The Architecture of Partnership:

COOPERATION, cOLLABORATION, CONVIVIALITY

21 & 22 April, 2017, Liebowitz Center for International Studies

Bard Center for Early College and Bard College at Simon's Rock

This conference, to be held at Bard College at Simon's Rock, seeks to delve anew into the meaning and promise of partnership in education, to shed light on the structural and infrastructural relations across various conventional divides and distinctions: high school/college, public/private, science/arts/humanities, teacher/student, faculty/staff, teaching/research, content/method, fact/value, policy/politics, community/institution, national/global, among others. This is especially needful at a time where liberal education must respond to rampant scarcities by rethinking needs and resources on behalf of the various constituents of our shared projects. We invite participants and attendees to think about the role and meaning of partnership in their work, the questions that the current social, economic, and political realities raise for them, and the new possibilities for collaboration they enable or necessitate. Our broadest hope is for a conversation that triangulates shared challenges, common desires, and various axes of partnership, in education and its reform.

Day 1 (Friday, April 21) of the conference will be dedicated to exploring visions and models of local and regional partnerships. Conference is free and open to the public.

Day 2 (Saturday, April 22) will be the Early College Summit, involving participants only from across the Bard Early College network, addressing frames of partnership internal to the early college model and the Bard network (including but not limited to innovative responses to the teaching/research divide as we launch our own journal, Process Notes: A Journal of Transformative Learning Ecologies). Proposals for participatory sessions invited from Bard Early College network participants only.

Encouraging plural interpretations of the theme of the conference, we hope for conversations that span: the relation between the liberal arts and inclusive and equitable learning environments; the role of educational and cultural institutions in the community; best practices in local and regional collaboration at multiple levels; partnership across institutional missions; sharing resources for social justice; relation between policy reform and cultural change; relation between philosophies and practices in partnership; relations between sanctuary campuses and sanctuary cities in the current context; creating supportive trans-institutional contexts for study and scholarship.

The Bard Center for Early College is committed to systemic reform in the education of adolescents by pioneering extraordinary learning contexts, and pursuing conversation about who goes to college, where, and when--a crucial and often-overlooked element of the organization of public and private education in this country, with profound implications for entrenched and layered problems of college access, cost, quality, equity, and completion. Enrolling students from all backgrounds into immersive college study after the 10th grade, Bard’s nationally renowned early college programs illuminate the overwhelming correlation between early college entry, successful college completion, and career readiness, informed and guided by deep immersion in the liberal arts and sciences.

Location

Bard Center for Early College
Bard College at Simon's Rock, the Early College