[RSCT] Invitation to N Dakota Study Group 2009 conference - Chicago - February - register now!

[Monty Neill]

Invitation

to the 

North Dakota Study Group

Annual Meeting

February 13 - 15, 2009

 

Voices of Courage:

Classroom, School and Community Actions for Change

University of St. Mary's by the Lake

Mundlein, Il.

 

A Welcome from the Planning Committee:

 

On behalf of the 2009 Planning Committee, we invite you to attend the 37th meeting of the North Dakota Study Group. The year's meeting will take place on President's Day weekend, February 13-15, 2009. We have a new location, the University of St. Mary by the Lake, Mundelein, IL - still northwest of Chicago. 

 

You can access the registration form and other materials at www.ndsg.org. This letter provides a quick overview; more detail on speakers, sessions, etc., is on pages 3 and 4. 

 

At the planning committee meeting this summer, we focused on several issues: 

- The importance of understanding and working with immigrant students, whose communities are under attack and who often display great courage and effectiveness in their organizing efforts. 

- The centrality of imaginative, child-focused curriculum and the importance of strengthening teacher capacity in this realm.

- The necessity to continue to fight against high-stakes standardized testing while promoting high-quality classroom- and school-based assessments as a vital educational tool.

- The importance of continuing and deepening NDSG's work with young people, listening carefully to their voices.

- Ensuring we continue to feature the voices of teachers, long-standing and new. 

 

Through these discussions, our theme for this year emerged:  Voices of Courage: Classroom, School and Community Actions for Change. 

 

At this gathering, we will hear from some new voices and voices familiar from past meetings: 



Michael Armstrong will present on Pedagogy of the Imagination: What could happen if the profoundly human impulse to make - to build, create, conjure up, fashion, fabricate, knit, join, assemble, suppose, imagine - were drawn from the margins to the center of the educational enterprise? 

 

James Thindwa is Executive Director, Chicago Jobs with Justice, and has worked closely with immigrant communities. He will discuss immigration: the general context within which mass immigration is taking place, the forces and structures that drive human migration; the organizing and movements by and for immigrants; and the political prospects for justice-centered, comprehensive immigration reform. 

 

Monty Neill of FairTest and Ann Cook of Urban Academy will discuss overhauling "No Child Left Behind" and state assessment systems. They will focus on proposals from the Forum on Educational Accountability and other groups for a radically different federal role in education, and the work of the New York Standards Performance Consortium. 

 

Teachers Panel. This year, our teacher's panel will focus on how we integrate social justice work into the curriculum of our classes, using the Letters to the New President project as a model of how we use windows of opportunity to engage the imagination of our students as well as keeping our curriculum relevant to the needs of our community. 

 

Truce and Llano Grande will collaboratively present Youth Participation in Identity Building, Immigration, and Imaginative Community Work. 

 

Works in Progress (WIP) sessions, Home Groups, and Affinity Groups remain vital parts of the conference. 

 

We look forward to the collective sharing of experience and wisdom, a hearty mix of the political and the poetical, the great fellowship that accompanies the give and take in a diverse group of professionals who enjoy a lively sharing of theory and practice. We appreciate the unrushed time frame that allows for the development of our thinking and a lasting commitment to creative consideration of the possibilities for change.

We maintain a financial aid fund to help maintain the diversity of our membership (see below). 

 

Please join us! 

 

Planning Committee:

Co-Chairs: Francisco Guajardo, Greta McHaney-Trice, and Monty Neill, 

Members at Buxton meeting: Phyllis Bretholtz, Helen Featherstone, Jay Featherstone, Carol Foresta, Molly Foresta, Macario Guajardo, John Lockhart, Mary Harris, Sid Massey, Debra Stoleroff, Lynne Strieb.

Other members: Bill Bennett, Joan Bradbury, Rebecca DeCola, Broderick Webb, Ann Wiener, and our 'nitty gritty' team of Dan Schwartz, Carol Kennett, and Carol Montag.

 

Thanks once again to the Buxton School for hosting our summer planning meeting.

