I am originally from Philadelphia, PA; my undergraduate degree is from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where I majored in Operations Research Engineering and minored in Africana Studies. I received a Master's degree in Urban Education with a concentration in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.
I taught secondary mathematics for eight years in Philadelphia, PA and St. Paul, MN, and during that time I developed a leadership program for African American boys and also coached several chess teams. I have been a trainer for Wellstone Action's Campus Camp program for four years, where I work with college students around the country on developing community organizing skills. I am a husband and father of two wonderful daughters and in my spare time I am the MC for Junkyard Empire -- a politically progressive, live hip-hop band.
I entered the Culture and Teaching Ph.D. program in order to advance my understanding of critical multicultural education in urban schools and to develop educational models centered on social justice.
After a few years of being lost in the years after my undergraduate education, I moved myself to Australia where I enrolled in a two-year teaching degree. In the course of this degree and the single year of teaching first grade in a public school, I was exposed to the philosophy of Paulo Freire, the democratic approaches of preschools in Reggio Emilia (and interned and worked in schools focusing on this inspiration), reflective practice/action research, multi-age classrooms, and intercultural populations of students. My experiences pulled me back to the United States where I felt I could do the most important work, and where it was most important for me to be, personally and politically.
Big influences and sites of learning for me are in hip-hop (and other youth cultures), various conceptual and street artists, Feminist scholars of color, and the earlier years of Sesame Street. I am interested in how culture, meaning, and language are negotiated and constructed across difference of varying degrees.
Part of my experience as a teacher that led me to pursue a Ph.D. was a recognition of how, even within seemingly progressive and democratic educational environments, certain traditional modes of silencing and dividing students, teachers, and parents are perpetuated, limiting the possible sites of negotiation and cultural formation. As a means to this end, I am currently curious as to how certain methodologies (pedagogical and research) allow us to realize the researching potential of teaching and the teaching potential of research.
As a Ph.D. student I have experimented with organizing learning circles and meal groups, been engaged in an Action Research project with teachers, taught in a month long residential course based on the democratic approaches of Myles Horton and the Danish Folk School movement, teaching in an undergraduate class, as well as working in a collaborative, intercultural, intergenerational and multi-linqual research project. I have also been encouraged to find classes in and form relationships with other departments across the University.
I have found the Culture and Teaching program (faculty, students, classes, research) a strong base of support as well as a healthy, constructive space of challenge to my own assumptions and interests. I am extremely thankful for the diverse group of similarly concerned and equally passionate people who make up the Culture and Teaching program and in some sense help me maintain sanity and strength as I pursue a Ph.D.
Tuesday 11/24/2009
12:00 p.m. - 1 p.m.
40 Peik Hall
Please bring a bag lunch if you like!
White Americans have, from the first, hopelessly confused the real Negroes and Indians, with whom they must for the sake of social survival and civil peace learn to live, with certain projections of their own deepest minds, aspects of their own psychic life with which precisely they find it impossible to live. —Leslie Fiedler
For the four white men who are the focus of this talk, the production of their own racial identities was intimately tied up with their relations to real and imagined racial others. I first share a theoretical framework that illuminates just how important racial others have been for the meaning- and self-making of white people throughout US history. Then, I discuss the larger interview study in which the four men participated, before turning to my interpretation of their interviews with me.
In the lives of these men, people of color, real and imagined, divided factions of families and churches against one another. People of color were integral to moral lessons they learned as boys—positive lessons about fairness and respect in athletics, negative lessons about hypocrisy (as they listened to their elders accuse Indians of drunkenness and stealing even as they watched these same white elders drink and steal). These men used people of color, imagined and real, to understand themselves and their powers—how smart they were, how good, how tough. People of color were integral to their efforts to find a place among the racist and democratic meanings and values of their community, society, and world.
Diversity Dialogues: monthly gatherings sponsored by the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. Each features a presentation by faculty, staff, student, or community members. Time is allotted for conversation.
Luke Lecheler (Learning Technologies) and I will be presenting a paper at the 2010 AERA Annual Meeting.
It's called "Design and Development of a Web Application for English and Composition Classes" and was placed into the session for "Designing Environments, Experiences, and Tools for Teaching and Learning."
We're very excited about presenting Confetti (the application we designed and developed and are continuing to design and develop) at AERA. It's not quite hooked up to a database for general use is, but it should be relatively soon and we'll start testing it further then.
