Civil Rights Expert is Keynote Speaker During Annual Workshop
Margaret Whitt will speak on theCivil Rights Movement as part of the Bennion Teacher's Workshop at USU.
A public lecture by a civil rights expert and advocate will add context to the uneasy state of America’s political and cultural spheres.
Margaret Whitt, writer and editor of widely used classroom material on the Civil Rights Movement, will speak at 9 a.m., Monday, June 26, at the Utah State University Eccles Conference Center, Room 207. Admission is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. Whitt’s speech is entitled “Stories from the Mid-Century South: Martyrs for the Cause.”
The unrest and anger in today’s headlines make this year’s Bennion Teacher’s Workshop timely. Sponsored by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University, the weeklong workshop for K-12 teachers is themed “Literature of Protest: Civil Rights, Democracy and Social Justice.”
Workshop directors Jessica Rivera-Mueller, assistant professor of English and Susan Andersen, a senior lecturer in English, said participants will consider “the role of literature in civil engagement and explore the ethical dimensions of bringing these often-sensitive issues into the classroom.”
While the keynote speech is open to the public, the workshop itself is fully enrolled.
Whitt, the event’s keynote speaker, is a professor of English at the University of Denver. She is the editor of Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement (2006, University of Georgia Press), which includes essays by such authors as John Updike. She’s also the author of another book used widely in the classroom, The Civil Mind (2006, Cengage Learning).
The Bennion Teacher’s Workshop is an annual event funded by an endowment from Ione Spencer Bennion (1908-1997). She was the USU Dean of Women and worked for many years in Logan School District. Herself an activist for education and women’s issues, Bennion intended the workshop to, in her words, “perpetuate democratic principles and explore the concepts upon which democracy is built, the conditions under which it flourishes and the dangers to its existence.”
For more information and for daily updates on the workshop, visit the Mountain West Center’s Facebook page Also, email mwc@usu.edu or call 435-797-0299.
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