 

 

More Detailed Information about NDSG 2009 Conference

 

New Location - St. Mary's

Sadly, Resurrection Center closed its doors last spring. The planning committee concluded that we could not change the date of the conference. Fortunately, we found St. Mary's by the Lake, which is a similar distance from Chicago's O'Hare airport. The amenities - rooms, food, etc. - should be quite fine. And we are able to keep our price the same as last year (see registration form). 

            Please note that most of us arrive Thursday evening so we can start quickly on Friday morning. We end Sunday morning in time for people to make early afternoon flights. See the Registration form for more information. 

  

Readings and Home Groups

This year, our primary reading will be student Letters to the New President. They will be available on the web at www.ndsg.org.  We will discuss them in Home Groups. Each participant is assigned a Home Group.

 

We encourage you to read ahead in order to benefit as much as possible from the presentations and discussions. You could read a Michael Armstrong book, materials on immigration, or testing reform proposals. (On NCLB, see the recommendations of the Forum on Educational Accountability, at www.fairtest.org and www.edaccountability.org. See also the proposals of the NY Standards Performance Consortium at http://performanceassessment.org.)

 

About the Presenters



Michael Armstrong is a distinguished teacher, former school principal, and life-long student of children's thinking. His most recent book, Children Writing Stories, is an impassioned analysis, both detailed in its attentiveness and large in its reach, of the meanings of narrative creativity in children's writing.  He is also the author of Closely Observed Children. He lives in Oxfordshire, England, often teaches at the Breadloaf  (Vermont)  Summer School, and recently has been working with teachers in the Lowell (Mass.) public schools.

 

James Thindwa is Executive Director, Chicago Jobs with Justice, engaged in workers' rights and economic justice advocacy. Over the years, he has advocated for health care reform, promotion of mass transit, corporate accountability, and progressive environmental policy, among other social justice issues, in Chicago, Ohio and Indiana.   

 

Monty Neill is Deputy Director of FairTest, the nation's only group focusing exclusively on reforming test use in education, and chairs the Forum on Educational Accountability, an alliance of education, civil rights, religious, disability, and other civic groups working to overhaul NCLB. 

 

Ann Cook, principal of Urban Academy, is also a founder of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which won a variance from the state's requirements that students pass five Regents Exams to earn a diploma. Consortium schools instead use a mix of school and Consortium performance assessments and exhibits. 

 

Llano Grande, a nonprofit organization that works out of a high school in rural south Texas, is committed to building local youth leadership, creating civic engagement opportunities, and participating in community and economic development. 

 

TRUCE (The Renaissance University for Community Education) is an award-winning after-school arts and media literacy program of the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City. Its mission is to educate and empower youth to become agents of positive personal and social change through the arts, academics and activism.

 

Works in Progress (WIP)

If you would like to share your ongoing work with your colleagues in a small WIP session, send a description to Helen Featherstone (feather1 at msu.edu) and Jay Featherstone (josfe at msu.edu). Please include your proposed format, suggested duration (between one and two hours), and any equipment or set-up you need. 

 

Affinity Groups

Affinity groups will watch excerpts from and discuss Barack Obama's speech on race. (A transcript is at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/18/politics/main3947908.shtml# )

 

Financial aid

NDSG maintains a scholarship fund to help ensure diversity at the annual meeting. If you would like to request financial aid, please address a request, before December 1, to Mary Harris (mary.harris at unt.edu). Preference will be given to requests received before that date. (For more details, see Registration form.)

 

If you would like to contribute to the financial aid fund, please include it with your registration or make a separate check payable to the Financial Aid Fund, NDSG and send it to NDSG, Buxton School, 291 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267. We do need contributions - and no contribution is too small.  

 

Registration

If you receive this letter as part of a mailed packet, the registration form along with a financial aid form, payment/credit card authorization form, history of the NDSG, and directions to the conference are enclosed. You can go to the website and use that registration form. If you are reading this as email, please go to the website, www.ndsg.org. 

 

And finally, if you are on the website, the registration form and other materials are all on this site. 


Monty Neill, Ed.D.
Deputy Director
FairTest
Planning Committee co-chair, NDSG
monty at fairtest.org
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