REQUEST FOR WORKSHOPS

For the 4th Annual Northwest Conference on Teaching for Social Justice

“Rethinking Our Classrooms, Organizing for Better Schools”

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Chief Sealth High School, 2600 SW Thistle St, Seattle, WA 98126

Hosted by Portland Area Rethinking Schools, Tacoma Coalition X,

Puget Sound Rethinking Schools, Olympia Educators for Social Justice

Co-sponsored by Rethinking Schools magazine

We are looking for teachers, teacher educators, and community activists to present curriculum, information, and resources at our 2011 conference. The workshops½hours. Successfulwilllast1

workshops will:

•Express a social justice perspective

•Be hands on and practical

•Give participants a chance to talk to one another

We are looking for workshops that balance content and process,

where participants can learn something new and have a chance to discuss & reflect upon their own experiences and practices.

These areas have been under-represented at the conference in past years. We welcome and encourage

proposals that cover any of the following:
•	Science	•	Adult Education
•	Math	•	Special Education
•	Elementary

Some workshops offered at previous conferences were:

Creating a more Democratic Classroom; The Line Between Us: Teaching about the Border and Mexican Immigration; LGBTQ Panel; Black student/White school; Building Classroom Community; Merit Pay for Teachers? Rookies for Social Justice; Resisting the Racist Classroom; Beyond Kyoto: Teaching about Climate Change and the Atmospheric Commons; Living With High Stakes Testing While Working to End It; Living Algebra, Living Wage; Ganas: A Model of Bi-Cultural Latino Middle School Student Leadership Development

Please return this form by Friday July 1, 2011

NWTSJ via email: bill@rethinkingschools.org


Or mail to: NWTSJ c/o Bill Bigelow, 2814 NE Mason St. Portland, OR 97211

Presenter(s)

Contact person (if more than one presenter):

Presentation title (as you wish it to appear in the program):

Contact person’s mailing address:

Contact person’s email:

Contact person’s phone (include	Proposed audience:
area code):	Early Childhood		Elementary	Middle	Secondary
	General	Other, please specify:
Please briefly explain how your	One or two sentence biography of presenter to be
workshop will be meaningful to	included in program:
your target audience:

Summary (brief description to be used in the program, no more than 75 words please):

Workshop Overview: Please describe in detail your 90 minute lesson plan, including timeline and activities.

Sample Proposal Outline

Presentation title (as you wish it to appear in the program):

The Politics of Language: Teaching about Language and Power

Summary (brief description to be used in the program, no more than 75 words):

This session explores key components of a social justice unit on language. Participants will meet literary and historical figures in a colonial language tea party and engage in “take-it-to-the- people” student-created projects about language and assimilation.

Workshop Overview

Introduction: Overview & introductions (10 minutes)

The goal of the session is to engage participants in demonstration lessons about language and power: who has it and who doesn’t.

Part 1: Linguistic Tea Party (30minutes)

To familiarize participants with the context and characters they would meet during our journey of language and colonialism, they will engage in a linguistic tea party/scavenger hunt. They will meet eleven historical and literary characters, including: Stanford linguist, John Rickford; Irish poet, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn; Hawaiian writer, Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Hector Pieterson, a twelve-year old boy who died in the Soweto Uprising; Neville Alexander, a South African linguist who is working to restore mother tongue literacy in Africa.

Part 2: Examining language and power stories across continents (35 minutes)

Participants will watch one short video clip from The Wind that Shakes the Barley and jigsaw read several short excerpts from memoirs about language from the characters listed above. Participants will share their discoveries in a small group, continuing to ask the questions: Whose language has power? What do they have in common? Whose language changes? What do they have in common?

Part 3: Student “Take-it-to-the-people” projects (15 minutes)

During this final part of the session, we will share student essays and projects from this unit, including Ebonics Jeopardy, children’s books about language extinction, language assimilation, and Ebonics.

One or two sentence biography of presenter to be included in program:

Linda Christensen is currently the Director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark, and editor of Rethinking Schools. She taught high school language arts in Portland Public Schools for thirty years and has published many books and articles.