Congratulations to our own Terry Adams, her daughter Ele, and Matthew Criscione’s fifth-grade class at Hoover Elementary in Corvallis. They have started the World Peace Game with a great write-up in the Corvallis Gazette-Times: World peace, courtesy of Hoover Elementary fifth-graders.
If you want more background information, check out John Hunter’s TED Talk.
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.”
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.”
Each year Oregon State University provides opportunities for our community to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by participating in impactful, inclusive, and engaging celebration. This year the Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Office of the President are working with units across campus to offer more than 20 events from January 12th to 23rd.
For the full calendar of events, click here.
As part of this celebration, our SEJ group is organizing and hosting a ‘brown bag’ discussion:
Wednesday, January 14
12-1 PM
303 Furman Hall
“Is This Kansas?” is an essay from Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss. It focuses on the author’s time teaching at the University of Iowa. We invite you to participate in a discussion of the essay’s themes: pardoning students for behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other subculture; university hierarchies of influence/power; White students’ failure to see racism or sexism in their community; media coverage of racially-charged events.
Copies of the book are available for loan in 104 Furman Hall. You may request a copy of just this essay by emailing stacey.lee@oregonstate.edu.
→ We also highly encourage you to participate in the MLK Jr. Day of Service on Saturday, January 17. Many of the service opportunities organized through OSU’s Center for Civic Engagement are family friendly.