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April's lead story reports on a series of professional development sessions for Oakland teachers, led by UC Berkeley professors and other academics. The lecture/discussion presentations took place on the first two Saturdays in March, and were enthusiastically praised in teacher evaluations. Online resources, an integral part of each session, remain accessible at the website created for the sessions; OUSD plans to make video of the lectures available soon online. A full report on all four presentations is in the IU News. Other stories in this month's news expand on the theme of resources for teachers. There are new resources at FREE, the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence site. In addition, an exhibition of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens is showing at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, and is supplemented by a valuable website with links to teacher resources created for the Rubens' exhibition. Visit the IU Main page where the lead story begins, and check out the rest of this month's news. Stories featured in this issue are:
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UC Berkeley Speakers Talk Books With Oakland Teachers
On the first two Saturdays in March, Oakland High School English and History teachers attended presentations organized by Oakland's Urban Dreams Project and UC Berkeley's Interactive University. Four separate lecture/discussion sessions gave participating teachers an opportunity to learn in-depth about one of the required texts in this year's Language Arts curriculum for grades 9 through 12.
The half-day sessions — developed as part of Oakland's year six extension of Urban Dreams professional development work — were held at the Technology Learning Center in OUSD's Harper Building, where participants gathered for introductions and refreshments prior to the scheduled events.
On March 5, the designated texts were Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers (grade 9), and Night, by Elie Wiesel (grade 10); the following Saturday, March 12, featured the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (grade 11), the first of three autobiographies Douglass wrote, and Shakespeare's Macbeth (grade 12).
Each program began with a prepared talk about the book, followed by a round-table discussion. The talks were delivered by UC Berkeley professors and other academics recruited by the IU. A short break followed the talk and discussion, each group then re-convened to explore and discuss online resources at a new website created for the sessions. This part of the program was led and facilitated by an OUSD staff member, who guided teachers through both paper and online resources that supplemented the lecture and discussion.
All four presentation and discussion sessions were video-taped by OUSD's KDOL staff, and each will be edited and available in the future. The website material will also be permanently archived by OUSD. Currently, the website is hosted by the IU; it was created by the IU in collaboration with OUSD curriculum staff, the lecturers, and teachers who participated in the Saturday sessions.
During each of the four Saturday sessions, time was provided for teachers to work online individually, or ad hoc in discussion and conversation. During this part of the program, all participants reviewed and discussed salient points and strategies mentioned or evolved from earlier in the program.
The day's events were designed to provide participating teachers with the opportunity to reflect on ideas and gather resources, to begin creating or outlining ways to incorporate the day's experience into classroom plans, and to have a place to share perceived challenges or obstacles identified as emerging from a book's themes or ideas.
Many teachers remarked that having a time for resource exploration, reflection, and face-to-face discussion with other teachers was especially valuable — particularly in conjunction with lectures that were uniformly characterized as enlightening and stimulating.
Since each of the four lecturers provided or suggested supplementary resource materials (most of these may be found at the website) a fruitful, creative interplay developed between the lecture, the resources, the discussion, and the ideas engendered and supported by this combination.
The teachers felt rewarded by an event where learning and knowledge were encouraged and supported. Some teachers noted that the atmosphere of cross-fertilization and collaboration was energizing and exciting.
The initial session, on the morning of March 5, was a lecture on Elie Wiesel's Night by UC Berkeley doctoral candidate Christine Hong. Ms. Hong has written about experiences of trauma and issues of human rights as represented in literature written during the second half of the 20th Century. In talking about Night, she incorporated contemporary theories about trauma-induced stress, referring to how traumatic events affect memory and the ability to recall and depict human experience. While focusing on Night, she made the case that Wiesel's book was an early example of literature that gives testimony to some of the brutal, deadly events which have characterized tyrannical modern political states. Ms. Hong presented the teachers with tools for critical insight and approaches to literary accounts of cultural and political destruction, depravity and devastation.
Elizabeth Lay was the March 5 afternoon presenter for the novel Fallen Angels. Ms. Lay is a former English teacher and chair of the department at Oakland Tech; she is currently an educational consultant for the district's New Teacher Support and Development program. Fallen Angels tells the story of young Americans fighting in Vietnam. Lay, who has been at work for several years preparing an archive of Vietnam-era material for the Oakland Museum of California, brought the wealth and knowledge of this research to Walter Dean Myers' text, as well as a generous and abundant packet of contextual material she had produced — this packet is available in PDF form online at the Fallen Angels web page.
