Gloria Ladson-Billings and Ron Walker
Gloria Ladson-Billings-Absolutely Great!
I spent an hour and a half on Tuesday evening and 3 hours Wednesday morning mesmerized by Gloria as she explained what is needed to teach all children in our schools. I had read Dreamkeepers many years ago and felt then that this women "got it", and understood teaching. After listening to her over these past two days I've become a disciple. If everyone could read or hear what she has to say and then practice it, we would move beyond the achievement gap/education deficit and really reach our children.
There is no way I can reduce her presentations since she is succinct and direct in what she says and each aspect of her talk is carefully linked to earlier parts. The best I can do is share specific points she made exactly as she made them.
What she presented Wednesday at the all day session was completely different from what she said at Wheelock Family Theater on Tuesday.
There were some specific points she made in her first presentation. She focused on how schools fail to educate black boys by perceiving them as men, and therefore a threat. What follows is treatment of their behaviors in much more severe ways than the behaviors of white children, and eventually the loss of many of these young black boys to the educational system.
Here are a few special points:
expect any work from you. They are taught with Martin Haberman's Pedagogy of Poverty.
Dr. Billings ended by saying schools need to move Black boys from childhood to young adulthood, not from boys to men!
During her discussion she had mentioned the number of Black men in prison and the rise from 100,000 in 1990 to over 1,000,000 in 2001. In response to a question, she pointed out that if schools throw kids out, there is no longer many manufacturing jobs in this country so they can't find decent jobs and the only place left for them is prisons
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