Derrick Jensen and Campus Happenings

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At our last SEJ meeting, we watched an interview with Derrick Jensen from the Earth at Risk 2014 Conference in San Francisco. The entire 37 minute video is worthwhile and thought provoking. Jensen is speaking in a very casual, unscripted way for this interview, and yet he is not subtle with his opinions. He speaks specifically about schools and educators starting at 15:30.

Currently, several events of interest are happening on campus, including the following:

What does a socially just university look like?

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Wednesday, February 25, 2015 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Memorial Union 213: Pan-Afrikan Sankofa Room

From OSU Today: “Join a coalition of faculty, staff, and student organizations for a community dialogue about the learning and working conditions at OSU and the ways in which we can all work together to ensure that OSU embodies the values of social justice.  More details here or email joseph.orosco@oregonstate.edu.”Sponsored by: OSU-American Association of University Professors, Allied Students for Another Politics!, Coalition of Graduate Employees, Service Employees International Union, MEChA, Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Intercultural Student Services/Student Leadership Involvement.

I first learned about this event through Joseph Orosco and Tony Vogt. If you haven’t yet seen their new blog for Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, it’s worth a look. As the site’s introduction states, “Inspired by the speculative fiction of Oregon writer Ursula K. LeGuin, the Anarres Project is a forum for conversations, ideas, and initiatives that promote a future free of domination, exploitation, oppression, war, and empire.”

Mark Your Calendars

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EVENT 1: Elizabeth Kolbert will be at Oregon State University in Corvallis on Monday, February 2nd. Kolbert is an award-winning staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. She’ll give a talk about her best-selling book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, at 7 PM in Austin Auditorim at LaSells Stewart Center. The event is sponsored by OSU’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, and is free and open to the public.

EVENT 2: The 3rd annual Healthy Masculinities Conference will be Saturday, February 14th at the OSU Memorial Union. The theme is Connecting the Dots: Awareness, Action, Commitment. Registration is open until February 9 and free for all attendees. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Shaun R. Harper, whose research “…examines race and gender in education, equity trends and racial climates on college campuses, Black and Latino male student success in high school and higher education, and college student engagement.”

 

Smarter Balanced & Ravitch on the Common Core

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Ken Winograd suggested sharing a Washington Post article from last winter: Everything You Need to Know about the Common Core from Diane Ravitch. As Oregon embarks on Smarter Balanced assessments for all students this winter and spring, this article seems especially timely. Here’s a teaser quote from Ravitch: “My fears were confirmed by the Common Core tests. Wherever they have been implemented, they have caused a dramatic collapse of test scores. In state after state, the passing rates dropped by about 30%. This was not happenstance. This was failure by design. Let me explain.”