The second Saturday began with an extremely well received talk by Berkeley Professor of English Janet Adelman. Professor Adelman is the recipient of a UCB Distinguished Teaching Award; her career work has focused on the English Renaissance, as well as Gender and Sexuality Studies; on March 12 she spoke about the roles and expectations of warriors and women in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Interleaving contemporary psychoanalytic understanding with her reading of select passages from the play, she placed into a single frame the contemporary and the Elizabethan, bringing to light numerous similarities in the accepted — at times even the required — behaviors of men and women then and now.
The final presenter was Berkeley Professor of English Abdul JanMohamed. Professor
JanMohamed has written about the literature of colonial and post-colonial cultures,
and explored the "cultural resistance of the colonized." He delivered a discerning
and provocative account of Frederick Douglass' Autobiography, describing scenes
in the book that are significant for Douglass' struggle to assert his autonomy
and gain his freedom. In particular, JanMohamed discussed the ways that a culturally
sanctioned, ever-present threat of death shapes an individual character. Reading
from a poem by Richard Wright and a short piece by Steve Biko, (both
online at the website) JanMohamed expanded beyond the life of Frederick
Douglass to explore how other writers have responded to coercion and the threat
of death while living, and writing, in dangerous situations.
For more information about these presentations, the resources gathered and made available, the presenters, or OUSD's Urban Dreams Project, please visit the website.
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Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
FREE, The Federal Resources for Educational Excellence site, posts new sets of learning materials each month. The FREE web site has been developed by a working group of more than 30 Federal agencies. Formed in 1997, the goal of the group has been to make Federally supported teaching and learning resources easier to find.
The FREE site map contains scores of subjects and hundreds of different sets of materials and resources. Topics include: the arts, educational technology, literature, mathematics, and the physical and social sciences. In addition to resources for teachers, there are separate listings of resources for students.
The site is easy to navigate and understand. Resources are abundant and varied. Following a thread from the OUSD presentations cited above, a quick query using the FREE search engine found 125 entries that refer to Macbeth, and 14 that mention "Lady Macbeth"; a subsequent search found 500 mentions of Frederick Douglass. While these examples do not attest to the value or applicability of any single entry, they give a sense of the scope and breadth of resources that have been gathered.
A closer look at a few new resources posted at FREE reveals the following:
- The National Science Digital Library site, funded by the National Science Foundation, invites students to try its "ask an expert" service, where answers to questions about math, science, technology, and engineering are provided. In addition, the NSDL site features a Middle School Math, Science, and Technology Portal for teachers, it includes hands-on experiences with measurement, how energy moves and changes, and the basics of aerodynamics.
- Brown v. Board: Five Communities That Changed America. This site, part of the National Park Service "Teaching with Historic Places" project, describes five cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear in 1952 under one title: Brown v. Board of Education. The cases originated in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Each contested the "separate but equal" doctrine of the Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which by the 1950s had resulted in 17 states requiring racial segregation in public schools and 4 states allowing it.
- At the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History site, the online exhibition Lakota Winter Counts offers the world's largest database of Lakota pictures drawn on cloth or buffalo hide to remember each year's key events — the "winter counts" — from 1701 to 1905. Ten Lakota bands' winter counts are shown side by side on a timeline. Compare how the bands depicted a particular year. Search for an image. Watch interviews with Lakota. Learn about the culture of this Sioux tribe of the northern plains that followed buffalo herds for food. A teachers guide is included.
- An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre focuses on paintings, posters, and other work by Lautrec, depicting the bohemian life of Montmartre, the working-class district on the outskirts of Paris where the artist lived for most of his career. This exhibition has links to additional teaching resources and school programs available as part of the National Gallery of Art's education program.
These four examples are part of more than two-dozen recent postings at the FREE site. Check it out for these additional topics: Animal Diversity Web, Cosmology 101, and The Most Dangerous Woman in America.
