Deadline: March 26,, 2021
Contact: Arlene M Plevin, Emeritus Professor, Olympic College
Email: plevinarlene@gmail.com
Phone: 12067235126

Proposed Panel for ASLE 2021 Virtual Conference, July 26-August 6

We have survived one year of a pandemic, one year where we have feared for our own lives, feared for the lives of our loved ones, and feared for what some might ignore when this is over, fearful that “normal” (whatever that is) would re-emerge without what most of us believe is a critical move to another way of living on the earth, of living with each other, both humans and animals and plants. In “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Arundhati Roy writes: “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Taking its cue from Roy’s notion that we can be “ready to fight for” a world we can newly imagine, his panel will focus broadly on the classroom (however it is conceived) and educational institutions as necessary places of activisms. The panel invites defining and redefining activism and of supporting and emboldening students of all types, all ages, to be or become activists, to enact tikkun olam (repair the world). What could this look like? Who could it involve/invite that prior activisms might not have happened? What might an educator as public intellectual/public activist look like?

Please send a 300 word abstract by March 26 to aplevin@olympic.edu.

Posted on March 19, 2021