Keynote Speakers
Curtis Johnson
Managing
Partner, Education|Evolving
Curtis Johnson, a teacher for several years and then a community college president, has been for nearly 30 years a colleague of the group now known as Education|Evolving. This Minnesota-based based group of thought leaders in education reform has been instrumental in innovations such as open enrollment and school choice, the nation's first charter school law, and teachers as owners of professional partnerships. Education|Evolving works to convince those who make and influence policy that America's success depends on creating radically different and better ways for young people to learn and for teachers to work.
Johnson co-authored, with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn, the provocative 2008 book Disrupting Class. This book explains why even the best managed schools will be disrupted by changing learning models and how both school districts and the chartered sector can respond. The authors make a vigorous argument for the effectiveness and economics of personalized learning.
He is also the co-author of three books about public policy issues in urban regions, most recently Century of the City, published in late 2008 by the Rockefeller Foundation. As a longtime writer with the Citistates Group, Johnson, along with columnist Neal Peirce, has written more than a hundred feature-length articles on a wide range of public policy issues which have appeared in more than 50 newspapers over the past 20 years.
He's also been the head of a citizen think tank, a policy adviser and chief of staff to a Minnesota governor, and the chairman of the board of one of America's only two regional governments.
Johnson has a BA in history from Baylor University and a PhD from the College of Education at the University of Texas. He was born in the Atlanta, Georgia region, grew up in Texas, and has lived in Minnesota since 1972.
You can learn more about Johnson, and Education|Evolving, at www.educationevolving.org.
James Paul
Gee
Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at the Arizona State University
James Paul
Gee received his Ph.D in linguistics from Stanford University in
1975. He started his career in theoretical linguistics, working in
syntactic and semantic theory, and taught initially in the School
of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst
Massachusetts. He went on to do research in psycholinguistics at
Northeastern University in Boston and at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics in Holland. As his research focus began to
switch to studies on discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and
applications of linguistics to literacy and education, he took a
position in the School of Education at Boston University, where he
was the chair of the Department of Developmental Studies and
Counseling. From Boston University, he went on to serve as a
professor of linguistics in the Linguistics Department at the
University of Southern California and, later, served as the first
Jacob Hiatt Professor of Education in the Hiatt Center for Urban
Education at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1998,
he became the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading in the
Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison. In 2007 he became the Mary Lou Fulton
Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at the Arizona State
University. He is a member of the National Academy of
Education.
His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) was one of the
founding documents in the formation of the “New Literacies
Studies”, an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language,
learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of
their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An
Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999) brings together his work
on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural
settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the
last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games,
language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About
Learning and Literacy (2003) offers 36 reasons why good video games
produce better learning conditions than many of today’s schools.
Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an
overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help
us in thinking about the reform of schools. His new book, Good
Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007) situates game-like
learning in the framework of current research in the Learning
Sciences.
Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics,
psychology, the social sciences, and education. In 1989, the
Journal of Education, one of the longest running journals in
education in the United States, published a special issue devoted
to reprinting his early essays on literacy. His books include
Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Second Edition 1996; Third
Edition 2007); The Social Mind (1992); Introduction to Human
Language (1993); The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New
Capitalism (1996, with Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear); An
Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (1999; Second
Edition 2003); What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy (2003); Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of
Traditional Schooling (2004), and Why Video Games Are Good for Your
Soul (2005); and Good Learning and Good Video Games
(2007)
Nelson Smith
President and CEO, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Nelson Smith, a nationally recognized expert on charter schools and education policy, is the President of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. His experience includes senior management positions at the U.S. Department of Education, the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the New York City Partnership, and most recently at New American Schools, where he served as Vice President for Policy and Governance. In 2002, he was appointed by Education Secretary Rod Paige as one of 21 negotiators who developed federal regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act. Nelson is a graduate of Georgetown University and a resident of Washington, DC.
