Thu, April 16, 12:00 to 1:30pm
Holistic Education: Diversity and Justice
Location: Hyatt, West Tower - Green Level, Crystal B
Session Type: Roundtable Session chaired by Karen F. Tardrew, National Louis University
· A Mindful Solution to a Thought-Provoking Problem: Consideration of a Just Intervention in an Unjust Educational Climate, Lisa Bass, North Carolina State University
· Holistic Education: Perspectives from Islamic Schools and Their Leaders, Isra Brifkani, Middle Tennessee State University, Rick Vanosdall, Middle Tennessee State University
· Circle of Knowledge: Exploring Holistic Education, Self-Study, and Indigenous Traditions of Teaching and Learning, Karen Ragoonaden, The University of British Columbia
· Media Literacy as a Form of Holistic Education, Yonty Friesem, University of Rhode Island
Thu, April 16, 2:15 to 3:45pm
Innovation in Practice
Session Type: Roundtable Sessiom chaired by Juli B. Kramer, DAT High School
· Care-Based Mentoring in Online Platforms: A Holistic Approach to Creative Teaching, Jennifer Elaine Killham, University of Cincinnati, John E Stegall, University of Cincinnati
· Presence of Mind: A Qualitative Study of Meditating Teachers, Michele Irwin, University of Toronto, Jack Miller, University of Toronto
· Professional Development as Action Research: Creating Individual, Group, and Professional Holistic Intentionality Through Intensive Self-Discovery, Michelle L. Tichy, University of Northern Iowa, Michael Skivington, Sam Houston State University, Karen F. Tardrew, National Louis University
· Concurrent Validation and Curriculum Sensitivity of the Holistic Wellness Assessment, Charlene Rinehart Brown, Rinehart Institute, Brooks Applegate, Western Michigan University, Mustafa Yildiz, Western Michigan University
Thu, April 16, 6:15 to 8:15pm
Holistic Education SIG Business Meeting. Maxine Greene, the Living Legacy: A “Wide-Awake” Wake
Location: Swissotel, Event Centre First Level, Zurich AB
Session Type: Business Meeting chaired by Bruce J. Novak, Foundation for Ethics and Meaning
· Key Dialectical Frameworks in Maxine Greene's Work, William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago
· Maxine Greene's Impact on the Reconceiving of the Role of the Arts in Education, Arnold Aprill, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
· Examples of Maxine Greene's Concepts in Action in Local, National, and International Initiatives, William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago
Arnold Aprill, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
· Just Teaching in Unjust Settings: Animation and Spoken Word, Elgin Bokari-Smith, Columbia College Chicago, Roger Bonair-Agard, Fordham University
· Maxine Greene's Dialectical Relationship to the Work of Paulo Freire, Kurt Wooton, Brown University
· Maxine Greene's Concept of "Being Alive Among Others," Kuumba Lynx
· Reconceiving the "Color of Justice" in African American Communities, Amanda Williams, Freelance
Fri, April 17, 12:25 to 1:55pm
Mindfulness, Wellness, and Transformation: Holistic Practices in Higher Education
Location: Swissotel, Event Centre Second Level, St. Gallen 3
Session Type: Paper Session chaired by Michelle L. Tichy, University of Northern Iowa
· Eros, Aesthetics, and Holistic Education: Intersections of Life and Learning, Boyd Eric White, McGill University
· Teaching Naked: Encounters With "Taboo" Dimensions of Holistic Practices in Teacher Education, William L. Greene, Southern Oregon University, Younghee M. Kim, Southern Oregon University
· Transformative Approaches to Teacher Education: Becoming a Holistic Educator in an "Unholistic" Setting, Robert H. London, California State University - San Bernardino
· Mindfulness Awareness Practice in Preservice Education, Shelley Murphy, OISE/University of Toronto
· Moving Beyond Content Toward Skill Set: Contemplative Practices in Graduate Education, Maryann Krikorian, Loyola Marymount University
Fri, April 17, 4:05-5:35pm
Caring for Mind, Body, and Heart: Holistic Practices in the Classroom
Location: Swissotel, Event Centre First Level, Zurich E
Session Type: Paper Session chaired by Karen Ragoonaden, The University of British Columbia with discussant William L. Greene, Southern Oregon University
· Reclaiming a Young Child's Voice: Building Holistic Relationships and Celebrating Community for Children With Autism Using Classroom Rituals, Kathleen I. Harris, Seton Hill University
· Self-Movement in Emotion in Pedagogy, Pierre Boudreau, University of Ottawa
· Tea Corners and Places for Play: Movement and Classroom Structures That Support Student Learning and Happiness, uli B. Kramer, DAT High School
· Care, Connectedness, and Motivation: Key Components of Positive Student Outcomes, Tess Garceau, University of Northern Iowa, Michelle L. Tichy, University of Northern Iowa, Nicole Skaar, University of Northern Iowa
