Better Meeting Skills with C.T. Lawrence Butler (2009 VIDEO)
February 26, 2010 at 3:50 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Better Meeting Skills, C.T. Butler, C.T. Lawrence Butler, Consensus, Consensus Decision-Making
2009 AERO Conference “Better Meeting Skills” workshop
Presented by C.T. Lawrence Butler
Why is it that, although meetings are necessary, they are often difficult, time-consuming and even painful experiences? Perhaps one of the reasons is that few of us take the time to learn better meeting skills. In this class, participants will learn skills and techniques designed to improve their experience in meetings. Exercises will be used to encourage creative conflict resolution, self-empowerment, respect for diversity, and appreciation of different perspectives and opinions. These skill-building exercises will provide experiential learning in areas of agenda planning, facilitation techniques, small group discussion and evaluation. The beginner as well as the experienced facilitator will find this class stimulating and valuable.
C.T. Lawrence Butler is the co-author of On Conflict and Consensus and Food Not Bombs – How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community. He is a father, a political activist, a nonviolent conflict resolution mediator and trainer, and vegetarian chef. In 1980, he co-founded the Food Not Bombs collective in Cambridge, MA and is also a former Cambridge Peace Commissioner. Currently he travels in the United States, Europe and Africa giving lectures and teaching class on Formal Consensus. Groups he teaches include government agencies, schools, Indian Tribes, Co-housing groups, professional associations, religious organizations and intentional communities. He has recently published his third book titled Consensus for Cities.
Better Meeting Skills Part 1/2
Better Meeting Skills Part 2/2
The Present State of Our Education and the Future it Can Be (VIDEO)
February 25, 2010 at 9:20 am | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Cavanaugh & Kavanaugh, Don "Four Arrows" Jacobs, Don Trent Jacobs, Four Arrows, Gerald D. Jennings, Jerry Jennings, Kristin Diodonet, Mayor Gerald D. Jennings, Mayor Jerry Jennings
A Talk by Kristin Diodonet
Kristin Diodonet’s talk starts at the 15:30 minute mark. Also included: A brief performance by Cavanaugh & Kavanaugh, Albany Mayor Gerald D. Jennings, and Don “Four Arrows” Jacobs.
Keynote Topic
“The Present State of Our Education and the Future it Can Be”
Keynote Summary
Based around the ever growing problems of our school system. Mainly through repression of our youth, extreme inflexibility, and the violence it now presents to us now. This speech is designated to recognize the potential of the growing alternative influence in both our country and the world. Along with pointing out key differences and similarities between our alternative communities, it is focuses around the idea that we can join our ideas to harmonize and perhaps change the course of the a dreary future looms ahead.
Bio
Kristin Diodonet grew up in Dutchess county, southern New York, surrounded by a very traditional family. Often times she felt artistically stifled trying to meet the ever changing goals presented to her.
Kristin went to public school at an early age, going on to be homeschooled, and later being self schooled. Finally, she enrolled in Harriet Tubman Free school (HTFS) in 2007. She is in her final year at HTFS and looks forwards to college where she wishes do art and cultural studies.
After she leaves school she still wishes to be apart of the alternative school movement were she hopes she can help improve students lives, even if she cannot improve their world around them. Although she is very much up for the challenge. She also wants to be an artist, travel around the world and study the lives others.
Currently you can find her reading, drawing, and daydreaming. Her greatest joy is that there is so much to learn. Her only regret being that there is not enough time.
Seeds of Tomorrow: Solutions for Improving Our Children’s Education (NEW BOOK)
February 24, 2010 at 2:07 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, New Resource | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Angela Engel, Seeds of Tomorrow
Seeds of Tomorrow
Solutions for Improving Our Children’s Education
Angela Engel
With a foreword by Deborah Meier
This inspiring author moves beyond criticism of public education uniting readers toward a vision of educating children that is holistic, intelligent, and empowering. Seeds of Tomorrow: Solutions for Improving Our Children’s Education offers reasonable alternatives to high-stakes testing. Engel promotes educational philosophies in support of differentiation and personalization rather than uniformity and conformity. She introduces school collaborative accountability models ensuring academic integrity and excellence on behalf of students, teachers, and our communities.
