What: SUN Seminar with Linda Christensen

When: Saturday, January 31, ,10 a.m. – noon

Where: South Campus Conference Center 101

• Using stories and examples from her 30 years as an inner city classroom teacher in Portland, Linda Christensen will explore how she engages students in a critical study about the power of language.
• She will discuss how teachers build classroom communities that include or exclude students from traditionally marginalized groups.  This seminar/workshop will examine how the choices teachers make influence students of poverty, students of color, and English Language Learners.
• Christensen will show how she grounds her curriculum in students’ language and lives, teaches  students to pose essential questions about language and society, and encourages them to reflect on ways to make a difference in the world.

Linda Christensen taught high school language arts in Portland, Ore. for thirty years and is now the Director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark. She is the author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word, and co-editor of Rethinking School Reform: Views from the Classroom, and Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools magazine. Her latest book, Teaching for Joy and Justice will be published in the spring of 2009.