On Thursday, September 6th, Teachers College (TC) will celebrate the launch of the curriculum created by its faculty, staff and students for use with Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.
Headlined “Teaching The Levees: Lessons from Katrina,” the event, which will be held in TC’s Cowin Conference Center from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m., will feature a panel moderated by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert that includes Columbia President Lee Bollinger; race education expert Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Professor at Princeton University and senior fellow at the Jamestown Project, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on democracy and social issues; and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a member of the New Orleans City Council.
Discussion will be based on the questions that are the focus of the curriculum, such as “Who are we as a country?” and “Who do we want to be?”
Sam Pollard, collaborator with Lee on the “Levees” documentary, also will speak at the event.
The 100-page curriculum will be distributed free of charge by TC Press to 30,000 high school, college and community educators along with a DVD copy of the film made available by HBO. The project is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Additional support will be provided online at the Levees Web site: www.teachingthelevees.org, which was created and is maintained by the TC EdLab at the Teachers College Gottesman Libraries.
rmk
September 6, 2007
I saw When the Levees Broke at the Museum of Natural History last year, and it blew me away. It should be required viewing for every American.