Education: Film- The Fall of The I- Hotel

The Fall of The I- Hotel documents the eviction of Filipino and Chinese elders 
in San Francisco's Manilatown.

Education: Contemporary Filipino Scholarship: Status, Problems, and Prospects

The following is a documentation of panel abstracts presented at the International Convention of Asian Scholars. It is provided to give the reader an idea of  Filipino scholarship. Click on the link below.

#163. Contemporary Filipino Scholarship: Status, Problems and Prospects

ICAS and the Association of Asian Studies has a Call for Papers. The 2011 convention will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Call for papers and 2011 Convention

Broadside Press Updates and Info About My EMU Alumni Interview

Dear Friends,

Here is the latest Broadside Press News. Please feel free to circulate it to your email lists.

Broadside Press Contact Information: P.O. Box 2011 Detroit, MI 48202
Phone: 313 586-4577 

* We are not accepting new poetry manuscripts for publication at this time, however we are putting out a second call for our Hip Hop Anthology. The deadline is open at this time. We are looking for poetry, short essays and literature reviews that expresses the Hip Hop Movement and its daily, local, national, and global effects, and, concerns. We are also accepting submissions from other countries for this anthology.

CALL FOR SUBMISSION: HIP HOP ANTHOLOGY

Noted for its history of publishing the foremost African American poets of the last 40 years, Broadside Press is calling for submissions to an upcoming anthology, Broadside Speaks Hip Hop. This collection will feature the work of young and adult writers who have matured in the cultural climate of the hip hop movement of the last few decades. The anthology editors are interested in the following kinds of work:

· Poetry which reflects the styles, political concerns, and critical commentary characteristic of the hip hop genre.

· Poetry which reflects new modes of expression, or a new aesthetic.

· Poetry written for spoken word performance.

· Poetry which exemplifies serious intellectual engagement and technical mastery.

· Poetry which deals with the pressing socio-political concerns and issues of the African Diaspora.

· Poetry which expresses African and African American spirituality.

· Poetry which refers to African diasporan history.

Broadside looks forward to the publication of this anthology and the presentation of new writers in keeping with our legacy of making the finest literary productions of our community available to the world.

Please use 11 or 12 font size. You may submit 3 or 4 poems, one poem per page. The maximum pages of poetry is 4 pages, which allows for one poem that is 2 pages long and 2 short poems. For short essays and lit reviews 1800 word maximum. Make sure you include your name and contact info, including email, with the titles of your submission on a separate sheet. Include your name at the top of each poem, essay and lit review.

Send submission to: Broadside Press P.O. Box 02307 Detroit, MI

OTHER NEWS:

1. The Broadside Press functions in conjunction with the Dudley Randall Center for Print and Media at the University of Detroit-Mercy campus located on Livernois and McNichols in Detroit, MI. You may go to the University's website and look for posts about the Poets Theater there, or look for dates posted on Aurora Harris' facebook events page.

2. The Broadside Press Poet's Theater runs every third Sunday of the month from 3-6pm at U of D-Mercy and follows the university's semester schedule. We have featured readers and open mic.
June 20th is the last open mic until further notice. July is the month that we run our Institute of Cultural Studies.

3. The Broadside Press Institute of Cultural Studies takes place every summer for discussion and poetry workshops at the University of Detroit-Mercy campus. We will meet on Saturdays. July 12,17,24,31 from 12pm to 3 pm. contact Aurora at aurora917@gmail.com

4. The Aquarius Press & Broadside Press Writers and Poets Conference takes place in Idlewild, MI, the historic summer resort of many African American families, poets, writers and musicians. The dates are August 12-14 2010. The deadline for registration is July 31, 2010.