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Berkeley Art Museum: Peter Paul Rubens
Drawn by the Brush is the first U.S. exhibition to collect a comprehensive sample of Peter Paul Rubens' oil sketches. It contains dozens of quickly executed paintings by Rubens, small studies done as preparation for larger public and private work. There are religious and mythological scenes, oil sketches that pre-figure altarpieces, ceilings, tapestries, or engravings. In some cases, these small paintings are all that remain of larger pieces that have not survived.
Rubens was productive and active amid the Counter-Reformation fervor of early 17th Century Antwerp. Following destructive struggles between the Roman Church and Protestant reformers, Antwerp was emerging from the conflict as a Roman Catholic center, and a period of building and reconstruction provided numerous commissions and opportunities for Rubens.
In addition to his success as a painter, Rubens was an accomplished diplomat, an entrepreneur, and friend to powerful patrons throughout Europe. In the words of the curators at the website: "This exhibition, accompanying catalog, and website create a multilayered and interdisciplinary educational approach to the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens in the context of seventeenth-century Europe."
A valuable supplement to the paintings themselves (on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum until May 15, 2005), the website features an online exhibition of Ruben's work and a broad variety of teacher resources. The resources include five separate curricular topics created specifically for Social Studies, Language Arts, and Visual Arts — targeted for grade level (e.g. 6-12, 9-12, 6-8, etc.) and aligned with National Standards in Visual Arts, Social Studies and Language Arts, they can easily be printed and reproduced. Teacher resources are in PDF format, and include concepts, objectives, and lesson activities. They provide suggestions for understanding Rubens' art and the social, historic and religious issues that shaped the era in Northern Europe.
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UC Berkeley "Diversity in Action" Forum
On March 10, a daylong campuswide "Diversity in Action" forum met to discuss and listen to ideas and strategies that might advance the campus toward the goals of the California Diversity Project, an umbrella initiative that evolved out of 2003's comprehensive Strategic Academic Plan.
The forum's keynote speaker was Boalt Hall Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., who outlined ways to create a Berkeley version of the Harvard Civil Rights Project (which he co-founded in 1996). A Berkeley Civil Rights Project would be part of a larger, university-wide effort to address diversity problems.
Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau delivered the day's closing remarks. He presented himself as the campus' CEO: Chief Equity Officer. Birgeneau admitted that he was "shocked" by the lack of ties across "cultural lines" he found on arriving at Berkeley. He vowed to work through "any meals legal" to improve the situation.
Read the complete Berkeleyan article about the "Diversity in Action" forum here.
Just over two weeks after the daylong campus forum, Chancellor Birgeneau was in the news again, speaking out on the consequences of Proposition 209 for University of California diversity. In an editorial that appeared in the March 27 Los Angeles Times, (reprinted here at the UCB Newscenter) Birgeneau says that in the wake of Prop 209 "minority representation has dropped appallingly" at Berkeley. He states "it is a tragedy for California when there are only dozens of African American men in a freshman class of 3600."
The editorial issues a call to action, and Birgeneau announces he is initiating a "broad-based diversity research agenda at Berkeley." The goal is "to find innovative ways to make this campus the inclusive and welcoming environment to which it aspires."
Birgeneau concludes his remarks by aligning himself with previous UCB Chancellors: "I feel a moral obligation to address the issue of inclusion head-on. Ultimately it is a fight for the soul of this institution. Inclusion is about leadership and excellence, principles that California and its leading public university have long represented and might again."
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Harvard Report Critical of California Schools
By Nanette Asimov in the March 24 San Francisco Chronicle
In a searing indictment of California's school system, Harvard University researchers say the state graduates only 71 percent of its high school students -- not the 87 percent it claims.
Moreover, the researchers assert, the state is harming students and the public in general by failing to keep students in school and accurately report the numbers.
The Harvard study found that some California schools are simply "dropout factories" and that dropout estimates for nonwhite students are worst of all: Just 50.2 percent of black ninth-grade boys received a diploma four years later.
California's own calculations do not show ethnic or gender breakdowns.
The researchers from Harvard's Civil Rights Project said the state's method of determining its graduation rate is based on a "flawed National Center for Education Statistics formula" that uses unreliable dropout data in the calculation.
Read the complete story by Nanette Asimov at SFGate.com.
Nanette Asimov writes again about results from the Harvard University Civil Rights Project — this time with a focus on the poor graduation rates for Oakland High Schools. Read the article here, at SFGate.com for April 5.
