Re-imagining
Higher Education
On January 8-12, 2009, UWC-USA's Bartos Institute and the Grassroots Leadership Center for Theory and Practice will be hosting a retreat for progressive educators.
Join the other educators and activists coming to this invitational gathering to think together about the US tradition of progressive education as it stands today -- its strengths, issues, problems; its potential to be renewed as a movement; and what, most of all, this country may still need to learn and make use of from its traditions, theories, practices, successes, failures, continuing possibilities.
This will be a small gathering of carefully selected people who bring a wide range of perspectives and of experience to the discussion and to any planning of further action that may take place. There is a great deal of discussion now about "democracy and education,"
about "engaged" and "civic" education. Progressive educators with real knowledge and highly contemporary experience have barely played a role in most of those discussions, and are still less evident among governmental decision-makers such as the spokespeople gathered by Secretary Margaret Spellings for her Commission on Higher Education.
Those interested in the promise of progressive education should, then, come together to prepare to communicate alternative visions of education, other programs and projects, hopes and possibilities. The future asks us to work on providing the richest possible discussions about and planning for higher education for our dramatically reconfiguring world.
Please direct any questions about the retreat and/or logistical matters to Naomi Swinton.
This retreat is among Grassroots Leadership's sponsored projects as part of its ongoing commitment to theory and practice in relation to social change. More specifically, the retreat is a follow-up to a gathering focused on privatization and corporatization in higher education held at the Blue Mountain Center in upper New York state two years ago.
Planners for the January retreat are also coordinating with those responsible for the second of a series of conferences at Goddard College, in Vermont, on progressive education. Thus we will follow up in our work that of the October, 2008, conference at Goddard on "Shared Vocation, Vision and future as Progressive Educators?"
Thank you for your work. I hope we will see you in New Mexico in January.
Elizabeth Minnich
Senior Scholar
Association of American Colleges & Universities Washington D.C.
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