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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

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

Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Thu, Feb 10, 2005

Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske speak about their recent book, *Elusive Equity: Education Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa*, which tells the story of South Africa's efforts to fashion a racially equitable state education system out of the ashes of apartheid. Fiske and Ladd describe and evaluate the policy strategies that South Africa pursued in its quest for racial equity. They draw on previously unpublished data, interviews with key officials, and visits to dozens of schools to describe the changes made in school finance, teacher assignment policies, governance, curriculum, higher education, and other areas.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from Students

Tue, Oct 19, 2004

Kathleen Cushman, shares surprising advice from teens she interviewed for her most recent book about how to engage, motivate, and challenge high school students. Kathleen Cushman, a journalist specializing in education and school reform, discusses her latest book, *Fires in the Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from High School Students*. Ms. Cushman interviewed forty teenagers about what teachers could do to better engage, motivate, and challenge high school students. She explains the remarkable insights they offered for improving classroom life and relationships between teachers and students. Every teenager is different, these young people say, but they all need teachers who know them well without violating their boundaries, and who challenge them without humiliating or ignoring them. Ms. Cushman's work offers invaluable techniques for increasing engagement and motivation, teaching demanding academic material, reaching English language learners, and creating classroom cultures where respect and success go hand in hand.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Closing the Achievement Gap

Mon, Dec 13, 2004

Richard Rothstein, former education columnist for the New York Times discusses factors contributing to the race achievement gap. While policymakers attempt to narrow the achievement gap by implementing school reform efforts targeting accountability, leadership, and teacher quality, they neglected other critical social reforms. Rothstein is accompanied by a panel including: Ronald Ferguson, lecturer in public policy, Kennedy School of Government; Dan Koretz, professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Donna Rodrigues, program director, Jobs for the Future, and founder of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, MA. Robert Schwartz, lecturer on education, moderates.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
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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Harvard Graduate School of Education
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.

Forum Network

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
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.

Forum Network

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Community and Youth Organization and Reform

Thu, Mar 9, 2006

The Harvard Graduate School of Education hosts a forum focused on community and youth organizing as a strategy to build civic participation and power in low income communities and as a powerful force for change in urban schools.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Abbott Districts: Better Funding, Better Achievement

Thu, Mar 16, 2006

The Harvard Graduate School of Education hosts a forum focusing on New Jersey's Abbott Districts, where state aid, resulting from thirty years of legal challenges, makes average per pupil spending higher now than it is in the state's suburbs. This increase in spending highlights the link between better funding and academic achievement. Can whole school systems be transformed to close achievement gaps? Does money matter? Thirty little-known Abbott Districts in New Jersey are the nation's leading response. The Abbott and Union City stories are not well known, but have national implications. This forum features Gordon MacInnes, Assistant Commissioner for Abbott Implementation, and Fred Carrigg, Special Assistant to the Commissioner for Urban Literacy, who helped move Union City from the second lowest-performing system in New Jersey to the highest among the state's larger systems. Ronald Ferguson, Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, moderates.

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
Connecting the Scholar and the Classroom

Thu, Mar 23, 2006

A panel of experts debate educational theories and other intriguing topics in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Harvard Educational Review. Topics discussed: How is educational research evolving? How are researchers addressing changing demands of the field, developing technology and globalization, as well as increased aims to link educational theory, practice, and policy? Speakers include Kevin Kumashiro, Director, Center for Anti-Oppressive Education; Richard Murnane, Academic Dean and Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Sonia Nieto, Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The discussion is moderated by Kathleen McCartney, Acting Dean and Gerald S. Lesser Professor of Early Childhood Development.

Forum Network

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Harvard Graduate School of Education
How Educators Can Help Children Exposed to Trauma

Mon, Nov 28, 2005

This forum, specially designed for school leaders, teachers, counselors, and community interventionists, discusses potential student and family reactions to trauma, as well as immediate and sustained ways for assisting in their continued emotional and educational development. The panelists discuss how, in the wake of traumatic events, educators often grapple with understanding and responding to the needs of affected children.

Mental Health Month

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Harvard Graduate School of Education