18th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Hosts Forum on 10 Year Retrospective of Educational Controversies April 21 at WWU

The 18th Annual Educational Law and Social Justice Forum will host authors who have contributed to the Journal of Educational Controversy and share their current thinking and research about some of the most pressing educational challenges at 4-6 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, in Miller Hall Room 005 at the WWU campus. 

The event is sponsored by Western’s Center for Education, Equity and Diversity, and is free and open to the public.

The forum will also celebrate the Journal’s 10th anniversary, as well as hosting a retrospective look at the topics covered over the past 10 years of the journal.

Following the presentations, the audience will have opportunities to interact with the authors and share educational controversies that they would like to see as topics for future issues of the journal.  The audience is invited to think about the links between the past and the present pursuit of social justice in both the K-12 system as well as in higher education.  How can we articulate these issues in a way that brings greater depth to our understanding of the conflict of values and the complexity of ideas that characterize our pluralistic society, which opens up new ways of imagining a more just, inclusive, and democratic educational environment for the future.

Topics and presenters for this year’s forum include:

  • Maria Timmons Flores, WWU: The experiences and challenges facing children and their families who are undocumented against a legal context, current political realities, critical race theory and practical recommendations.
  • Daniel Larner, WWU: Co-edited the issue on the school-to-prison pipeline. His papers covered conflicts over censorship, and the education of politicians as playwrights who can work with and through difference to construct civil laws and protections.
  • Bill Lyne, WWU: Teaching a public capable of sustaining the life of a democracy at a time of anti-terrorism legislation that violates civil liberties: a problematizing of the question against a nation’s historical realities. Lyne is the co-editor of our upcoming issue on “Black Lives Matter and the Education Industrial Complex.”

By Video:

  • Alice Ginsberg, University of Pennsylvania: “No Excuses Charter Schools” and a critique of the film “Waiting for Superman”
  • John Covaleskie, University of Oklahoma: Religion and Public Schools
  • Leslie Locke, University of Iowa and Ann Blankenship, University of Southern Mississippi: The Banning of the Mexican American curriculum in Tucson, Arizona.

For more information, contact Lynda Spaulding, program assistant at Western Washington University’s Center for Education, Equity and Diversity, at (360) 650-3827 or Lynda.spaulding@wwu.edu.