Course Information
Summer Academy
Week 1 at Evergreen
Sessions
Monday and Tuesday
Dr. Madhu Suri Prakash talked about educational philosophy, Ivan Illich, and grassroots movements in education. Her publications include:
Prakash, Madhu Suri and Gustavo Esteva. Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures. Counterpoints 36. Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.
Some of the resources she referenced include:
Michael Katz's article "From Volunteerism to Bureaucracy in American Education," which can be found in Foundations of Educational Thought edited by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr.
The movie Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. Bill Bigelow talks about using this in his classroom at Rethinking Schools Online.
Ocean Robbins - his story and organization Yes!
The Gods Must Be Crazy - a clip of the Coke bottle falling into an African bush tribe.
Ivan Illich is best known for the quote: "In a consumer society, there are inevitability two kinds of slaves, the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." More information about him from the Encyclopedia of Informal Education. Illich himself questions Deschooling Society in the Introduction to Matt Hern's Deschooling Our Lives. In The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection, other thinkers explore his influence.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) of the United Nations, a document modeled on Bill of Rights of the United States, includes the right of education in Article 26.
Paul Goodwin's Growing Up Absurd discusses the problem of how to implement change in our schools.
Tuesday
Eunice Santiago, co-founder of CIELO and a member of the Latino Family Group of Thurston County, spoke with us about the local Latino communities, and their relationship to our schools.
Many of the Latino immigrants in the Olympia area come from Todos Santos, Guatemala (first language is the Mayan language of Mam) or Mexico. Hispanic immigrants have been coming to Washington since the 1940s with the Bracero Program. El Norte is a good movie to illustrate the story of Guatemalans immigrating to the US. Enrique's Journey also tells the story of a young boy who immigrates to the US to find his mother. Finally, Dying to Cross follows four different immigrants stories of a deaths in a border crossing. On a more positive note, the movie A Day Without Mexicans celebrates the work of Mexican immigrants.
Rethinking Schools publishes a great resource for Mexican immigration: The Line Between Us: Teaching about the Border and Mexican Immigration by Bill Bigelow.
The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act is designed to help illegal immigrant youth go to college.
Yes! magazine's special edition on Latin America - Latin America Rising. Yes! offers a free one-year subscription for classroom teachers. This edition includes refers to the writing of Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan author.
Paul Willis's Learning to Labor explores about the resistance some students have to school and some of the reasons this exists.
The Hispanic Roundtable of Thurston County co-sponsors the Latino Youth Summit every year.
Bring the Latino communities into your history classroom through the Civil Rights Movement (the University of Washington's Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project has great resources to start this discussion), a modern day Hull House, or immigration history from early Washington history.
Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom relates some problems with cultural differences.
Wednesday
Dr. Joe Tougas talked with us about the philosophy of pluralism and conflict. We talked about different social structures: hierarchical societies, egalitarian societies, and pluralistic societies.
John Pumilio talked to us about using the issue of sustainability to engage our schools and history classrooms. He mentioned that Puget Sound Energy has a Conservation Resource Manager Program to help schools evaluate their energy usage. He also discussed LEED Certification, Green Seal, Focus the Nation, and the Bruntland Commission. He ended with a quote from Barry Lopez. Unfortunately, he ran out of time to get to Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Explore Evergreen's commitment to carbon neutrality. OSPI has an Education for Environment and Sustainability Program.
His view of sustainability as a guiding principle: "Sustainability is the hope of living a rich and meaningful life, but not at the expense of other people or the environment."
Thursday
Brent Conklin talked about the process at his school of implementing CBAs. In the course of discussion, he talked about several resources, including:
Dumblaws.com mentions obscure laws still on the books all over the country.
ESD Media Center also has Supreme Justice, a VHS video that outlines the Washington court system through Gardner v. Loomis.
Sue Schumacher mentioned a great primary source for a Constitutional Issues CBA The Bill of Rights, available through the ESD Media Center on PowerMediaPlus, which includes interview with defendants in controversial US Supreme Court cases.
Caleb Perkins from OSPI talked to us about the state initiatives in social studies, including:
CBAs from the World Affairs Council.
The Center on Education Policy's research on the effects of No Child Left Behind.
Resources
David began the day with a reading of Billy Collins's "The History Teacher" from Sailing Along Around the Room: New and Selected Poems.
Other books David mentioned:
David C. Berliner's The Manufactured Crisis discusses the fallacy of businesses believe that college graduates in the US are under-trained.
Linda McNeil's Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing mentions the removal of culturally responsive curricula in one school in Texas.
Tim shared a great resource, The River Remembers: A History of Tumwater, 1845-1995 by Gayle L. Palmer available from the City of Tumwater.
Cassie uses Facing the Future to help connect her students to what is going on in the world today.
Week 2 at Long Beach
Sessions
Monday
Jan shared with us some of the resources available through the Geography Alliance Network and the Washington Geographic Alliance. She also passed around a copy of EarthPulse, which illustrates changes in the global environment.
Tuesday
The Wisconsin Historical Society has more information about Thinking Like a Historian online, including a downloadable PDF.
Wednesday
John Pumilio continued our discussion about sustainability in our schools (see OSPI's Education for Environment and Sustainability Program), and shared with us how he calculated Evergreen's Greenhouse Gas Inventory. We defined terms such as carrying capacity, social footprints, and green tags. In his presentation, John referenced several sources, including the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Climate Impacts Group, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, the Washington Department of Ecology's report Impact of Climate Change on Washington's Economies, and the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Finally, in our discussion we talked about some additional resources to use in the classroom, like Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, Jack M. Hollander's The Real Environmental Crisis, National Geographic's adaptation of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the Environmental Protection Agency's Educational Resources.
Thursday and Friday
In our teacher presentations, several resources were mentioned:
Carlos Bulosan, a leader in Seattle's Filipino community
Montesano's Jones Photo shares their collection of historic photos online
Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod's versions of "Did You Know?"
CONEVyT, the partnership between the Yakima School District and the Mexican government
Rowan Jacobsen's A Geography of Oysters
Ann Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea
For additional resources mentioned during the week, see our Moodle page.
