unSchooling Oppression Conference – Day5
Friday, November 9, 2007
All conference activities are FREE!
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7:30pm (doors at 7pm)
Keynote: Tara Guenette & Julie Lalonde, of the Miss G_ Project’s Ottawa/Carleton chapter
Location: University of Ottawa campus, MacDonald Hall Auditorium, 150 Louis-Pasteur St, room 146
Topic: 12 Million Voices: Intersectionality in Education
Our goal is to reclaim the diversity of voices in Ontario secondary schools. We will examine the current reality in Ontario schools, look at possible solutions (there is hope!) and discuss the role of the Miss G__ Project in bringing equity to the current education system.
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Tara Guenette, Chair of the Miss G__ Project for Equity in Education’s Ottawa/Carleton Chapter, is currently completing her B.A. Honours in Law with a minor in Women’s Studies at Carleton University. She is Metis, and hails from a small town in Northwestern Ontario. Tara’s interests in her field of study include gender differences within the law, with a particular interest in gendered and racialized discrimination within the law and society in general. Passionate about feminism, government and politics, as well as her family and friends, Tara plans on furthering her studies by doing graduate work at the Masters level.
Julie Lalonde is co-chair of the Miss G__ Project’s Ottawa Chapter. With a B.A. Honours in Women’s Studies and Canadian Studies, she is currently a master’s candidate in Canadian Women’s Studies at Carleton University. Julie is also a collective member of Ottawa’s Sexual Assault Support Centre and a mentor with Big Brother Big Sister Ottawa. She is personally interested in promoting accessible feminism and is passionate about academia as a tool for social change.
The Miss G__ Project works to promote equity in education, to combat sexism and homophobia through education, and to encourage active citizenship. The Project’s current mission is to get a Women’s and Gender Studies course into the Ontario Secondary School curriculum. Equity in education is a policy commitment of the curriculum, but without recognizing gender and its implications, the curriculum fails to meet this commitment. We spend our years of mandatory formal education without ever encountering a critical study of gender and sexuality. In high school, we never encountered a fair and appropriate introduction to the very real contributions and histories of women and feminisms.
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Love to learn, but hate school?
Think there must be something better than this?
Want to arm yourself against the weapons of mass instruction?
unSchooling Oppression at the University of Ottawa
Conference, November 5-10, 2007
Registration Cost: FREE, but donations are encouraged to cover speakers’ travel and accommodation costs
See the full schedule and speaker bios at: http://unschoolingoppression.wordpress.com/
This is not your average conference! unSchooling Oppression is an original, student-led initiative designed not only for academic professionals, but for students, teachers, professors, activists, and community members alike. It is both a critical examination of the various forms of oppression within traditional schooling models and a hopeful exploration of liberating educational alternatives.
Five evening keynote presentations will feature speakers on a broad range of topics, each concluding with a period for questions and discussion. Various aspects of their talks will touch on the historical roots and purposes of traditional schooling; power, authority and oppression; institutional violence; curricular racism, sexism and homophobia; freedom and deschooling; alternative models for learning; and much more. Confirmed speakers include: David Noble, John Taylor Gatto, Cindy Milstein, Tara Guenette & Julie Lalonde, and Matt Hern. These presentations will allow attendees from the university and the broader community to critically examine current teaching practices and envision alternative education models that are student-centered and promote independent thinking, self-motivation, equity, and solidarity, both inside and outside the school. The speakers will be traveling to Ottawa from around Canada and the USA. See our website for full schedule and speaker bios.
The conference will also include a series of daytime workshops organized by members of the community as well as guests from the United States on issues that they consider relevant to the themes of education as oppression, and education as liberation. Themes will include the deschooling movement, self-motivated learning, militarization and education, and more.
The most exciting part of the conference will be the concluding caucus, wherein conference attendees will have the opportunity to brainstorm together a way forward in applying some of the ideas presented during the conference. Our goal, as conference organizers, is for this event to catalyze a new movement of projects and campaigns here in Ottawa to directly address the issues presented.
We hope you can be a part of this movement!