To "disrupt" is to interrupt an event, activity, or process by causing a disturbance or problem; it is to radically alter the structure of a problem. Ed Factory Teacher's Institute seminars and public symposia this year will attempt to address the young body both psychologically and physically, and the direct and often overlapping social, economic, and political responses the US has had to particular young bodies (e.g., gay bodies, bodies of color, male and female bodies).

Join the Teacher's Institute @Minneapolis for its annual public symposia series, where artists, scientists, educators, and activists will engage the public in discussions about why it's necessary and how we might disrupt the violence against young bodies. 

What is a “love pedagogy”? Read about it here.

Visiting Scholars

Teaching to Disrupt

At the opening of the Ed Factory Teacher's Institute @Minneapolis Visiting Scholar Public Symposia series, educator, author, and activist Bill Ayers will address the Institute's 2014-2015 theme, Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Violence Against Young Bodies. 

Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), and he is the founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. Ayers' articles have appeared in several journals and newspapers, including the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, Rethinking Schools, The Nation, and the New York Times. Ayers is also the author of more than 20 books, most recently Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident (Beacon Press, 2013) and with Rick Ayers, Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2011). 

Niobe Way is an applied psychologist and the author of Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press, 2011). Kent Harber is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. His main interest is how people’s self-resources (e.g., feelings of self-worth, self-esteem, social support, opportunities to disclose) affect their physical perception, social judgments, and interpersonal behavior. He applies this interest to interracial feedback, the perception of disturbing events, forgiveness, and the use of emotions as information.

As members of PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity) at New York University, the work of Way and Harber provides critical insight into why it is that we face local and global crises of all sorts, including the fact that homicide is the leading cause of death among 10-24-year-old African Americans and the second leading cause of death for Latinos, 20% of kids report being bullied on school property, one out of every three women in the world experiences sexual violence, mass violence in the U.S. occurs once every two weeks, and people in the U.S. are more likely to kill themselves than get hit by a car.  

Together, Way and Harber will engage in a significant discussion about the crisis of connection young people experience today, the ways we are increasingly disconnected from our own humanity and the humanity of others, and what we need to do to reconnect with ourselves and each other. This discussion will have profound Implications for teaching and learning, especially for teachers and students under pressure from current educational reforms.

Strangers in the Village: Imagining (Young) Black Bodies in America

CLAUDIA RANKINE + MARLON JAMES

Claudia Rankine is an Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Rankine is the recent recipient of an NAACP Image Award and the author of five collections of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press), which the New Yorker described as an "especially vital book for this moment in time," and by the New York Times as "insistently topical, with references to Trayvon Martin and stop-and-frisk police tactics, and concerned with intimate moments when racial impasses spring up between friends and colleagues." Citizen won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and became the only book of poetry to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. 

Born in Jamaica in 1970, Marlon James is a Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Award for Fiction. James is the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was touted by the Wall Street Journal as "a fictional, kaleidoscopic take on the 1976 assassination attempt on reggae star Bob Marley and its aftermath." Publisher's Weekly declared that the novel "should be required reading," and the New York Times calls James a "prodigious talent."

Young Bodies Speak Back

An Installation & Reading by Students + Teachers of Minneapolis Public Schools Featuring Poets Patricia Smith + Mark Nowak

This year's institute focuses on Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Violence Against Young Bodies. Using installation art and writing, Visiting-Scholars Patricia Smith (poet) and Mark Nowak (documentary poet), along with the Ed Factory's senior consultant Lisa Arrastia and specialist Fadwa Abbas, will spend two days engaging Institute Minneapolis fellows and a select number of their students in an experiential examination of the disruption, and the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference. The results of their work together will be on display and performed at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis on Friday, 6 March.

Friday, 6 March, 2015

6:00 - 8:00 pm

Capri Theater, North Minneapolis, MN