In addition to serving as the Assistant Director of Standards and Assessments for the Kansas State Department of Education, Scott Smith is a graduate lecturer in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas and an adjunct professor at Washburn University of Topeka. Dr. Smith teaches classes in educational philosophy, educational psychology, and curriculum and instruction. He earned a B.A. in English from Purdue University, an M.A. in Educational Administration from Washburn University, and a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Kansas. The focus of his dissertation is the phenomenology of language, in particular the work of Jesuit linguist Walter Ong and German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. His research interests also include agrarian-distributist economics and philosophy, epistemology, and Bildungsroman literature, and he has presented papers on a variety of subjects, ranging from the work of philosophers such as Wendell Berry, Maria Montessori, Hermann Hesse, and Edmund Husserl to reflections on the implications of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. Dr. Smith has ten years of experience as a middle and high school English and Spanish teacher, and he has for the past eight years been involved on both a state and federal level in the areas of large-scale assessments, psychometrics, and educational policy.
ELPS 450 Foundations of Education
ELPS 770 History and Philosophy of Education