Gloria Ladson-Billings
Gloria Ladson-Billings, chair of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will speak Thursday, Oct. 20, at NIU on “Pushing Past the Achievement Gap.”
Despite the intense focus on the achievement disparities between African-American and Latino students and their White counterparts, Billings posits that the achievement gap discourse keeps academics locked into a “deficit paradigm.”
Her talk will challenges the audience to look into the inherent fallacies of the achievement gap discourse and to put students’ achievement struggles into a larger context of social failure that impedes student success.
The presentation begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Altgeld Hall auditorium. A reception begins at 4 p.m. Both are free and open to the public.
Ladson-Billings holds the Kellner Family Endowed Professorship in Urban Education and is the faculty affiliate in the departments of Educational Policy Studies and Afro American Studies at UW-Madison. She was the 2005–2006 president of the American Educational Research Association.
Her research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. She also investigates critical race theory applications to education.
She is the author of the critically acclaimed books, “The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children,” “Crossing over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms” and “Beyond the Big House: African American Educators on Teacher Education.”
The talk is sponsored by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literacy, the NIU Alumni Association, the College of Education, the Center for Black Studies and the Latino Resource Center.
For more information, call (815) 753-5793 or email cisll@niu.edu.
