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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

Closing the Nation's Racial Achievement Gaps III

Thu, May 12, 2005

Organized by the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) at Harvard University, this is the third in a series of forums addressing Racial Gaps in School Readiness: The Importance of Early Childhood. Public discourse about achievement gaps is typically focused on what happens in schools and classrooms. However, the fact is that racial achievement gaps exist on the first day of kindergarten. The evening's speakers will discuss research evidence on the size of the gaps that exist by kindergarten, research based explanations for those gaps, and some of the implications for policy and practice. This forum will feature Roland Fryer, Economics Department, Harvard University; David Grissmer, senior management scientist, Rand Corporation; and Kathleen McCartney, professor of education and academic dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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What Does Good Work Look Like?

Thu, Mar 3, 2005

Educator Ron Berger lectures on the study and research of student work, and how to improve the work produced by students by giving them models to to base their own works from. **Ron Berger** served as a public school teacher in western Massachusetts for 25 years. He works with the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school network, Harvard Project Zero, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His new book from Heinemann is An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship in Schools. This lecture is a part of the John Landrum Bryant Lecture/Performance Series, sponsored by the Arts in Education Program and supported by the Bauman Foundation.

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Framing Education as Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day

Tue, Mar 22, 2005

Lecturing from her book Framing Education as Art: The Octopus Has a Good Day, Jessica Hoffmann Davis, offers suggestions for making non-arts education more connected to and like the arts. This discussion is part of the John Landrum Bryant Lecture/Performance Series, sponsored by the HGSE Arts in Education Program and supported by the Bauman Foundation.

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Telling Tales: Reading with Michael Armstrong

Tue, Apr 19, 2005

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.

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Arts and Schools: Reconciling Opposites

Thu, Apr 21, 2005

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.

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Assessing Literacy: Exploring the Reader's Mind and Heart

Thu, Apr 7, 2005

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.

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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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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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Consuming Kids: Hostile Takeover

Wed, Oct 13, 2004

Susan Linn, instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center, discusses how all aspects of children's lives, including their health, education, creativity, and values, are at risk of being compromised by their status in the marketplace. Interweaving real-life stories of marketing to children, child development theory, and the latest research, Linn reveals the magnitude of this problem and show what can be done about it.

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Fragments: Links between Cognitive Science and Education Policy

Thu, Feb 24, 2005

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.

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