Click on this for more info 

if page doesn't work go to:
http://motownwriters.blogspot.com/2010/06/idlewild-writers-conference.html

www.idlewildconference.homestead.com

5. NEW POETRY CD INFO: Fellow board member Al Ward has a new spoken word and jazz cd called About Love Sometimes...The Poetry of Soul by Albert M. Ward. Also reading on this cd is board member Dr. Gloria House (Aneb Kgositsile).

http://spokenu.wordpress.com/http://spokenu.wordpress.com/

You can listen to poetry and jazz samples of Al's cd by clicking on this

6. Board member Aurora Harris wrote a poem called "Yurugu" for the jazz composition called "Yurugu" by Detroit's In The Tradition Jazz Band. The music and poem were inspired by scholar Marimba Ani's book "Yurugu." The cd has been receiving world air play on radio stations in the US and other countries. To order the cd go to

www.inthetraditionjazz.com

Aurora's John Coltrane poems on Radio Free Amsterdam are found on her blog at
http://auroraharris.blogspot.com/

Click the following to see my interview:

Aurora's interview about her being a scholar-poet-activist

http://emugoldalumni.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/140/


Thank you!

“Black Female Intellectuals in the Academy” by Staci Maree Perryman-Clark

CF 20: “Black Female Intellectuals in the Academy” by Staci Maree Perryman-Clark

An article on Black Female Intellectuals in the academy.

Education: Women's Empowerment From A Global Perspective

It is 7:20 p.m. and I am posting links about women's empowerment. Tomorrow, I will be at the 2nd Annual Global Women's  Conference at the Detroit's Wayne County Community College, Northwest Campus. As a panelist with educator Lolita Hernandez and Dr. Sharon Oliver, I will be discussing women's empowerment.

Since I am interested in various subjects such poetry, history, culture, and identity, and work in the fields of education, media (publication, recording, music, radio, film, and television), and community work, I thought it would be a good idea to post additional links for educators, students, or anyone who is interested in what is taking place at an international level regarding women's empowerment. 

1.   ITVS.org has a page called "Women's Empowerment" that has videos and lesson plans that are downloadable. If you click on the main title, you will see the lesson plans. Then click the title of the video to see the video or learn more about the film.

To see the videos, click this link. 

Some of the videos can be shared but others must be ordered. One of the shared videos is

Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai - ITVS

The video "Taking Root..." is about Kenya's Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai who started an environmental movement by planting trees.

The "Beyond the Box" page is a blog that has interesting and informative postings.

2.  WeDpro     is a Filipina feminist site. From their page: "The founders of WeDpro, Inc (founded October 1989) were members of the feminist collective Katipunan ng Kababaihan para sa Kalayaan, popularly known as KALAYAAN (founded 1983). WEDPRO members have a long history of being activists and feminists, whose individual and collective experience has made a mark especially in the early years of the women’s liberation movement. KALAYAAN was one of the very first women’s organizations that took pride in its feminist identity"

3.  Pathways of Women's Empowerment is a research site.

Media: Philippine News (In Tagalog)

Here's a link to

Dateline Philippines News  

News in Tagalog and English

Education: Autism, Literacy, and Reading.

A Morning with An Autistic Young Adult: Reading
by Aurora Harris c. 2009

June 11, 2009 9:30 a.m.

I have been awake since 6:00 a.m. While waiting for the bus to pick up my grandnephew, I asked him to read the morning newspaper out loud. As I listened to him read word by word, without fluency, it dawned on me that perhaps part of his lack of fluency was due to being taught how to sight read. As I continued listening to him, I remembered sitting in one of his elementary school classes, with the teacher standing in front of a list of words, pointing at each word, saying the word, and having the students repeat what they heard. After this recollection, the next thoughts I had related to Detroit's high illiteracy rate.

I thought about the newspaper reports in the past few months regarding the poor state of education in Detroit, the students' low test scores, and that up to half of the city's population is functionally illiterate. I looked at my grandnephew, who is a "high functioning autistic," in his twenties, and in a "transitional school setting."

After he read, I asked him if he knew what certain words meant. He lowered his head and said, "I don't  know."

"How in the heIl can he get through life just repeating words without knowing what they mean?" is what I thought.  Then suddenly, I said to him, "No. You will not go to summer school. I will teach you myself."  He looked at me and said, "O.K."

Suddenly, all of the years that I've had him, since he was three years old, flooded my mind. From age three to now, I have been his guardian and advocate. I remembered seeing his early years of odd behaviors like rocking, hitting himself, tantrums, unstoppable crying fits, and, collecting toys and stacking them. I remembered my mother, who was his great grandmother, carrying him on her hip from room to room, as a way to quiet him down. I remember telling my mother and father, "I'm going to find out how we can help him." After I wrote down the behaviors I saw, I drove to Wayne State University and sat down at one of the computers that were set up for community access. As I typed the behaviors into the search engine, each behavior took me to a page concerning Autism or Aspergers. I remember feeling relieved that I had something, some research that I could take to my parents and doctors.

