Best-selling Author Joins CMK2010 Faculty!
November 28, 2009 by garystager
Filed under News, Posts, Speakers
Super Early-bird Registration ends December 20th!
Constructing Modern Knowledge is thrilled to announce that best-selling author and history teacher, Dr. James Loewen, will be a guest speaker at CMK 2010, July 12-15, 2009!
The addition of Jim Loewen to our faculty further distinguishes Constructing Modern Knowledge from other conferences and professional development events. CMK 2010 is the place where modern educators can learn with master learners and thinkers. Dr. Loewen joins a faculty already featuring MacArthur Genius Deborah Meier, prolific author and provocateur Alfie Kohn, artist and children’s author Peter Reynolds and edtech pioneers – Dr. Cynthia Solomon, Brian Silverman, Gary Stager, Sylvia Martinez and John Stetson.
About James Loewen
James Loewen’s gripping retelling of American history as it should, and could, be taught, Lies My Teacher Told Me, has sold more than 800,000 copies and continues to inspire K-16 teachers to get students to challenge, rather than memorize, their textbooks. Loewen’s most recent book, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History, helps teachers learn to teach history more authentically based on inquiry and access to primary sources.
A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. A researcher who discovered that many, and in many states most communities were “Sundown Towns” that kept out blacks (and sometimes other groups) for decades. (Some still do.) An educator who attended Carleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, and taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont.
Jim Loewen taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont. Previously he taught at predominantly black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He now lives in Washington, D.C., continuing his research on how Americans remember their past. Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong came out in 1999. The Gustavus Myers Foundation named his new book, Sundown Towns, a “Distinguished Book of 2005.”
His other books include Mississippi: Conflict and Change (co authored), which won the Lillian Smith Award for Best Southern Nonfiction but was rejected for public school text use by the State of Mississippi, leading to the path breaking First Amendment lawsuit, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al. He also wrote The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, Social Science in the Courtroom, and The Truth About Columbus.
He has been an expert witness in more than 50 civil rights, voting rights, and employment cases. His awards include the First Annual Spivack Award of the American Sociological Association for “sociological research applied to the field of intergroup relations,” the American Book Award (for Lies My Teacher Told Me), and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. He is also Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Read the James Loewen Wikipedia entry.
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