In a time of political transition and optimism, Americans are looking for the means to improve our nation’s schools. Engel acknowledges the interdependence between education, democratic citizenship, the global work force and the economy, the individual and the community. She seeks not to create consensus on a singular school model but rather to build a common framework. New decisions necessitate a clear understanding of where we’ve come from and where we’re headed.
Written for parents, teachers, administrators, students, and policy makers committed to children and change, the book is hopeful in its analysis of our current challenges: poverty, inequity, and budget shortfalls. It is also sensible in its examination of today’s proposals including performance pay, magnet schools, charter schools, and vouchers.
Uniquely engaging and surprisingly entertaining, Engel’s combination of story telling and research data offers a comprehensive guide to cultivating future generations of problem-solvers and leaders.
Order online at: http://www.educationrevolution.org/seeds.html
Angela will be a featured presenter at the 2010 AERO conference. See http://www.educationrevolution.org/conference.html for more information.
The book is an essential part of the toolkit for the reforms that can be undertaken to fulfill the promise of education that has always been flirted with, often practiced here and there, and that could, if we follow her wise words, be our future. Never has it been said better, and never in such a straight-forward, reader-friendly, and well-reasoned order.
-Deborah Meier, from the Foreword
A valuable guide for reconstructing an education that responds to the needs of heart and mind while contributing to a productive and just society
-H.M. Levin, Teachers College, Columbia University
A New Look at Early Childhood Education: The Old Way (VIDEO)
February 23, 2010 at 10:31 pm | Posted in AERO | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Dr. Joan Lawson, Early Childhood Education, ECE, Hudson Valley, Hudson Valley Community College, HVCC, John Lawson
A Talk by Joan Lawson
The workshop with review current trends in early childhood education within the context of developmentally appropriate practices. Put another (more realistic!) way: we will discuss how the current “push down” curriculum imposed upon many young children in too many early childhood settings conflicts with sound developmentally appropriate practices as defined by respected theorists and practitioners. We will also discuss how to resolve the conflicting demands that correspond with these trends as such are faced by early childhood educators in the field and ways to integrate developmentally appropriate practices within play based programs.
Joan Lawson is a faculty member in the Teacher Preparation Dept. at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, NY, where she has been a course instructor and/or department chair for almost 25 years. Her fields of expertise are early childhood education, language and literacy, and classroom management. She has presented workshops and teacher training in area schools and programs for many years and she continues to learn from her students while doing so. Dr. Lawson has bachelor’s degrees in speech pathology/audiology and elementary education from SUNY Plattsburgh and masters and doctoral degrees in reading from the University at Albany, and she has done post doctoral work at Harvard University. She is the mother of two adult daughters… her eternal teachers.
Can Critical Teaching Change the World?, Ira Shor Keynote Address (VIDEO)
February 20, 2010 at 12:20 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Critical Teaching, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, CUNY, Empowering Education, Freire, Ira Shor, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy for Liberation, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Shor, When Students Have Power
Ira Shor is an author and Professor of Rhetoric/Composition at both the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island/CUNY. His nine published books include a 3-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor: Critical Literacy in Action and Education is Politics (Volumes 1 & 2).
Shor’s work with Freire began in the early 1980s and lasted until Freire’s unfortunate passing in 1997. He and Freire co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation in 1986, the first “talking” book Freire published with a collaborator. Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education (1992) and When Students Have Power (1996), two foundational texts in critical teaching. His Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980) was the first book-length treatment of Freire-based critical methods in the North American context.
Shor’s teaching career began at Staten Island Community College in the embattled period of Open Admissions, a creative era of cultural democracy and classroom innovation. During this time, Shor helped build an open-access writing program recognized then by the NCTE as one of three such successful efforts in higher education.
