18th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum: A 10 Year Anniversary Retrospective of Educational Controversies

18^th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum

A 10 Year Retrospective of Educational Controversies: Come and Celebrate the Anniversary of the Journal of Educational Controversy

Thursday, April 21, 2016

4:00pm to 6:00pm

Western Washington University, Center for Education, Equity and Diversity (CEED) Miller Hall 005

 

The 18^th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will celebrate the anniversary of the 10^th year of the Journal of Educational Controversy.  As part of the celebration and continued discussion, the Journal in collaboration with the Center for Education, Equity and Diversity will be hosting a retrospective look at the controversies covered over the past ten years of the Journal. Now in its 18th year, the forum will host authors who have contributed to the Journal and who will share their current thinking and research about some of our most pressing educational challenges. 

 Following the presentations, the audience will have opportunities to interact with the authors and share educational controversies that they would like to see as topics for future issues of the journal.  The audience is invited to think about the links between the past and the present pursuit of social justice in both the k-12 system as well as in higher education.  How can we articulate these issues in a way that brings greater depth to our understanding of the conflict of values and the complexity of ideas that characterize our pluralistic society, and that opens up new ways of imagining a more just, inclusive, and democratic educational environment for the future.

 Topics and presenters for this year’s forum include:

In Person:

 Dr. Maria Timmons Flores’ paper helped school professionals understand the experiences and challenges students who are undocumented face, and offered tangible roles schools can play in rethinking policies and practices to counter everyday injustices. The paper was informed by a legal context, current political realities, and critical race theory.

Dr. Daniel Larner co-edited the issue on the school-to-prison pipeline.  His papers covered conflicts over censorship, and the education of politicians as playwrights who can work with and through difference to construct civil laws and protections.

Dr. Bill Lyne’s paper, “Beautiful Losers” addressed the theme of our 2008 issue that asked how are we to “fulfill the traditional moral imperative of our schools to create a public capable of sustaining the life of a democracy . . . .in an age of the Patriot Act and similar antiterrorism legislation . . . all likely to involve violations of civil rights and liberties” by problematizing the question against the historical realities of our nation’s history.  Dr. Lyne is the co-editor of our upcoming issue on “Black Lives Matter and the Education Industrial Complex.”

 By Video:

 Dr. Alice Ginsberg – “No Excuses Charter Schools” and a critique of the film Waiting for Superman

 Dr. John Covaleskie – Religion and Public Schools

Dr. Leslie Locke and Dr. Ann Blankenship – The Banning of the Mexican American curriculum in Tucson, AZ.

 The forum is free and open to the public.