"Teaching to Change the World" Is Topic of Conference
At Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, May 1

— Keynote Address by Columbia University Professor Robin D. G. Kelley —

Brooklyn, N.Y. — "Teaching to Change the World" is the theme of an education conference at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, with distinguished educator Robin D. G. Kelley as the keynote speaker.

The event will take place on Saturday, May 1, 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the Campus’s Zeckendorf Health Sciences Center, HS 107. The fee is $20; free for Long Island University students.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of Anthropology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, is currently completing a biography of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. His other books include "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination" (2002); "Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression" (1990); "Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class" (1994); "Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970" (1996); and "Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America" (1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice. He is also the co-editor (with Earl Lewis) of "To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans" (2000), which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection.

The School of Education’s Center for Urban Educators, whose mission is the reform of urban teacher education, is sponsoring the event. Participants in the conference will be actively involved in inquiry groups with parents, teachers, teacher educators and students of teaching, using descriptive processes to look closely at children, children’s works and teachers’ works.

Descriptive inquiry as it is practiced in CUE has its roots in the work of Patricia Carini and the Prospect Center in North Bennington, VT. Its aim is to find language for strong advocacy for children; to explore issues of social justice in teaching and learning; and to learn about inquiry communities in schools and teacher education programs as forces of social justice.

For more information, contact Marita Downes at (718) 488-1378, or e-mail marita.downes@liu.edu.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 30,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including more than 11,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.