13th Annual Multicultural Education Conference at Sac State

On Saturday, I went up to Sac State to present at their annual Multi cultural conference. Sonia Nieto was the keynote speaker -- I missed her talk but arrived in time to attend Duane Campbell's . Duane did a clever thing by starting with a video of Irish immigration in the 1840s to point out that immigration is nothing new to this country, nor are the reasons (eg famine, political oppression) new. He sequed from Irish immigration to talking about how the Latino immigration issue will increasingly be in the news in the coming months



-- hence the need for teachers to teach about Cesar Chavez on March 31,session on teaching Cesar Chavez and the UFW movement.

and then proceeded to give a good grounding in how to teach about it and provided teaching resources (eg one of the issues of the Rethinking Schools magazine.


During the second session, I gave my spiel on how the 1964 Mississippi Freedom School Curriculum was an important topic for those interested in critical pedagogy since it is a study of how theory and practice interact. Only five people showed up for the session, three of them involved in Waldorf schools and focusing on arts education -- which is highly relevant to any curriculum that wants to encourage students to be agents of social change. As Myles Horton argues, movements escalate by their nature and one has to be creative and flexible to respond to those moments when it is time to escalate.

The third session, I watched a video made by Francisco Reveles of CSUS. He does a lot of anti-gang work. . His video was very good at getting students to begin to understand how to focus on getting beyond "survival to success." This is one piece of the puzzle we need to get into place (along with working for systemic change).

I felt good to be among a lot of teacher credential students (the majority of those who were attending the conference) who were interested in being political with their teaching. Kudos to those who put on the conference!!!