CASE - Council on American Studies Education

Register for CASE Conference 2009!

Register now for the upcoming CASE Conference.  Our online registration system, powered by Acteva, accepts both checks and credit cards.

The registration fee is $89, and it includes: keynote speaker/program, breakout sessions, curriculum exchange, continental breakfast and luncheon, and time to meet with fellow American Studies teachers.

After you've registered, review the conference theme and keynote speaker -- and maybe submit a proposal for a panel or presentation..

Get to Know the Keynote Speaker: Bill Ayers

The keynote speaker at the conference is William Ayers, who has been a leader in educational reform movements for over forty years.  He is the author of numerous books on education and social change – most recently, Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice (2004), Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (2004) and Handbook of Social Justice in Education (2008).  Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Professor Ayers has been in the news lately.  To hear him in his own words, listen to this recent interview on the NPR program Fresh Air.  You can also read this interview from Salon. 

For an even more in-depth conversation, I strongly recommend this two-part, two hour interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! 

CASE Conference 2009: Education and Change

Save the date!

The Council for American Studies Education (CASE) Conference -- "Education and Change" -- is coming soon: Friday, February 27, 2009 at the Chicago History Museum located at 1601 N. Clark St.

The keynote speaker at the conference is Bill Ayers, who has been a leader in educational reform movements for over forty years. 

For more information on this year's theme, see below.  We are presently accepting proposals for break-out sessions related to the theme or to American Studies in general.  Submit your own proposal.

We will soon be accepting registration online (pay by credit card or check).  The early conference registration fee is $75.

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Change is in the air. As Barack Obama prepares to assume the presidency, citizens of the United States – and the world – eagerly anticipate a new era.

The question for educators is how not to get left behind.

In many ways, of course, classes that deal with American literature and history are, almost by definition, stuck inside a set of elitist and out-of-date expectations.  The haughty invocation of "literature" has produced a canon of acceptable "great books" and confined the concept of literacy to a very narrow set of traditional reading and writing skills.  The sense of "history" as a fixed body of facts has produced a burdensome set of requirements for historical "coverage."  And the very use of the word "American" has allowed most of these classes to remain provincial, treading a well-worn path through classic and comfortable domestic concerns.

This year's CASE conference hopes to shake things up a bit, as it asks foundational questions about what we teach and who we are:

• How can we redefine American Studies to make it relevant to our students' lives and a force for change in the world?
• How will recent political events – specifically, Obama's victory – change the way we teach everything from race to civic engagement?
• How have new technologies altered what it means to be literate and how do we incorporate a new "media literacy" in the American Studies classroom that empowers students in a digital age?
• How has globalization redrawn the borders of the "American" experience and how do we teach American Studies in a global context?