EDUCATION RESEARCHER KAREN GALLAS TO SPEAK AT HAVERFORD

The Bryn Mawr-Haverford Education Program and the Feminist and Gender Studies Program, in conjunction with the Haverford Distinguished Visitors Program, will present a talk by teacher-researcher, poet and essayist Karen Gallas at Haverford's Chase Auditorium on Monday, Feb. 28. The talk, to begin at 4:30 p.m., will be preceded by a tea at 4:15. The event is free and open to the public.

Gallas' talk, titled "Teaching as Ethnography? Lessons from a Navajo Kindergarten," proposes that conceptualizing teacher research as ethnography leads to a deep shift in the ways that teachers and students approach instruction, learning and curriculum. Using a description of her work with Navajo kindergarteners, Gallas describes how classroom ethnography problematizes and reconfigures basic principles of literacy learning and teaching.

Gallas has more than 30 years of experience in urban and rural public schools as an early-childhood and elementary teacher. She received her doctorate in education from Boston University in 1981. Her work as a teacher-researcher has focused on the role of the arts in teaching and learning, on children's language in the classroom, and on the process of teacher research.

A poet and a writer, Gallas has written four books describing her work as a teacher-researcher: The Languages of Learning: How Children Talk, Write, Dance, Draw and Sing Their Understanding of the World; Talking Their Way into Science: Hearing Children's Questions and Theories, Responding with Curriculum; "Sometimes I Can Be Anything": Power, Gender and Identity in a Primary Classroom; and Imagination and Literacy: A Teacher's Search for the Heart of Learning, all published by Teachers College Press. Gallas is a hospice counselor for Hospice of San Luis Obispo County in San Luis Obispo, Calif., and is studying depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpenteria, Calif.

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