2013 Educating Harlem Lecture Series

Our 2013 lecture series provokes us to rethink the stories we tell about learning, schooling, and community, and to reimagine the place of history and humanistic inquiry in education today. We have invited scholars who have defined their scholarship, and their lives as scholars, in ways that challenge conventional boundaries between historical research, writing, teaching, and engagement with public life. Our speakers offer stories of the place of learning and schooling in communities that focus on Harlem and extend beyond its borders. Join us for the beginning of an ongoing conversation.

Wednesday, March 6, 4-6pm
306 Russell Hall, Teachers College, Lecture followed by reception

Barbara Ransby, Professor,
Gender and Women’s Studies, African American Studies & History, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ella Baker: Radical Educator With Harlem Roots  –  Ella Baker received her own political education on the streets of Harlem but she also became a teacher there. Working in a New Deal Program called the Worker’s Education Project, she trained adult students in what can only be called a version of Freire’s pedagogy for liberation. There, in classrooms in the Harlem Y and Harlem Public Library, Ella Baker sharpened her own ideas and her approach to popular education. She would pass those lessons on to the young people in the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee three decades later. Prof. Ransby will talk about Ella Baker’s own intellectual development on the streets of Harlem, the cast of characters who were her informal teachers, and how she herself became a Black Freedom Movement teacher.

Please join us! RSVP to histanded@tc.columbia.edu. RSVP requested, but not required.

Mark your calendar for upcoming events:

Wednesday, March 27, 4-6pm

Martha Biondi, Director of Graduate Studies and
 Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, Northwestern University

Wednesday, April 24, 4-6pm

Khalil Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,The New York Public Library

Thursday, October 10, 4-6pm

Charles M. Payne, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

This series is made possible through support from the Provost’s Investment Fund and is organized with the cooperation of the Teachers College Department of Arts and Humanities – Program in History and Education, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and Center on History and Education.