Women's Network
[PAST EVENT] Hauben Distinguished Lecture: Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball
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(How) Can Teaching Disrupt Racism and Oppression?
Historical and persistent marginalization and oppression permeate all aspects of contemporary life, including education. Institutional structures and exclusionary practices rooted in social and cultural status groups and identities preserve and reinforce racialized and gendered norms. Teaching at all levels has enormous potential to disrupt these patterns, but it has instead often reproduced inequality and reified injustice through the discretionary spaces that are inherent to teaching. These discretionary spaces enable teachers to adapt responsively to cultural contexts, communities, and students, but they also make classroom practice vulnerable to actions and decisions that perpetuate oppression. This talk will investigate how patterns?particularly enacted patterns and signals of low expectations for marginalized students?are produced and reproduced, minute to minute, day to day, and week to week, inside of these discretionary spaces in teaching. We will explore how content can be taught in ways that can change the nature of the experiences of students and affect their sense of identity, belonging, and success and will consider what it would take to make such instruction a reality inside of classrooms.
Deborah Loewenberg Ball is the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the founding director of TeachingWorks. She taught elementary school for more than 15 years, and continues to teach mathematics to elementary students every summer. Previously, she was the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education for more than ten years. She has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications, developed videos about studying the work of teaching mathematics, and given lectures and presentations around the world. Ball is an expert on teacher education, studying the practice of teaching as the active work of building relationships with children to support their learning and growth. Her research focuses on improving the quality of beginning teaching and investigating the challenges of learning for children of color and low-income children.
About the Hauben Distinguished Lecture Series
This lecture is supported through a generous endowed gift established by Margaret Divens Hauben ?59 and her husband, the late Lawrence A. Hauben with the purpose of supporting the School of Education in its efforts to bring renowned scholars to William & Mary.