What are the epistemological and ethical considerations in research with immigrant populations?
Download conference call for papers [pdf] and conference flier [pdf]
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Ethics and Politics of Research with Immigrant Populations
President's Interdisciplinary Conference
June 4-5, 2010
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Deadline for Submissions: December 21, 2009
CONFERENCE CHAIRS
Bic Ngo, Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota
Martha Bigelow, Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota
Stacey Lee, Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bic Ngo, Ph.D., assistant professor and Martha Bigelow, Ph.D., associate professor (Curriculum and Instruction) received a President's Interdisciplinary Conference award from the Graduate School to convene a conference in Spring 2010.
Read the full CEHD News item.
Here is an update on some of the things CaT students and faculty have been doing in recent months. See recent entries below.
I volunteer at Adam Abdulle Academy, a Somali charter school in Rochester, and I am an active member of the Diversity Council in Rochester. As a member I am involved in community work addressing racism and white privilege. That's about it...no papers published yet although I am currently working on an article with Bic in which we are using CDA to analyze some interviews with Hmong community leaders dealing with early marriage.
I am currently helping my advisor, Bic Ngo, with her research on the experiences of Central African Republic refugees in southern Chad. I've had the opportunity to transcribe interviews and to conduct background research.
I supervise University of Minnesota intro block practicum students in a local urban school--and issues of race and culture come up often. It's literally a forum for culture and teaching in action!
Last summer, I served as a volunteer writing tutor at the International Institute of Minnesota.
Last year, as part of an assistantship, I collaborated with U of Mn Libraries staff members to create online information literacy tutorials through the U's Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation grant.
I'm currently organizing the 2nd annual Minnesota Web Conference (MinneWebCon) here at the University.
MinneWebCon delivers a practical blend of technical and creative information from industry practitioners and educators. It focuses on best practices and the most effective ways to leverage the tools at your disposal, offering insight into what’s ahead and what we can improve on right now.
Tim is on sabbatical and working on his next book. The book is grounded in an interview study he did in rural Wisconsin, and Tim is describing and theorizing white racial identity, as part of a larger effort to improve anti-racist teacher education. For an overview of the sorts of theoretical and political commitments he is bringing to this work, see his recent article in Curriculum Inquiry (Volume 38, no. 3, 2008), entitled "How I Became White While Punching de Tar Baby."
Recently, Bic guest-edited a special issue on Immigrant Education for the peer-reviewed journal, Theory into Practice. This issue includes articles about Lao, Somali, Hmong and Caribbean immigrants, among others. She also completed a single-authored book manuscript, Unresolved identities: Discourse, ambivalence and urban immigrant student. In this poststructuralist ethnography, she examines the ways immigrant youth identities are shaped by dominant discourses that simplify and confine their lives and experiences within unitary dualisms of good/bad, traditional/modern and success/failure. Highlighting the discourses we use to make sense of urban, immigrant students, enables Bic to illuminate implications for improving critical multicultural pedagogy. Currently, Bic is working on a few publications from her research with Hmong American high school students, parents, community leaders and youth activists. These works-in-progress explore the changing perspectives and practices related to early marriage, gender and sexuality among Hmong American students and community members.
In 2008 I led a 90 min. professional development workshop for teachers at the Minnesota Statewide Conference for Teachers of the Deaf/Hard of Hearing. The topic of the session was "Increasing the use of technology in instruction" and I made an accompanying blog for that session that is located here: http://lisadembouski.wordpress.com
In April, 2009 I'll present again at the same conference. The topic is still under discussion but I believe it will be about one of my pet projects (including the probable participants of my dissertation study): deaf/hard of hearing students with multiple needs.
I'll be presenting at the Collaboration Conference (Professional Development Conference, at the Sheraton Bloomington, this Friday. This Fall's theme is "Culture Matters: Designing Learning Environments to Foster Cultural Awareness and Intercultural Competence."
I recently signed on as an RA working with Professor Gillian Roehrig to provide support for Ah neen dush: A Science and Mathematics Enrichment Program for the White Earth Reservation Head Start Program. My responsibilities include assisting in curriculum modifications and development of culturally relevant science and mathematics modules for Anishinabe pre-K students. Also, I will continue supervising practicum students at Marcy Open Elementary school this spring.
