is no surprise given that we are adding about one million new humans every five days. There is rising public awareness that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption are driving climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss here and abroad, yet it is a challenging issue to discuss. Together we will explore the concept and roots of pronatalism, its intersectionality with overpopulation and anthropocentrism, and its impacts on us, other humans, animals, and the environment. Participants will develop techniques for learning and teaching about these issues in a way that invites dialogue and positive solutions.
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“Changing the world one child at a time.” Those words have inspired my work for more than four decades in education, and they continue to inspire me now. We are at a pivotal point in the evolution of our world. We are facing a climate crisis, a health crisis, a crisis of racial justice, a crisis in our treatment of animals, a crisis of media bias. The list goes on. And perhaps our greatest crisis is our consistent struggle as a society to simply come together respectfully, intelligently, and ethically to solve our problems and save our planet. We need solutionaries. We need young people who have been educated not only to think critically, creatively, and systemically about real-world issues, but also to be passionate, persistent, and humane in their implementation of real-world solutions. And that is IHE’s mission: to support teachers and educational institutions in preparing young people to become solutionaries – and the next caretakers of our planet.
IHE offers a healing vision and a tangible pathway forward for a struggling world. As Executive Director, I am excited, humbled, and deeply honored to join with others to promote that vision and that pathway in ways that make them foundational to systems of education throughout the world – and to each child who is committed to making that world a better place.
Passionate about preparing young people to lead lives of joy and purpose, Steve Cochrane has had a remarkable journey through the field of education. It is a journey that has taken him from the campus of Princeton University, where he served as an admissions officer and an assistant dean of students, to the classroom of a public elementary school, where he had the privilege of teaching – and learning from – his fourth and fifth grade students. Steve has been a dorm director and associate dean of admissions at Wheelock College in Boston. He has also been an elementary school principal, a middle school principal, an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and, prior to his work at IHE, he was the superintendent of the Princeton Public Schools in Princeton, New Jersey where he was honored with the award of County Superintendent of the Year. In each of these roles, Steve has collaborated with others to prioritize innovations in learning, wellness for students, equity, and a belief that every child should be supported and inspired to achieve their highest potential.
Steve received his undergraduate degree in English from Princeton University and his master’s degree in educational administration from Harvard. He is a competitive road cyclist who also enjoys the thrill of mountain biking. Steve and his wife are both vegans and advocates for holistic health. They currently reside in Spencerport, New York, with their two dogs and a very large Maine Coon cat.
