Crystal T. Laura – Against the Social Ecology Of School Discipline: Teaching for Love, Justice, and JoyAgainst the Social Ecology Of School Discipline: Teaching for Love, Justice, and Joy
West Zone, Syracuse University, Eastside
USA
The Douglas Bilken Landscape Urban Education Lecture Series presents
as part of the
2014-2015 Surveillance & Segregation in 21st Century Schools:
Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Against the Social Ecology Of School Discipline: Teaching for Love, Justice, and Joy with Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D.
Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D. – teacher, activist, author – will discuss her new book, Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, a riveting account of her younger brother’s odyssey through school and to prison. She makes an eloquent and urgent argument that schools can only succeed with all of our children when they are built on a foundation of “love, justice, and joy,” a pursuit she describes as “dangerous and worthwhile.”
Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of educational leadership and co-director of theCenter for Urban Research and Education at Chicago State University, and a volunteer teacher at St. Leonard’s Adult High School for formerly incarcerated men and women. Among her publications are Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (2014) and Diving In: Bill Ayers and the Art of Teaching Into the Contradiction (co-edited with Isabel Nunez and Rick Ayers, 2014). By day, she explores teacher education and leadership preparation for learning in the context of social justice with the goal of training school professionals to recognize, understand, and address the school-to-prison pipeline. During the second shift, she co-parents two marvelous boys who give her work in the field of education particular urgency.