Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education Annual Conference

Thursday, November 14 - Friday, November 15
Brandeis University, Hassenfeld Conference Center

Brandeis is proud to host the Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education annual conference on November 14-15, 2019.  CETE, comprised of education programs in nineteen leading universities and small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast US, was formed in 1983 as a response to a national mandate for improved teacher preparation.  

Since its formation, CETE members have shared a common vision about teaching and have been working on their own and in conjunction with one another to improve teacher education in their institutions and in the field itself:  "The members of CETE view teaching as a moral craft, and our role as one of helping to integrate theory and practice and to cultivate thoughtful analytical practitioners. It is a humanistic, inquiry-oriented approach to teacher education that is informed by two principles: development and integration."

The CETE keynote lecture is free and open to the public:

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Susan Eaton, Ed.D.
Getting To "We": Educators as a Counterforce to Othering in a Polarized Nation 
Thursday, November 14, 7 pm
Sherman Hall, Hassenfeld Conference Center

Talk Abstract

Educators in K-12 schools likely understand better than most how demographic change has transformed cultures, commercial spaces and the racial and ethnic composition of our schools and communities over the past two decades. During this period, racial and ethnic change has come to new, oft-termed "White" places, provoking both exclusion and resistance but also, growth, welcoming and transformation. How we collectively respond to demographic changes, particularly amid all the other rapid anxiety-provoking shifts in our economy and our climate, may determine the fabric of our lives and the strength of our democracy. We all have choices to make about how to think and act in response to change. But educators have a particularly powerful role to play by leading young people toward lives centered around belonging. We will briefly explore some demographic trends, explore the impulse to "other" and exclude but concentrate mostly on educators who intentionally pursue policies and practices that center belonging and reject the falsehood of "they" in favor of "we."

 About Susan Eaton

Dr. Susan Eaton is an author, most recently, of the book, Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees and America at Its Best (The New Press, 2016), about myriad efforts that welcome and incorporate immigrants into their new communities across the United States. She also is the author of the critically acclaimed, The Children In Room E4: American Education on Trial (Algonquin, 2007), which chronicles a landmark civil rights case and life in a classroom and neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut and The Other Boston Busing Story: What's Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line (Yale, 2001), a qualitative interview study of the adult lives of African Americans who had participated in a voluntary school desegregation effort in suburban Boston. Susan was research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School and a Lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.