The annual York Centre for Education and Community (YCEC) and Faculty of Education Public Lecture will feature University of the West Indies Professor Emerita Hyacinth Evans. This year’s lecture will pay special tribute to the legacy of Patrick Solomon, an education professor and one of the pioneers of the Urban Diversity Initiative at York’s Faculty of Education. Solomon died of cancer Oct. 4, 2008.
Evans’ lecture is titled “Creating Good and Inclusive Schools”. She will deliver her remarks on Nov. 6, from 6 to 8:30pm in 0001 Accolade East Building on York’s Keele campus. The lecture is free and open to the public, all are welcome.
A colleague and close friend of Professor Solomon, Evans will examine the challenges of creating inclusive schools that address the needs of all students – especially those from low-income communities.
Following the lecture, a panel will address the question: How might educational institutions strive to be accessible and inclusive to diverse populations given the structural, societal and systemic obstacles that continue to challenge and obfuscate the efforts of equity workers and teachers?
A question and answer session moderated by Susan Dion, a professor in the Faculty of Education, will follow the panel discussion.
Prior to retiring, Evans was a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education, The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She received a PhD in Education from the University of California Los Angeles in the areas of curriculum and teacher education. Over the course of her career, Evans has conducted research on curriculum practices in schools, the field experiences in teacher education, professional learning and development of teachers and teacher educators and in teaching and learning in schools. She is the author of the following books: Gender differences in education in Jamaica (1999), Gender and achievement in secondary education in Jamaica: Social policy analysis and research project (1999), Inside Jamaican schools (2001), and Inside Hillview High School: An Ethnography of an Urban Jamaican School (2006).
More about Patrick Solomon
Solomon was engaged in equity, diversity and social justice works for most of his professional career as an elementary and secondary school teacher, school administrator and university professor. In 1991, he began working in York’s Faculty of Education where he launched the Urban Diversity Initiative in 1994. The first of its kind in the province, this initiative was developed in response to a call by the Ontario Ministry of Education for institutions to make teacher education more relevant to the province’s increasingly diverse population and to integrate issues of equity, diversity and social justice into the schooling process. To date more than 1,000 teachers have graduated from the program and are using what they have learned to engage and empower students in classrooms across Toronto and beyond.
In 2005, he received the prestigious American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics’ Choice award for Teaching for Equity & Diversity: Research to Practice, a book he produced with C. Levine-Rasky. In 2003, he received the first annual Exemplary Multicultural Educators Award by the Canadian Council of Multicultural Educators for his multicultural and anti-racism education research and practice with teachers.
The lecture is sponsored by the YCEC and the Faculty of Education. For further information, contact 416-736-5003 or e-mail ycec@edu.yorku.ca.