Arts Integration Professional Development: Avoiding a "Single Story"
How do you avoid a “single story” in the classroom? Is there more than one way to share diverse narratives with your students? Inspired by our exhibition Romare Bearden: Abstraction, join us for a conversation on a new online publication The Reservoir: A Chronicle for Collective Change. Beginning in 2022, The Reservoir will publish critical reviews of youth books that prominently feature characters and people from historically marginalized communities, critical annotated bibliographies, and biographies of BIPoC who engage in this important work.
Dr. Nicole A. Cook, The Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina, and Valerie Byrd Fort, Instructor and Coordinator of Cocky’s Reading Express for the School of Information Science at the University of South Carolina will share this new project and practical ways for inclusivity and representation through reading and illustrations.
Free for all educators
This series is sponsored by the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Gibbes Women’s Council, The Mark Elliott Motley Foundation, the Post and Courier Foundation, and Individual donors.
About our speakersDr. Nicole A. Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests include human information behavior, critical cultural information studies, and diversity and social justice in librarianship. She was the 2019 ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award recipient, and she has edited and authored several books, including Information Services to Diverse Populations and Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era.
Valerie Byrd Fort engages students with passion and enthusiasm for reading and literacy. She has over 15 years of teaching in the K - 12 environment and was selected as Teacher of the Year at both schools in which she taught. As a school librarian, she was an advocate for both students and teachers. She teaches courses in children's literature and in school library management. Byrd Fort is the coordinator for Cocky's Reading Express, the University of South Carolina's literacy outreach program.
