Virtual colloquium series explores teaching in dangerous times

Associate Professor Warren Crichlow — *Warren Crichlow*

On Jan. 20, the next session in a monthly virtual colloquium series presented by York University’s Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) Project, Faculty of Education and Centre for Refugee Studies will explore teaching in dangerous times by examining the life of American author, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin.

“Considering James Baldwin’s Extracurriculars: Notes on Teaching in Dangerous Times” will explore a particularly relevant topic given current events. York University Associate Professors Warren Crichlow and Mario Di Paolantonio will lead the event, which will start at 9:30 a.m. EST/5:30 p.m. EAT online via Zoom.

For Baldwin, the purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to ask questions of the society and undertake responsibility to change it “no matter what risk.” In this event, Crichlow considers Baldwin’s “extracurricular life” in public school as the experiential starting place for his thinking on the tasks of education. Crichlow considers Baldwin’s peripatetic extracurricular life in Harlem, both in school environments and beyond in the Pentecostal pulpit, as the formative autobiographical ground he mined to address the paradoxes of education as a writer, activist and teacher. He argues that Baldwin’s striking demands remain relevant signposts for the practice of teaching in today’s dangerous times.

Crichlow is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education in York University, where he teaches cultural studies and education. He is most recently a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020). His most recent article (with Kass Banning) is “A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour,” in Film Quarterly, Summer 2020.

Associate Professor Mario Di Paolantonio — *Mario Di Paolantonio*

Di Paolantonio is an associate professor in York’s Faculty of Education. Drawing on ethical philosophy and employing innovative methodologies, his international award-winning research explores how different memorial-artistic practices are employed to pedagogically reckon with historical wrongs.

This event will be the fourth in the colloquium series, which explores the intersections of refugee education, anti-Black racism and COVID-19 in Canada and East Africa, with the theme "Reciprocal Learning in Times of Crisis."

Join the Zoom session at https://yorku.zoom.us/j/92694835883?pwd=T0w0cloyN1U1ZFVvZGplRjl4MWJ1Zz09.