· Teaching From the Thinking Heart: The Practice of Holistic Education, John Miller, University of Toronto, Michele Irwin, University of Toronto, Kelli Lynn Nigh, University of Toronto - OISE
· Opportunity for Equity? Deploying Waldorf Methods to Master the Common Core, Ida Oberman, Community School for Creative Education, Mary Barr Goral, Bellarmine University
WHEN: Prior to the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Chicago
11:30 AM to 5 PM Wednesday, April 15th and 9 AM to 12 PM Thursday, April 16th
WHERE: Wed - National Louis University, in the Atrium, 122 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL Thursday – National Louis, Classrooms TBD
COST: Free! (Donations to NLU are strongly encouraged, though)
For more information and to register, contact [email protected]
Theoretical Framework Play is fun, but also very serious. In his Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2009), Stuart Brown documents the neurological and ethological research showing how play is the central complex of behaviors evolutionarily developed to facilitate learning and social bonding among mammals. Social imagination is facilitated through members’ innovative, sportive, artful participation within loosely rule-governed frameworks lying comfortably between the extremes of total anarchy and total standardization.
Several of the contributions to the recent collection Education and Hope in Troubled Times (Shapiro, ed. 2009) relate how effectually transformative social imagination is sparked by the cultivation of free play: including Miller’s “Education After the Empire,” Eisler’s “Education for a Partnership World,” Sapon-Shevin’s “To Touch and Be Touched,” Shapiro’s “Worlds of Change,” Roskelly’s “Teaching Like Weasels,” Keating’s “Transforming Status Quo Stories,” and Westheimer’s “No Child Left Thinking.” These authors echo arguments made long ago by the poet Schiller in the classic Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind, written during the original Age of Terror: “it is only through engagement in free play that we arrive at genuinely free politics.”
Rationale If the cultivation of imaginative play is central to the cultivation of social imagination, the skills of play need to be deliberately and publicly cultivated. Members of the Holistic Education SIG often lament our inability to embody the depth of our teaching practices at AERA, or to form among ourselves the kinds of rich community we regularly form with our students. AERA has represented, for many of us, a place where deeply kindred spirits can come—because of the heavily presentational format and limited time frame of the sessions—into only superficial connection.
We therefore are hosting a Playshop over a day and a half before AERA, enabling our members—as well as those of other like-minded groups—to connect more fully with one another through participating in the kinds of activities that for the most part can only be reported on during the actual conference. The Playshop is an exceptional opportunity for: inspiring practicing researchers and educators in the field; mentoring graduate students and junior researchers in the essential skill of living our theories and practices, of “being the change we want to see in the world” as Gandhi famously put it; introducing those from diverse fields to our research methods through the embodied experience of those methods; and, not least, for refreshing body/mind/ spirit stimulation to energize us through the course of the long, heady conference to follow. In short, this is a holistic program of holistic activities for holistic professionals to acquire the skills of holistically, vitally inhabiting and enriching the social world, through our engaging in holistic action research with one another.
Goals The time is structured to facilitate the acquisition of a series of holistic skills on the following themes: embodiment, presence, altruism, the outing and acknowledgement of oppression, and the distilling of wisdom in teachers’ lives. Participants will throughout engage in and reflect on the effectiveness of holistic qualitative action research methodologies: including narrative inquiry, drama inquiry, arts-based research, psychological self-study, and philosophical methods anchored in the quest for personal and collective wisdom.
Most important, ample time is allowed for free dialogue, as well as more structured community building activities incorporated into the instructional activities. Our most important goal is the building of life-sustaining and life-renewing social imagination among ourselves, in the form of a community of educators/researchers helping to form a Special Interest Group who take the word “interest” seriously, as “Inter-Being”: the sense Dewey gave to the word in his first important educational essay, “Interest and the Training of the Will” (1895), echoed in our own times by Buddhist activist Thick Naht Hahn in the book Inter-Being (1987). This session, we believe, presents a particularly apt form of professional development.