Beyond These Times: Reimagining School
In a continued partnership with the Golden Apple Foundation and National Louis University, Chicago Shakespeare Theater is hosting the education forum series Beyond These Times: Reimagining School—a free two-part symposium bringing together leading futurists in education to address what school in the future must look like to prepare students for rapid advances in technology, globalization, and economy. The series is moderated by WBEZ arts and culture reporter Alison Cuddy.
“For too long the dialogue in Chicago has been mired in power terms: who holds the blame, whose solution is superior,” says Dominic Belmonte, Golden Apple’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Lost in the argument to date is how the concept of school itself must change to help our students define the future rather than be victims of it. We need to hear from futurists to help us envision a far better tomorrow than our students currently receive.”
The first symposium was on Monday, March 18, and featured noted Arizona State Professor Dr. James Paul Gee, and Stephanie Pace Marshall, President Emerita of the Illinois Math and Science Academy. Gee is a futurist author whose books include Language and Learning in the Digital Age; What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, and his newly released, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning. Marshall is the author of The Power to Transform: Leadership That Brings Learning and Schooling to Life, and is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a non-partisan core of “the world’s most influential leaders committed to strengthening the capacity of people throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.”
The second symposium, coming up on Tuesday, May 21, will feature Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World and The Global Achievement Gap, and Constance Yowell, Director of Education at the MacArthur Foundation. Wagner is the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and founded the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Yowell leads MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative which aims to determine how digital media are changing the way young people learn, socialize and participate in civic life.
Photo by Johnny Knight
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