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Chancellor Robert Birgeneau Inauguration April 15
By Karen Holtermann, Public Affairs | 17 March 2005
Three days of academic events and celebrations will surround the April 15 ceremony inaugurating Robert J. Birgeneau as UC Berkeley's ninth chancellor and celebrating the 137th anniversary of the founding of the University of California. Information on all inauguration events is online at inauguration.berkeley.edu.
The campus community is invited to a range of inaugural festivities from Thursday through Saturday, April 14 to 16 — from a student barbecue to a faculty-staff reception, and from symposia on some of today's most debated topics to the formal inauguration ceremony itself.
The celebration for Birgeneau, who took office last September, is timed to coincide with the commemoration of Charter Day, marking the university's establishment in 1868, and with the annual Cal Day, this year set for Saturday, April 16, with some 35,000 visitors expected for the campus open house.
Read the complete story by Karen Holterman.
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Cal Day is April 16
By Noel Gallagher, Media Relations | 14 March 2005
BERKELEY – The University of California, Berkeley, invites you to Cal Day on Saturday, April 16, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.. This annual open house is for the general public, including prospective students and their families.
Amidst a fair-like atmosphere, there is something for everyone: campus tours, music and food, sporting events, special free museum tours and information on the latest in campus research. Children - and kids at heart - will particularly love the three-story Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, the CALnival game area, and hands-on displays in physics, archaeology, engineering, and other departments. Almost everything is free.
Read the complete press release by Noel Gallagher.
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Upcoming Events
Information is now available for the Summer 2005 Bay Area Writing Project's Young Writers' Camps, held this year from June 27-July 15. This summer program offers a unique opportunity for students entering grades 4 to 8 to develop their writing talents. Under the guidance of experienced UC Berkeley/Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) Teacher Consultants, students will have a chance to grow as writers. In an atmosphere that is optimal for young writers, students will become better writers in the process of practicing their craft.
The Bay Area Writing Project's Young Writers' Camp offers students the time and opportunity to explore their writing interests, discover their strengths and learn more about the craft of writing. The camps provide in-depth writing instruction, structured writing workshop time, flexibility in writing assignments, and daily opportunities to share writing with peers. Through the camps, students discover the conditions and habits needed to do their best writing and grow in their confidence and skill. For more information visit this page at the BAWP site.
A registration form (in PDF format) is now available for BAWP's Summer Courses for Teachers. The first courses begin on June 20, and offerings continue into August. At the same link, you may access preliminary information with more details about BAWP's Summer 2005 teachers' programs.
BAWP's Saturday Seminar Series for this year will conclude on May 7.. Check this BAWP page for details of the year's final event. Visit this site to be added to the BAWP email distribution list for program information.
Visit the BAWP site for details about upcoming programs. You will also find a link at the site to the Bay Area Science Project (BASP) which shares dates and locations with BAWP for Saturday Seminars. The BASP site has a list of offerings for the March and May dates.
Registration is now open for the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) Summer 2005 Institute for Teachers — PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Studying Cultural Interaction, Exchange And Migration Through First Person Accounts. As stated at the site: the theme for the 2005 ORIAS Summer Institute will be teaching and learning about world history, cultural interaction, exchange and migration through personal narratives.
The study of interaction among cultures and populations provides a fabric for holding the sequence of area studies in world history together and offers coherent threads for planning the overall curriculum. Illustrating the opportunities, events and systems that drive this interaction through eyewitness accounts engages students in the sense of historical empathy and promotes academic literacy by framing questions of research, evidence and point of view. Primary sources such as letters, diaries, interviews, autobiographies, and travelogues have long provided unique insights and perspectives on world history. Most recently, weblogs have added further raw material for analyzing current events as they are experienced and debated across borders.
The Summer Institute runs from July 25 - 29, 2005. Find out more here.
EarthTeam, is an environmental network for teens, teachers and youth leaders. The EarthTeam Restoration Initiative (ETRI) creates restoration projects for SF Bay Area teens throughout the year at different sites around the Bay area. The next event is April 6, in Orinda.
Ongoing ETRI restoration events offer students a chance to do hands-on environmental work locally, support teachers who want to promote environmental learning and stewardship, and help local habitat restoration efforts of government, nonprofit, and private organizations. For more information about EarthTeam check out their website.
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