Dr. Na’ilah Suad Nasir and Dr. Tyrone Howard
A coalition from UC Santa Barbara will present the talks and moderated discussion “The Road Forward: The Future of Black Education in the 21st Century” on February 10 at 4 pm in the MultiCultural Center Theater in the UCEN on the UC Santa Barbara campus. This event is free and open to the public. Held in celebration of Black History Month, the event will feature keynote speakers Dr. Na’ilah Suad Nasir from UC Berkeley and Dr. Tyrone Howard from UCLA and will be moderated by UC Santa Barbara Professor Jeffrey Stewart.
These talks and moderated discussion are part of a day-long event of activities that feature faculty, graduate and undergraduate students engaged in serious discussions about what we have learned over the last six years from research about what works in stimulating achievement among Black children and what punitive challenges African American learners face when trying to learn. Attendees will hear about new strategies in education succeeding in the Oakland school system and the targeting and labeling of students as pre-criminal in the Los Angeles school system. Achievement is struggle in Black America. What strategies exist to make this struggle to learn more successful? That is our question and our charge.
Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Ph.D., is the Birgeneau Chair for Educational Disparities, Graduate School of Education and Williams Chair, African American Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Nasir's research centers on how issues of culture and race influence the learning, achievement, and educational trajectories of African American and other non-dominant students in urban school and community settings. She is interested in the intertwining of social and cultural contexts (cultural practices, institutions, communities, societies) and the learning and educational trajectories of individuals, especially in connection with inequity in educational outcomes. Specific studies have focused on the nature of mathematical thinking and learning for African American students in practices outside of school, such as basketball and dominoes; relations between racial/ethnic identity and mathematics learning and achievement in a diverse urban high school; the nature of connection and disconnection for African American high school students (and the role the institutional structures of the school played in these processes); racial/ethnic identities and stereotypes of African American students. She is also interested in marginalized students’ experiences of teaching and learning in juvenile hall schools. Nasir won the Early Career Researcher Award from Division G of the American Educational Research Association in 2007.
Tyrone Howard, Ph.D. is on the faculty in the division of Urban Schooling in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. He also is the Faculty Director of Center X, the Founder and Director of the Black Male Institute, and an Associate faculty member in the Bunche Center for African American studies at UCLA. Howard is also the Faculty Associate Director for the Academic Advancement Program at UCLA, which is the nation’s premier student retention program for underrepresented students. Dr. Howard is the author of the book Why Race and Culture Matters in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America’s Classrooms, published by Teachers College Press. In 2007, Professor Howard received an Early Career Scholar award from the American Education Research Association. He has received more than $5 million in research grants from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Department of Education, and other sources to fund his research. In 2007, Professor Howard received the UCLA GSE&IS Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Howard has been a guest on National Public Radio and is a regular urban education contributor to the New York Times.
After an introduction of the event and the speakers by Jeffrey Stewart, both Nasir and Howard will give 20 minute long talks. Stewart will then moderate a discussion featuring both scholars and open up that discussion to a Q&A from the audience. A reception will follow immediately after.
The event was developed by a planning team including The Department of Education, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, Department of Black Studies, Center for Black Studies Research, and Center for New Racial Studies.