Saturday, November 10, 2007 – 2 events
All conference activities are FREE!
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4:30pm (doors at 4pm)
Keynote: Matt Hern, co-founder of Vancouver’s Purple Thistle Centre and editor of Deschooling Our Lives
Location: University of Ottawa campus, Colonel By Building, 161 Louis-Pasteur St, room C03
Topic: Possibility in the Face of Probability

Our institutions, especially those we build for children, both reflect and construct society. If we want a more democratic, respectful and equal world, then we need to create relationships and institutions that reflect that. We cannot just be telling, or teaching children how to behave, or what good citizenship looks like, they need to be living it right from the start. They need to be experiencing and learning how to create democracy, respect and egalitarian relationships.

Community is the most important arena for political and cultural life: it is in the experience of place, of neighbourhood and local community that genuine, participatory democracy can flourish. Thus we need to be creating semi-permeable institutions, integrated into community and family life, not isolated. Women, children and families need to be involved in every level of community life, not warehoused away from active life.

We need to be moving towards diversity, not away from it. A good community can accept and integrate a pluralism of values: that is a diversity of viewpoints and values, and not just about minor things, but fundamental things. Thus in every community there should be a variety of institutions for kids reflecting a diversity of viewpoints, needs and learning styles. Educators, families and kids need to come together to create democratically controlled sites reflecting the wide variety of children.

We cannot reduce learning, however, to the practice of teaching. Learning cannot just be about filling kids up with canonical knowledge: we need to be constantly asking what it will take for these kids to thrive. Not the abstract kids of theory, but the actual kids right in front of us.

There is no method, no guru, no system that we can turn to for the answers. No one knows how kids grow up best: there are many models and examples we can use for inspiration, but we have to be creating and recreating our own pedagogies of liberation. As Paulo Freire said: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world and with each other.” Families and children need every opportunity to pursue that constructive inquiry within community life.

This suggests a pedagogy that is not child centred, but community centred, one that seeks to liberate the family and community, not just the child. The practice of freedom has to be about social freedom, that is a freedom towards something, not simply an individualist freedom from something. Pedagogical and political freedoms are closely linked: they are the practice of self determination.
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Dynamic and captivating speaker Matt Hern holds a Ph.D in Urban Studies, and writes and lectures throughout North America on the topics of both Urban Studies and Education. He co-founded and currently operates the Purple Thistle Centre, a youth-oriented, collectively-run drop-in, arts, and activism space in East Vancouver, which also refers to itself as a “deschool.”

Notable written works:

· Deschooling Our Lives (editor; 1996)
· Field Day: Getting Society Out of School (2003)
· Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn’t Always Better (2007)

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7pm
Event: Informal Dinner & Caucus
Location: University of Ottawa campus, Colonel By Building, 161 Louis-Pasteur St, room C03
Cost: donations welcome

Topic: All interested participants will come together to discuss how we can take action to effectively “unschool oppression”

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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!

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