Words like "love" and "hope" are not used often in educational theory or curriculum guidelines, but they are the words we need to use in an age where increasing numbers of students leave schools without caring about what they have learned. We can find ways to make hope more than just a wish for better days. This program describes how we can reform ideas about learning and knowledge to accommodate hope as a method of change. Dr. Roskelly presents information about the work of teachers in schools in North Carolina counties and across the country who are making hope part of their schools' agendas.

Do you use Windows XP? Do you read for pleasure? Can you fill out a job application? These questions reflect some of the meanings we give to the word "literacy." Our definitions of this term are crucial, for they determine how we view schools and learning, how we assign value to jobs that workers perform, and how we determine social class. Using the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, Dr. Roskelly asks participants to come up with potential solutions on how to confront our "literacy crisis," a crisis not only of reading ability but also of the spirit.

In and out of school environments, enabling groups to work together effectively is important, sometimes vital. And yet, our success in having people speak and listen, think and plan, and produce work together is often limited. This presentation centers on how and why groups , from reading groups in schools to community groups outside schools, succeed or fail. Describing the effects of gender, race, and class on the ways people respond to one another, Dr. Roskelly explores why it is important to encourage the groups we operate within to work together as groups.