All Workshops will take place at the Wheelock Brookline Campus, 43 Hawes Street.
Yes We Can, If We Choose: De-Traumatizing Black Boys
Free lecture: Tuesday, October 30, 2007
All-day workshop: Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Benjamin Wright
Single-Sex School Activist and Chief Administrative Officer
Metro Nashville Public Schools, Nashville, TN
Traumatized children need even more differentiation, beginning with a balanced adult. It is without a doubt that children living in the Urban core of the city are traumatized. We need to create a balanced environment in which they can learn and flourish. I know that there are those who would ask the question, "Why do we need a specialized training or guidance to work with Urban youth." The answer to that question doesn’t even call for much research. One only has to look around our communities to understand the magnitude of this problem. With your input this workshop will provide "promising solutions."
Boyz to Men? Teaching to Restore Black Boys' Childhood
Free lecture: Tuesday, November 13, 2007
All-day workshop: Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Gloria Ladson-Billings
Professor Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Past President, AERA
Many schools see teaching African American and Latino boys as their biggest challenge. The primary focus of these children and youths’ educational experience is maintaining order and discipline. By the time Black and Brown boys reach the 3rd or 4th grade they are no longer treated like the children they are, but rather like men.
In this seminar we look at ways we can teach to insure that we teach all children, particularly boys, in intellectually, socially, and culturally appropriate ways.
Playing with Anger: Engaging the Emotional Lives of Black Boys in Schools
Free lecture: Monday, December 10, 2007
All-day workshop: Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Howard Stevenson
Associate Professor and Director of the Professional Counseling and Psychology Program (PCAP)
Applied Psychology and Human Development Division
University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education
African American boys who repeatedly experience rejection from many societal agencies, in the form of excessive punishment for a "crime", are in need of intervention by culturally competent educators and health providers.
This seminar will focus on helping educators who work with Black boys to understand their cultural and developmental identities, expressions, and behaviors in order to reduce conflicts between the boys. We will discuss the history and current rationales to understand why some Black male youths perceive violence as the only way to react to stress and life challenge. Videotape examples will be provided of boys striving with manhood and the meaning of life pressures.
Culturally relevant interventions developed in the Preventing Long-Term Anger and Aggression Project (PLAAY) that teach coping skills to African American boys with a history of aggression will be presented. These interventions teach anger management and critical consciousness strategies through in-the-moment conflicts that arise during athletic interaction and competition.
Other issues we will touch upon include how parents can be empowered to help their aggressive children, what cultural socialization is and why it is necessary to help African American boys, and why taking an African American psychological approach is complementary to empowering positive growth in these youths of color.
Why Black Males are So Over-Represented in School Discipline Systems and How This Can Be Changed
Free lecture: Wednesday, January 16, 2008
All-day workshop: Thursday, January 17, 2008
Jabari Mahiri
Associate Professor of Language and Literacy, Society and Culture
University of California Berkeley, Graduate School of Education
This seminar uses short, dramatic video clips that capture the interactions of one 17 year-old black male student in several settings of school. The four clips show him communicating with several different white adults (both male and female) in a classroom discussion, in a disciplinary hearing surrounding him being charged with threatening a teacher, in a counseling office conference, and in a school creative arts project.
Each clip provides a text for in-depth discussion and analysis of the differing communicative and cultural styles that are brought into contact and sometimes into conflict as the student moves through various settings of school. The presentation concludes with a discussion of research conducted in the same school setting that reveals how and why teachers can be successful in engaging black males in schooling and keeping them out of the school's discipline systems.
To Be Male, In School and Black: Connections and Consequences of Teacher Beliefs and Practice
Free lecture: Thursday, March 13, 2008
All day workshop: Friday, March 14, 2008
Nelda L. Barrón
Assistant Professor in Elementary Education
Wheelock College
Lilia I. Bartolomé
Associate Professor in the Applied Linguistics Graduate Program
University of Massachusetts - Boston.
Stephanie Cox Suarez
Assistant Professor in Special Education
Wheelock College
Felicity Crawford
Assistant Professor in Special Education
Wheelock College
Paula Elliott, Ed.D.
Educational Consultant
In this lecture and workshop we - parents, teachers, researchers and practitioners - will examine and discuss how dominant ideologies, such as racism and classism, shape professional development, school structures, and classroom culture (e.g., teacher beliefs and practice, formal curricular decisions, representations of the hidden curriculum, and expectations for teacher/student interactions), thereby determining the persistent exclusion of Black males from essential educational and social opportunities.
Participants will leave with a clear conceptual understanding of the term "ideology", its salience in our professional lives, and a framework with which to unearth and deconstruct potentially harmful dominant ideological assumptions which maintain social, economic and race-based hierarchies that jeopardize black males.
