(posted Friday, Sept 14, 2007)
Dr. Gloria J. Ladson-Billings will kick off the 2007-08 Miller Education Seminar Series at the Indiana University School of Education on Thursday, September 20 at 5:00 pm in the Wright Education Building Auditorium (room 1120). Her speech regards moving past intensely focusing on the achievement gap between African-American, Latino, and other students of color and white students. Ladson-Billings says such discussion “keeps us locked in the deficit paradigm.”
Ladson-Billings is a faculty member in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education in the department of curriculum and instruction. Her book The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children outlines some of the problems of educational incongruity in teaching African-American children. As the past president of the American Education Research Association, she delivered a presidential address in 2005 titled “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools.” In that speech, she said the combination of historical, moral, socio-political, and economic factors have created an “education debt” disproportionately affecting African-American, Latino, Asian, and other non-white students.
The Miller Seminar is free and open to the public. A reception with Ladson-Billings will precede her speech.
The Drs. Beatrice S. and David I. Miller Education Seminar Series was established in 1992 to offer a new opportunity to faculty and students, irrespective of educational specialization, to gather together to reflect upon important ideas shaping our understandings of teaching, learning, and research in education. The Miller Series invites the best minds to come to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University to share their thinking in the history, pedagogy, philosophy, political economy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and technology of education. The Series makes it possible for faculty and students to make connections between and across specializations on issues and ideas of educational significance, thereby enhancing the development of a genuine, intellectually engaged community of scholars within the School.