Reworking Intersections, Reframing Debates, Restoring Hope

November 2-5 2011

Chicago, IL, Chicago Marriott Downtown

Submit proposals online (http://NAMEorg.org) by April 15, 2011.

CLICK HERE to Download the full  NAME 2011 CALL for PROPOSALS

Across the United States and around the world, we can hear public debates that narrowly frame the problems and possibilities of education.  We are asking only certain questions about the goals of schooling, or debating only certain answers about what and how to teach, or how and why to improve the learning and the healthy development of our next generation.  The recent U.S. media blitz about public schooling is but one indication that we need to broaden our perspectives … and that multicultural education can help.  But even those of us who are working to improve education can find ourselves stuck in narrow frames.  In other words, even for practitioners, researchers, and advocates of multicultural education, a central challenge is to see more complexity and contradiction, to see the bigger picture.

Advancing equity and social justice requires that we address multiple dimensions of diversity that correspond with varying forms of bias and injustice, and none of these exist in isolation.  Our identities and oppressions overlap and intersect in such a way that challenging one form of injustice often results in indirectly contributing to other forms of injustice.  This happens not only at the micro-level of teaching and counseling, but also at the macro-level of leadership and policy.  Education reform will continue to be contradictory and impoverished if it does not connect with the bigger picture historically, globally, and politically, which cannot be done without reworking intersections and reframing debates.

The 21^st Annual International NAME Conference will enrich multicultural education research and practice by grounding our work in new perspectives of this bigger picture.  We invite teachers from preschool through university, education leaders and counselors, and community activists to submit proposals that offer constructive ways of grappling with intersecting identities and oppressions. We invite proposals that embody the paradoxes and promises of examining the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, language, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, immigration status, and other dimensions of diversity.  We also invite proposals that contextualize the current attack on multicultural education within broader movements, institutions, and discourses, and that help us to develop concrete strategies and resources for improving our practices, programs, and policies.  Expanding on over four decades of research, we look to P-12 as well as teacher educators to highlight successes with multicultural teaching and learning and to share cutting-edge theory and research on how to prepare teachers for multicultural education.