Shor also started the new doctorate program in Rhetoric/Composition at CUNY’s GradCenter in 1993. There he directs dissertations and offers seminars in literacy and conquest, critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, composition theory and practice, the rhetorics of space and place, and working-class culture.
Shor has a son, Paulo, born in 2003, who is doing a reasonably good job of raising his father.
Keynote Topic:
“Can Critical Teaching Change the World?”
Keynote Summary:
Teaching is not a career leading to fame or riches. While it is relatively easy to be a bad teacher, it is remarkably hard to be a good one. Many teachers with high expectations conscientiously infuse ethical ideals into their lesson plans and class activities. These teachers see education as a career for doing some good in a very troubled world. Their high hopes for education as a force to improve the world mirrors the texts of great educational thinkers, from Dewey to Freire, from Bruner to Kozol to Kohl to Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer and Bob Moses. My question for today, then, is this–Can critical teachers indeed change the world for the better? Can classrooms inviting students to question the status quo, to consider inequality and injustice in society, to probe the ethics of power and the civics of knowledge–transform a cynical, conservative, test-tormented age into a new progressive era?
Part 1/3
Part 2/3
Part 3/3
Mending the Broken Mirror: Education for Resiliency and Restoration (Pt. 2)
February 16, 2010 at 7:11 am | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Humane Education, IHE, Institute for Humane Education, Khalif Williams
Khalif Williams, Executive Director of the Institute for Humane Education, is passionate about building the social movement toward just and sustainable societies through education.. He has been working in the arena of social change and education for over 14 years and has served as a consultant on a variety of educational and non-profit projects.
Khalif will be speaking again at AERO conference 2010. Visit www.educationrevolution.org/conference.html for more information.
Mending the Broken Mirror: Education for Resiliency and Restoration (Khalif Williams Keynote, Pt. 1/2)
February 15, 2010 at 1:24 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Humane Education, IHE, Institute for Humane Education, Khalif Williams
Khalif Williams is the Executive Director of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE). Since 1996 IHE has trained hundreds of humane educators through its certificate and degree programs, workshops, presentations, publications and website. By implementing Mr. Williams’ and IHE’s unique cooperative and collaborative ideals, IHE trainees have touched hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
In 1994, Khalif began working for racial equity in higher education by helping establish a minority mentoring/college preparatory program at Roger Williams University, where he earned his B.A. in Philosophy. He has also served as a counselor and crisis interventionist at a residential treatment facility for mentally ill/emotionally disturbed adolescent boys, and spent several years working for an urban homeless/runaway shelter for teens.
Khalif will again be a featured presenter at AERO conference this year. Visit www.educationrevolution.org conference.html to find out more.
Through his work with young people and as an advocate for the humane treatment of animals, Khalif developed and conducted dozens of highly successful humane education programs for all ages on issues ranging from the environment to domestic violence, consumerism and the media to factory farming. These experiences and concerns led Khalif to an IHE workshop in 2001, where IHE’s philosophies inspired him to make humane education his life’s work.
Keynote Topic:
“Mending the Broken Mirror: Education for Resiliency and Restoration”
Keynote Summary:
What is education for? Given the escalating ethical, economic, political, and environmental challenges of our time, young people need far more than education for jobs. They must be on the forefront of solving complex, interconnected issues through their careers, volunteerism, and involvement in system-changing. Their education must be worthy of their imagination, talents, and intelligence and help them acquire the knowledge, tools, and motivation to be fully engaged, hopeful, and fulfilled citizens in the unfolding of a peaceful, sustainable and humane world for all.
How Do Children Learn Mathematics?
