Join the Ed Factory’s Teachers Institute for our end-of-year colloquia, featuring poets Patricia Smith and Rita Williams-Garcia.

Join the Ed Factory's Teachers Institute for an art exhibit featuring dynamic visual and audio personal documentaries by Institute fellows that tell the story of what it's like to try to build innovative, democratic learning environments within today's culture of high-stakes testing and educational standardization. 

PATRICIA SMITH + RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA

Patricia Smith's poetry has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” Smith is a Renaissance artist of unmistakable signature, recognized as a force in the fields of poetry, playwriting, fiction, performance, and creative collaboration. 

Smith is Professor of Creative Writing at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island, and she the author of six critically-acclaimed volumes of poetry, among them Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the National Book Award finalist Blood Dazzler (read excerpts here), and Teahouse of the Almighty ( a National Poetry Series winner), both from Minnesota's own Coffee House Press.

Rita Williams-Garcia is the author of One Crazy Summer, Jumped, and over a dozen award-winning novels and short stories. Williams-Garcia was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Newbery Honor Award (2011), Coretta Scott King Award, Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the PEN/Norma Klein Award.

What Is the Price of the Ticket? Deconstructing Race + Opportunity

Friday, 7 March, 2014

5:30 PM 8:30 PM

The Blake School, 511 Kenwood Parkway, Minneapolis, MN, 55403 (map)

American Promise: A Film Screening + Conversation with Director, Michèle Stephenson

American Promise spans 13 years as Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, middle-class African-American parents in Brooklyn, NY, turn their cameras on their son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, who make their way through Manhattan's Dalton School, one of the most prestigious independent schools in the country. Chronicling the boys' divergent paths from kindergarten through high school graduation, this documentary provides a rare look into the lives of two middle-class black families as they navigate the ups and downs of parenting and educating their sons in a country still wrestling with notions of difference, race, class, and opportunity. American Promise is the winner of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival US Documentary Special Jury Award.

This screening is provided by the Ed Factory's Teacher's Institute @Minneapolis and sponsored by the Blake School, Minneapolis Public Schools, and Jack and Jill of America, City of Lakes chapter.

Pedagogies of Design

Saturday, February 22, 2014

9:30 AM 11:30 AM

University of Minnesota STSS Building, Room 412117 Pleasant Street, Minneapolis, MN (map)

SUGATA MITRA + PETER WILLIAMS

Sugata Mitra is the Teacher's Institute 2013-2014 featured Visiting Scholar. Mitra is a winner of the 2013 TED Prize. He is a Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in England. His “Hole in the Wall” experiments were the basis for the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year. Mitra's international experiments have shown that in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. 

Peter Williams is the founder and executive director of an organization whose goal is to improve global health, using design to create healthier environments as preventative measures for tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria. Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments (ARCHIVE) has projects in countries worldwide, including Haiti, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. ARCHIVE identifies and addresses the causes of poor health in disadvantaged communities and uses strategies related to housing design improvements to create environments that promote better health. 

Is Racism the Neural Adversary of the Social Mind?

Saturday, January 25, 2014

9:30 AM 12:00 PM

University of Minnesota, STSS Building, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (map)

TA-NEHISI COATES + MATTHEW LIEBERMAN

An Atlantic senior editor and writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates has penned many influential articles including "Fear of a Black President," one of the most profound pieces written about the presidency of Barack Obama. Coates is a former writer for The Village Voice, and a contributor to Time, O, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of growing up in Baltimore during the age of crack. In 2012, Coates was awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Matthew Lieberman is the author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Crown, 2013). Lieberman is a Professor of Psychology at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and a Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UCLA. His research interests are social cognitive neuroscience, neural bases of automatic and controlled social cognition and affect, beural bases of personality, neural bases of social perception and self-schemas, common neural bases of social rejection an physical pain.