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  • February 28, 2020 County-Wide Institute Day Program

    • English Language Arts County-Wide Institute Day
    • Wheaton North High School
    • Friday, February 28, 2020

     

    CELEBRATING LANGUAGE ARTS: Social Justice and Literature

    For information and registration for the event, find the link on our school’s scrolling message board:

    https://www.cusd200.org/Domain/80

     

    We are very pleased to announce our keynote speaker: Dave Eggers

     Dave Eggers

    Dave Eggers is the author of many books, including Circle, The Monk of Mokha, What is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Lifters.

    He is founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a humor website, and a journal of new writing, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. 

    Eggers is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States. Numerous other organizations worldwide operate with inspiration from the 826 National model. Realizing the need for greater college access for low-income students, Eggers founded ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible.

    Eggers’s novel What Is the What, about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the civil war in South Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng. VADF operates secondary schools in South Sudan.

    Eggers’s books for young readers include What Can a Citizen Do?, Her Right Foot, This Bridge Will Not Be Gray, and The Wild Things, among others.

    Trained as a painter, Eggers’s artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Biennial of the Americas, and numerous other galleries and art spaces. Eggers is the winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

    In 2018, Eggers co-founded The International Congress of Youth Voices, an annual gathering of 100 extraordinary young writers and activists; their landmark meeting in San Francisco resulted in a youth-written manifesto published by The Guardian.

    Wheaton North High School will host the 14th Annual “Celebrating Language Arts” Institute Day on Friday, February 28, 2020.  We seek proposals offering ideas and activities associated with our understanding that literature possesses the ability to challenge or to reinforce social ideologies, to consider what is just and what forces undermine justice, and to transform readers’ perception of those who they consider others.

    We hope our presenters will offer sessions in the complete language arts field: the literature of novels, short fiction, and poetry; the rhetoric of nonfiction; the analysis of film; the literacy skills of reading and vocabulary building; the writing skills of memoir work and journaling, creative writing, rhetorical writing, and journalism; the specialized curriculum of speech programs, Advanced Placement courses, theater and acting; the teaching practices of assessment (especially the paper load), implementing new programs, and incorporating technology; and more. 

    A Call for Proposals

    If interested, please send us a proposal with responses to the form questions (please see the box below) by January 31, 2020.

    Presenting is strong evidence of Domain 4d and 4e “excellent” ratings for teacher evaluations.

    We expect that every middle- and high school Language Arts and English Department attending the conference will have at least one teacher submit a proposal.

    Presentations are approximately 50 minutes in length.   Each presenter is expected to host two sessions.

    Proposed Time Schedule:

    • 7:00 – 7:50 - Registration, Coffee/Rolls and Bagels                                     
    • 7:55 – 8:45 - Session A                                                                           
    • 8:50 – 9:30 - Session B                                                                           
    • 9:35 – 10:25 - Session C
    • 10:30 – 11:20 - Session D
    • 11:25 – 11:55 - Lunch + Networking
    • 12:00 – 1:00 - Keynote Address: TBA                        

    Email your responses to the following by January 31, 2020 to

    Nicole.Blazier@cusd200.org  AND Debra.VanGetson@cusd200.org

    • Presentation Title:
    • Names of Presenter(s):
    • Intended audience (grade/ability level, subject):
    • Presentation Overview (max 50 words):
    • Presenter(s) Bio (max 50 words): 
    • Contact Info (e-mail, phone number, mailing address): 

    If your proposal is accepted, we will notify you via email in the beginning of February.

    Thank you for submitting a proposal!