Yikes!

Wow, time really does fly... I just looked around and realized that there are only 9 days before I fly to Austin TX for the SXSWedu conference, where I'm presenting on a panel (with colleagues and friends Emily Lewis and Justin Schwamm) titled "Building Learning Community with Purpose and Joy".

While Emily, Justin and I are all involved in different projects in the humanities/classics (The Pericles Group, Tres Columnae, and Dungeons & Discourse, respectively), we share a common direction and focus: we recognize that "business as usual" factory-model public education is not what our students need. We are committed to building authentic community in our classrooms, and in our schools, as the sine qua non of truly powerful and lasting education. And we believe that such authentic community necessarily rests more on engagement, play, and a deep and robust sense of joyfulness, and less on models of command-and-control (the residue of decades of authoritarian traditions) or mercantilist self-interest (the option touted as the new justification for education - but which misses the essential point of education just as widely).

I've got a lot to do in these nine days to prepare for the conference (in addition to all the usual work in my  two jobs!) - but I'm looking forward to it. There are going to be so many great presentations at SXSWedu, I hope I'll find a little time somewhere in there to just get out and see Austin!