Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Big Backyard

Lots of news right here in my Twin Cities backyard:

The Sankofa Project at St. Kate's (The Minnesota Women's Press article, via Negrophile)

...[Reverend Dr Paulette] Sankofa’s primary objective right now is to finish analyzing the data and get the results into the hands of the community. This is a focal point of Sankofa’s newly developed research method, called critical womanist ethnography. A conglomeration of womanist theology, critical pedagogy and critical ethnography, this method seeks to make the role of the researcher more transparent by focusing on the relationship between the research and the community. Simply submitting an article to an academic journal, as traditional researchers do, completely ignores that connection, Sankofa said. “I am always within the structure of the community, so it’s the community looking at the data and I serve as the facilitator,” she said. Her goal is to submit the findings to newspapers, radio and magazines that reach the target population (such as Essence and Ebony), as well as make presentations and ultimately produce a video about the project. “While reports of the research findings are submitted to scholarly journals, the validation of the research comes from the women and girls of the community, through participation in and determining the processes that lead to the findings and resulting actions,” Sankofa wrote in her paper, “Critical Womanist Ethnography: Community-Based Research Methods with African American Women and Girls"...

Family Social Science junior and General College alum crowned Miss Black USA 2005 (Minnesota Daily article):

In the coming year, [Celie] Dean said she’ll meet with the Congressional Black Caucus and speak to the Women’s Empowerment Conference in Arizona. She’ll travel to Vienna, Austria; Africa and the Bahamas, she said, having won a trip to the latter for raising the most money for the Children’s Miracle Network. She will also meet with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, a prospect she said makes her “nervous but excited.”

...Dean, a former General College student who later enrolled in the College of Human Ecology, was active in the spring’s rally to keep General College open. Neiman said she asked Dean to speak at the rally because “she represents the typical ‘GC’ student: first-generation student, low-income, very motivated.”

Hurry to see Joshua’s Journey: A Black Cowboy Rides the Chisholm Trail (through September 18). My daughters and I went last week and they loved it!

Joshua’s Journey brings to life the Scholastic Dear America/My Name is America® book, "The Journal of Joshua Loper, A Black Cowboy". Visitors will follow Joshua’s adventures as he leaves home at age sixteen to drive a herd of cattle on the Chisholm Trail. Joshua’s Journey shows the ethnic diversity that has rarely been seen in western movies but was part of the historic cattle drives of the late 1860s through 1880s.

The Peace Movement hits home, for example in this Strib editorial: Peace's face/Lourey makes powerful witness

A new antiwar movement is being born this summer on a Texas roadside. It presents a much different face -- feminine, older, wiser, and filled with grief and righteous indignation. The face is that of mothers who lost sons and daughters in Iraq, first Cindy Sheehan of California, and now more, including Minnesota state Sen. Becky Lourey.

...Lourey, who spent three days at the protest site dubbed Camp Casey outside President Bush's ranch, offers the antiwar movement a powerful voice -- one capable of attracting national attention if this summer's grass-roots combustion in Crawford catches lasting fire.

Both personally and politically, the DFL state senator from Kerrick commands respect. Lourey, 62, is an indefatigable 15-year legislator admired for her warmth, passion and lawmaking skill. She and her husband raised 12 children, eight of them adopted, while establishing a successful family business. She is as riveting a speaker as exists in Minnesota's liberal camp.

Lourey fell silent in the weeks after her Army pilot son Matt was shot down and killed near Baghdad in June. Her grief's quiet phase appears to have ended. We expect that she now has much to say that, in coming weeks, Americans should hear...

And finally, be sure to join the U at the "Great Minnesota Get-together." The schedule for U of MN events at the fair is now up here. This Sunday is Maroon and Gold day, a sample event detailed below. Me, I'll be looking for the deep-fried dissertation on a stick booth!

College of Education & Human Development: The Center for Early Education and Development will be featuring research projects such as the development of accurate progress monitoring for preschoolers with or without disabilities.

...Help us celebrate our college centennial! Interactive Web displays allow you to take a short quiz based on the state’s 1938 high school admission tests, or to try your luck with sample questions from the current state Basic Skills Test. There's a coloring table for children where they can draw pictures of classrooms of the past or future, and a station where people can send free post cards to their favorite teachers. Giveaways: Centennial-themed 12-inch rulers and a variety of bookmarks.

Posted by perry032 at August 24, 2005 10:27 AM | TrackBack
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