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Re-Languaging School

Session 5
Alex Shevrin — Centerpoint School

The language of education evokes strong emotions for many of us: Discipline. Freshman. Grades. Math. Administration. Assessment. We each bring our own understandings, context and history to the language we use in school. As we change our educational practices, our attention to physical space, our approaches to student support, how are our word choices keeping up - or not?

In this conversation, we’ll explore these questions: do the words we choose to use in school describe what we actually mean? How do words include or exclude? Do our terms inspire hope or fear? How might we use our language to guide our culture? Are we being intentional? How do the lenses of history, race, gender, power and poverty factor in? What might we shift to align our values with our language?

This conversation will not seek to answer any of these questions; rather, we’ll seek to debate and generate.

Conversational Practice

Large group brainstorm, small group discussion of terms, large group conversation and generation of proposal for re-languaging common school terms.

Presenter Profiles

Alex Shevrin
Alex Shevrin
Centerpoint School

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