February 11, 2010 at 2:48 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, Gilles Laverdure, How Do Children Learn Mathematics, Learning Math, Math, Mathematics
This workshop was presented by Gilles Laverdure at the 2009 AERO conference. Gilles will be returning in 2010 to present an expanded version of this highly successful workshop. Find out more at www.educationrevolution.org/conference.html
Workshop Description
Two components of math learning will be discussed: 1. How to focus learning on the understanding of important math concepts and 2. How to develop competencies in problem solving. There will be a brief presentation on how the brain makes sense of new learning and a thorough interactive presentation of how mathematical concepts and techniques have evolved over the last 20 000 years. Most importantly, a parallel will be drawn between this long history of inventiveness and the cognitive and creative development of a child. A case will be made for constructivist learning and participants will learn how to avoid common traps in teaching math which can be harmful to the child’s understanding and success.
Distance Learning Programs with the Institute for Humane Education
February 9, 2010 at 8:56 am | Posted in AERO, Education Events | Leave a commentTags: AERO, Humane Education, IHE, Institute for Humane Education, MOGO, Raising a Humane Child
Distance Learning Programs with the Institute for Humane Education
Whether you are a concerned citizen, parent, or educator (or all three), our month-long distance learning courses immerse you in connecting with your deepest values and helping create a humane world. Learn more & register: http://humaneeducation.org/sections/view/distance_learning_programs.
RAISING A HUMANE CHILD
A month-long distance learning course for parents who wish to bring the principles and practices of humane education to their child-rearing and family life.
March 1-26, 2010
October 4-29, 2010
Developed for parents with children of any age, Raising a Humane Child will expand your parenting strategies to help you bring humane education concepts and values to your children and manifest your vision for a better world, starting with your family.
A BETTER WORLD, A MEANINGFUL LIFE
A month-long distance learning course for people who want to put their vision for a better world into practice.
May 3-28, 2010
September 6-October 1, 2010
Learn to tap into your deepest values and help create a peaceful, just, compassionate, sustainable world while cultivating your own inner peace and joy. Through this month-long course, you’ll have the opportunity to assess your life, examine your values, explore new information and do more good for yourself, other people, animals, and the environment.
TEACHING FOR A POSITIVE FUTURE
A month-long distance learning summer institute for educators who want to inspire their students to become leaders and change-makers for a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable world.
July 5-30, 2010
Teaching for a Positive Future is designed to train classroom teachers, community educators and homeschooling parents to effectively teach critical thinking about social justice, environmental ethics, and animal protection, and enhance your students’ understanding that their choices make an impact on themselves, their local community, the fate of other people, other species, and the Earth. The course’s emphasis throughout on building critical thinking skills provides participants with a constructive approach for teaching about complex, controversial issues. You’ll develop new techniques and ideas to revolutionize and revitalize your students’ education and to make your teaching even more rewarding, interesting, and meaningful.
Each course includes:
- a course book
- a booklet of exercises
- links to relevant resources
- access to the Online Commons for engaging with your fellow students and the course advisor(s)
- guidance and feedback from your course advisor(s)
- participation in one or more course salons (conference calls)
- a certificate of completion and/or Continuing Education Credits, if desired
Beehive Design Collective presents “Cross-Pollinating the Grassroots: Collaborative Art as Popular Education”
February 8, 2010 at 9:19 pm | Posted in AERO, AERO Conference, AERO Online Video Series | Leave a commentTags: AERO, AERO Conference, BDC, Beehive Design Collective, Cross-Pollinating the Grassroots
“Cross-Pollinating the Grassroots: Collaborative Art as Popular Education” was presented by the Beehive Design Collective (www.beehivecollective.org) at the 2009 AERO conference. Enjoy free video of the presentation below. To find out about the 2010 AERO conference, visit www.educationrevolution.org/conference.html
Using gigantic portable murals teeming with intricate images of plants and animals, the Bees will facilitate story-sharing about the impacts of globalization & climate change on communities and ecosystems throughout the Americas. As artists and educators who engage with thousands of learners each year, the Bees use illustrations, stories, and an inspiring, interactive, and memorable narrative to promote discussion of pressing issues that affect both people and the environment. Bees will model some techniques for sharing graphics & stories and will encourage lots of participation, questions, feedback, and strategy suggestions from attendees.
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