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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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Harvard Graduate School of Education

The Askwith Education Forum, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is endowed through the generosity of Patricia Askwith Kenner and other members of the Askwith family, and acts as a galvanizing force for debate and conversation about education in its narrowest and broadest perspectives. Each year, the Forum welcomes a number of prominent people from diverse fields to speak about issues relevant to education and children. Recent topics have included immigration, values, affirmative action, education reform, and the arts. All of these events are free and open to the public.break

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/askwith

  • Maxine Greene, professor emerita of philosophy and education and director of the Center for Social Imagination at Columbia University, shares her vision of the power of the arts in education to transform student indifference into a state of wide-awakeness. This lecture is part of the Arts in Education Program's John Landrum Bryant Lecture Performance Series.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Suzi Gablik departs from what she calls "the faded ethos of modernism," and explains why she sees artists as agents of social change. This lecture is part of the Arts in Education Program's John Landrum Bryant Lecture Performance Series.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Roy Foster speaks about the final volume in his acclaimed biography W.B. Yeats, A Life, Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. **Roy Foster**is the Carroll professor of Irish history at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Hartford College. He is author of numerous books including Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Harvard Graduate School of Education celebrates the work of Dr. Seuss, with a forum to discuss children's literacy, the effects of parent-child and child self-motivated book reading, and child literacy programs. Initially created as a one-day event to celebrate reading, the National Education Association's Read Across America has grown into a nationwide initiative that promotes reading every day of the year and culminates on March 2nd, the birthday of Dr. Seuss.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Michael J. Feuer of the National Research Council presents the second in a series of lectures on links between cognitive science and education policy. This lecture focuses on sources of complexity in the American school system and implications for the design of rational models of education policy. Feuer emphasizes the intended and unintended effects of the fragmented system of school governance that exists in the US, the limitations this imposes on the use of existing measurement tools to gauge individual and institutional progress, and the problems that arise from accountability systems that inadvertently create incentives for opportunistic behavior among students, teachers, and school authorities. Given these constraints, Feuer argues for a new approach to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of alternative governance models, defining rational goals for education policy, and setting reasonable expectations for improvement. **Michael J. Feuer** is Executive Director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Research Council of the National Academies.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Organized by the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) at Harvard University, this series kicks off a forum entitled Race, Culture, and K-12 Achievement Gaps. Popular discourse among national leaders has assumed that some black and Latino youth are embedded in a culture that is oppositional to achievement and that this culture is a major impediment to narrowing the nation's achievement gaps. The speakers present a more complex picture, identifying issues upon which future research will be helpful, and suggesting some practical implications of the emerging research consensus. Panelists include Prudence Carter, assistant professor of sociology, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Ronald Ferguson, lecturer of public policy, Kennedy School of Government; and Mica Pollock, assistant professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Michael Armstrong, author of Closely Observed Children, reads from Girl Today, Hare Tomorrow, a story by a child that to him represents the culmination of elementary school art. This reading is part of the John Landrum Bryant Lecture/Performance Series, sponsored by the HGSE Arts in Education Program and supported by the Bauman Foundation.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Dick Deasy, director of the Arts Education Partnership in Washington, DC, and editor of Critical Links, speaks about schools and the arts. Sponsored by the John Landrum Bryant Lecture/Performance Series, which is part of the Arts in Education Program.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Robert Calfee discusses the importance of effective teaching and active research regarding reading and accessing literacy. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education and Dean, provides an introduction to the lecture.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Norman Brosterman discusses the history of kindergarten and its influence on such modernist giants as Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus school. In his book Inventing Kindergarten, Brosterman argues that within this lost world of women and children we can locate the seedbed of modern art. With its emphasis on abstract decomposition and building up from elemental forms, the original kindergarten system of the mid-nineteenth century created an education and design revolution that profoundly affected the course of modern art and architecture, as well as physics, music, psychology and the modern mind itself.
    Partner:
    Harvard Graduate School of Education