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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

Holding the Truth: Reflections of a Navajo Artist

Thu, Feb 24, 2000

Melanie Yazzie, contemporary Navajo multimedia artist, and visiting professor at the University of Arizona, gives a lecture and slideshow on "Holding the Truth: The Personal and Political in Art." This event iss co-sponsored by the Harvard Native American Program. **Melanie Yazzie** is a Dine (Navajo) artist of the salt and bitter water clans. Yazzie works in a variety of media including prints and ceramics, among others. Through her installations, she examines both internal and external influences on Native people. For instance, neither the cloth in the Dine skirts nor Blue Bird flower are indigenous to the Dine people, but after being filtered through the hearts and hands of one of its women, they become synonymous with it. The monotype is another example of art that challenges Native portrayal in the dominant culture. By using the personal example of her own family, Yazzie presents real portrayal of Native culture, without idealizing, degrading or commercializing it.

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Learning with Excitement: Afterschool Programs

Fri, Oct 3, 2003

This Learning with Excitement Conference presents policy and research perspectives that offer integrative approaches to system-building in youth development and afterschool education. Afterschool education plays an important supporting role in children's scholastic and social success. Among stakeholders, there is not yet consensus concerning the specific objectives and outcomes of afterschool programs. Enhancing young people's overall success through afterschool programing requires a balanced and comprehensive strategy, one that targets a range of developmental competencies and bridges a child's diverse worlds.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
W.B. Yeats: The Arch-Poet

Wed, Dec 10, 2003

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.

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Louis Menand: Pragmatism's Three Moments

Thu, Feb 12, 2004

Louis Menand lectures on pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy based on experience and experiment rather than fixed principles. Louis Menand, professor of English and American literature and language in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and a member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty, is the author of *The Metaphysical Club* (2001), an exploration of American pragmatism that examines the transformation of American intellectual thought from 1865 to 1919 and explores the development of the pragmatism philosophy.

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(Not) Talking About Race Talk

Wed, May 5, 2004

Mica Pollock discusses race talk dilemmas with local educators, as presented in her new book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Education for All

Tue, Oct 26, 2004

Fernando Reimers, associate professor of education at HGSE moderates this conversation on universal primary education. Panelists discuss why children across the world, particularly girls, children from poor societies, children who work, and children in conflict - do not have access to a basic education, why they should, and what's being done about it. Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann will introduce the distinguished speakers which include: Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); Gene Sperling, director of the Center on Universal Education, Council on Foreign Relations; Vivien Stewart, vice president for Education, Asia Society; and Elaine Wolfensohn, World Bank.

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Inventing Kindergarten: Seedbed of Modern Art

Thu, May 5, 2005

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.

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"L" is for Literacy: Reading with Children

Wed, Mar 2, 2005

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.

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Becoming Literate: Baltimore Early Childhood Project

Tue, Mar 8, 2005

Robert Serpell, vice chancellor at the University of Zambia, discusses the results of his five-year study tracing literacy development in pre-kindergarten through third-grade children from low- and middle- income families of European and African heritage in Baltimore. His presentation centers on how the concept of intimate family culture can assist in moving the discussion of educational disadvantage beyond stereotyped accounts of various social addresses. Catherine Snow, the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of Education, will provide an introduction.

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Closing the Nation's Racial Achievement Gaps I

Thu, May 5, 2005

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.

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