An Installation & Reading by Students + Teachers of Minneapolis Public Schools Featuring

The focus of this year's institute is Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Violence Against Young Bodies. Using installation art and writing, Visiting-Scholars Patricia Smith (poet) and Mark Nowak (documentary poet), along with the Ed Factory's senior consultant Lisa Arrastia and specialist Fadwa Abbas will spend two days engaging Institute Minneapolis fellows and a select number of their students in an experiential examination of the disruption, and the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference. The results of their work together will be on display and performed at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis on Friday 6 March.

A Reading and Discussion with Authors Claudia Rankine and Marlon James

RANKINE and JAMES will read from their works and engage in a conversation that will attempt to connect issues of race, justice, and violence with MTI's 2014-2015 theme.

Claudia Rankine is Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Rankine is the recent recipient of an NAACP Image Award, and the author of five collections of poetry including the National Book Award finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press),which was described by the New Yorker as an "especially vital book for this moment in time," and by the New York Times as "insistently topical, with references to Trayvon Martin and stop-and-frisk police tactics, and concerned with intimate moments when racial impasses spring up between friends and colleagues." Citizen won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and became the only book of poetry to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. 

Born in Jamaica in 1970, MARLON JAMES is a Professor of English at Macalester College in Minnesota and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Award for Fiction. James is the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was touted by the Wall Street Journal as "a fictional, kaleidoscopic take on the 1976 assassination attempt on reggae star Bob Marley and its aftermath." Publisher's Weekly declared that the novel "should be required reading" and the New York Times calls James a "prodigious talent."

Niobe Way is an applied psychologist and  the author of Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press, 2011). Kent Harber is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. His main interest is how people’s self-resources (e.g., feelings of self-worth, self-esteem, social support, opportunities to disclose) affect their physical perception, social judgments, and interpersonal behavior. He applies this interest to interracial feedback, the perception of disturbing events, forgiveness, and the use of emotions as information.

As members of PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity) at New York University, the work of Way and Harber provides critical insight into why it is that we face local and global crises of all sorts, including the fact that homicide is the leading cause of death among 10-24-year-old African Americans and the second leading cause of death for Latinos, 20% of kids report being bullied on school property, one out of every three women in the world experiences sexual violence, mass violence in the U.S. occurs once every two weeks, and people in the U.S. are more likely to kill themselves than get hit by a car.  

Together, Way and Harber will engage in a significant discussion about the crisis of connection that young people experience today, the ways in which we are increasingly disconnected from our own humanity and the humanity of others, as well as what we need to do to reconnect to ourselves and each other. This discussion will have profound Implications for teaching and learning, especially for teachers and students experiencing the pressure of current educational reforms.