Curriculum, Conferences, Community? Can Our Institutions Advance Justice?

The theme, Building Belonging: Advancing a Global and Inclusive Pennsylvania, simultaneously roots us in place and asks us what roles educators and community members are playing in building the more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities we desperately need. 

As a whole, the conference embraces the insight that critical inquiry should guide our institutions and actions, couching global education within the most pressing questions of the day. In the opening pre-conference conversation on Thursday, September 29 (accessible by zoom for conference registrants),  Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen's Law School, Canada), Craig Borowiak (Haverford College), Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University), and Luis Cabrera (Griffith University, Australia), consider dignity, solidarity, and justice across and beyond states, grounded in specific locations, social movements, and diasporic communities. 

The conference itself kicks off Friday morning, September 30, with presentations from individuals advancing place-based global education and community-building in, around, and beyond educational institutions. Felipe H. Lopez (Seton Hall University), will share insights developed through his work as an educator, poet, and language activist who serves as Citizen Advisor for the Commission of Human Rights for the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Drawing on more than a decade of education abroad and ongoing collaboration rooted in Black Studies and liberatory practice connecting Dalun, Ghana, and the Philadelphia region, Alice Lesnick (Bryn Mawr College) will present on Laɣim Tehi Tuma (LTT) (“thinking together”). 

Principal of Central PA’s Vida Charter School Elana Nashelsky will share how that institution has created a bilingual space welcoming 220 students in kindergarten through grade six from Adams, Franklin and York counties. Lina Martínez Hernández (Haverford College) will show us how Spanish courses were reimagined for productive collaboration with Philadelphia’s New Sanctuary Movement. Throughout the day, concurrent sessions will offer glimpses of programs and curriculum that intentionally advance the values at the center of robust and critical global citizenship education. Act 48 professional development hours are available for PA educators. 

The lunchtime plenary on sustainability and global education includes Kate Fox Manni (Penn State) and Suzanne Willever (Temple University), each of whom have been active in the Climate Action Network for International Educators, a volunteer grassroots initiative formed by international education practitioners from around the world who see the need for the sector to step up and act on climate. Their presentations will be complemented by Lehigh University’s Breena Holland, who works with students and community members on air quality monitoring and action in Bethlehem. Continuing the emphasis on place-based action addressing critical global issues, Lindsey Lyons (Dickinson College Center for Sustainability Education) will share how sustainability work permeates the campus and community there. 

Vitally, conference attendees will have time for connecting and community-building, some of which will occur at a reception before dinner from regional food trucks. As the day comes to an end, we’ll have an opportunity to view a film that takes on critical questions of belonging, history, and harm.

The feature documentary 80 Years Later explores the racial inheritance of Japanese American family incarceration during World War II through multigenerational conversations with survivors and their descendants. After the film, J. Reid Miller, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Comparative literature at Haverford College and the Film’s Writer and Producer, will engage in conversation about the film and questions of dignity and recognition with session facilitator Thomas Donahue-Ochoa (Haverford College). Joining them will be Juan Espíndola (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and Andrew Valls (Oregon State University) in a discussion at the intersection of experience, applied ethics, and racial justice. 

Saturday morning starts with a panel featuring Joseph Croskey, (PA State System of Higher Education Frederick Douglass Institutes), Cherie Garrett (Dallastown School District, PA Seal of Biliteracy, and Barbara Weikert (Norristown School District, incoming PACIE President). We will be treated to additional concurrent sessions and food trucks for lunch before closing with a promising panel facilitated by Amelia Dietrich, Senior Director for Research and Publications at The Forum on Education Abroad and Managing Editor of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. Closing panelists will consider the topic, “Where from Here? PA Global Education Forward,” from their positions across the Commonwealth: Samantha Brandauer is Associate Provost and Executive Director, Center for Global Engagement, Dickinson College; Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and served from 2017-2021 as Director of the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh; Nicole Stokes is Division Head and Professor of Sociology at Penn State Abington. 

From plenary sessions to concurrent offerings, the PACIE Conference brings together the humanistic approaches of our liberal arts community with the applied experiences of educators advancing excellent global education throughout Pennsylvania. Across the conference, we expect to wrestle with the kinds of questions professor Wayne Yang asks in the afterword for Bringing Human Rights Education to US Classrooms, where he writes, “I need to see the strategic value of human rights in anti-colonial movements, the synergy between transnational and local human rights activism, and the ways queer people, people of color, and stateless people instrumentalize while transgreesing the limits of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” 

Special thanks to The Asia Institute, the AmeriCenter, and Dickinson College Center for Global Study and Engagement, for supporting this conference as Gold Sponsors, which helps us extend these opportunities and programming. Early bird registration closes Sunday night, September 18 (recently extended following community feedback). Register here. 

Haverford college students, faculty, and staff who wish to attend should communicate with CPGC Executive Director Eric Hartman.