Join us for our special Opening Night Dinner and Awards Ceremony, featuring a special presentation from College Unbound.
Thursday, October 22 from 6:00-8:30 pm
Adams Room, Palmer House Hotel
Tickets: $100 each; includes a three-course dinner, the Improvising Institutions program from College Unbound, the ASA Award and Prize ceremony, and our Celebration of Authors toast
We open the conference over a shared meal with a conversation about different interventions that are reimagining the landscape of higher education at this political moment. How can we create educational institutions, spaces for deep learning and experiences that respond to the complexity, creativity, and aspirations of the communities they serve?
We anchor our conversation with an exploration of College Unbound—a nontraditional, student-driven institution of higher education for adult learners that serves as a model for imagining new forms of partnership, shared authority, care, and learning together.
The setting over dinner is intentional. At College Unbound, shared meals are part of the structure of learning, creating space for conversation, relationship, and the exchange of knowledge.
“Improvising Institutions” with College Unbound brings together longtime ASA member Adam Bush, President of College Unbound; Bill Ayers, faculty at College Unbound; Cathy Cohen, D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago; and College Unbound students from Chicago to explore what higher education can become when those too often excluded from its institutions become co-creators of them.
Bill Ayers will be in conversation with his students about the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning and the ways educational relationships can unsettle traditional hierarchies of expertise and authority. Cathy Cohen will then offer reflections to inform a dinner conversation about how innovative interventions, such as Scholars for Social Justice’s “Open Universities” and other campus and community learning initiatives across our institutions help us all improvise new forms of teaching and learning in these times.
Don’t miss the evening everyone will be talking about all conference long! Tickets are available here.