1993. In 1993, I began my long and stress filled journey of caring for an autistic child. By the time he was enrolled in school, I had amassed a ton of research from every available web site concerning Autism and Asperger autism. I was determined to teach him any way I could. I wasn't a teacher or even interested in teaching at the time. I was an unemployed, overworked telecommunications worker with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, with pain up to my neck on both sides. At that time, with hands in splints, I tapped on the keys of a typewriter or computer keyboard with two pencils turned upside down, so the erasers wouldn't damage the keys. It seemed that the moment I decided to be a poet, I was faced with another challenge. However, in spite of my own inability to hold a pen and physically write due to the splints and pain,  I never thought, at any time, that I couldn't help my grandnephew or that he was not teachable.

After he was enrolled in middle school, I remembered the long battle to get him diagnosed as autistic because he had been misdiagnosed as "Learning disabled." The battle was long and hard...I don't have enough time to go into what it took to coordinate three or four schools' IEP's (Individual Education Plans) that were found collecting dust on a desk in an area office, and bring the administrators, social workers, and school psychologists together to get them to agree with what I had been saying all along: "The child is autistic."

As an educator looking back, I can state that there are studies out there, concerning the misdiagnosis of minority students and the late diagnosis and effects on minority children, but my case was different. I came into the school system with all of the research and symptoms from my investigation. After years of being told, "We can't determine what he has, he has too many behaviors," all I could say was, " He copies people. He studies people. He repeats what you say word for word as an answer to a question. He sounds like a robot. He collects things. He can shake a bottle of water and watch it for hours. He has echolalia," until he became "older" and they could "re-test him."

"How did I learn to read?"  I asked myself.  I remembered that I learned how to read at home, before I was enrolled in elementary school... that I enjoyed pronouncing words, saying them, listening to family members read out loud...sitting at the window seat or at the dining room table in our dining room with either my father, grandfather, or mother holding my hand and teaching me how to write...the pads of wide, green, lined paper my parents brought home for me to write on...the alphabet books in Spanish and English, Dr. Seuss books, the science encyclopedias, the Filipino magazines that were in Tagalog and English that relatives sent us, the hundreds of other books and magazines I was given to read silently and out loud...the heavy, giant dictionary that had a world of knowledge from writing business letters to learning about science, in the back of it. I remember saying and writing, "ventana, manzanas, caballo, bintana, mansanas, kabayo, window, apples, horse." I remembered why it was easy for me to learn Spanish, Tagalog and English. My grandfather lived with us spoke and Castilian Spanish, Tagalog,  and Ilocano with my mother and other relatives. He had been a Spanish Teacher who taught at Fort Wayne.  My father spoke English, a little Tagalog, Italian and Polish. My grandmother on my father's side was an English teacher. I lived in a multillingual home where speaking different languages, reading, and learning were normal, and, expected. Today, there is only me to help my grandnephew until I find assistance.


The Detroit Public Schools and The Mayor are pushing for students to read. The commercials of little children are great, but do they have reading services for my autistic grandnephew who is in transition? Who nows how to see and say but don't know what the words mean?

Mind you, I do not have a teaching certificate. I do not know all of the theory or technical vocabulary that goes into the science of reading. However, I do have a Masters degree in Social Foundations of Education, I know how to write, and I know how to read.

So, today, I will start like I did before. Grassroots style. I will go on the Internet and list reading resources for parents and caretakers like myself, who are unemployed, lack the funds to pay for reading tutors, or, any tutoring service, and, do not possess a K-12 teaching certificate. Hopefully, folks will pass this blog entry around or copy it for those who don't have access to computers, so other resources can be exchanged.

Later, when my grandnephew gets home from school, I will teach him, the way I was taught: 1. Look at the word. 2. Say/ sound the word out.  3. Write and read the words, find and write the definitions, and, memorize them. 4. Write the word in a sentence.

Resources for parents and teachers ( I will post more later):

Teaching Students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders to Read (in Google books)

Reading Rockets: Curriculum and Instruction

Reading Rockets: Fluency