UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

October 3-6, 2007 Embassy Suites Hotel Charleston, West Virginia

The Conference Planning Team invites you to submit a proposal for the October 3-6, 2007 NNER Annual Conference. We envision a conference that will give us an opportunity for rich and critical conversation about issues related to building and sustaining partnerships. We encourage leaders from the P-12 classrooms and districts, university partners from arts and sciences and education, and community stakeholders to share lessons learned from challenges and opportunities they face in partnership settings as they pursue the work of the NNER. To help center the discussion, we have identified four conference strands:

1) Bridging the NNER’s past, present and future
2) Bridging challenges and opportunities in rural and urban schooling
3) Bridging philosophy and ideology with practice
4) Bridging democratic practice, inquiry and education policy to support simultaneous renewal

Complete descriptions of these strands can be found later in the Call for Proposals, and we encourage you to read those descriptions carefully as you craft your proposal. We recognize that the strands overlap, but we request that you submit your proposal in such a way that it clearly addresses one of the strands in particular. The Proposal Review Committee will be looking closely at the clarity with which you do so and will also carefully consider the degree to which both your proposal and your presentation team demonstrate the collaborative nature of NNER work.

Continuing the tradition of recent NNER conferences, the 2007 event includes, in addition to presentations from member settings, an impressive array of keynote speakers. These include: The Honorable Joe Manchin III, Governor of West Virginia, and Wendy Puriefoy, President, Public Education Network

A Thursday evening Meet and Greet Reception will be our first opportunity for conference participants to catch up with old acquaintances and make new friends. Continuing another NNER tradition, the 2007 event will provide participants with a bit of local flavor, this year a Friday evening visit to the West Virginia Cultural Center at the State Capitol. The evening will include a reception in the Great Hall of the Cultural Center with a welcome and remarks by The Honorable Joe Manchin III, Governor of West Virginia. We will cap the evening with a Mountain Stage performance, a West Virginia music tradition. (http://www.mountainstage.org/). Mountain Stage is one of the nation’s longest running radio-based music programs. The show airs weekly and includes a wide-range of artists and performers. The performance will include the Mountain Stage band and a special selection of musicians who represent genres that have their roots in Appalachian music.

On the business side, time will be reserved for meetings of the Tripartite Council, the Governing Council and the Executive Board. For the third consecutive year, we also will offer a New Participants’ Session for individuals who may be new to the organization and need an orientation to the mission and goals of the NNER. Finally, the 2007 conference will move forward in its third year of recognizing two institutions for their exemplary work in two specific areas by awarding the Richard W. Clark Award for Exemplary Partner School Work and the Nicholas Michelli Award for Advancing Social Justice.

We are particularly pleased that the conference will be held in Charleston, WV. In the context of partnership work in West Virginia, our state-level policy stakeholder support has been critical in building the work of simultaneous renewal across our state that began with the work of the Benedum Collaborative at West Virginia University. Second, the dates of the conference will be during the spectacular autumn colors found in the Appalachian Mountains. We hope that the combination of business and pleasure will make your time in West Virginia a truly rewarding experience, and we look forward to receiving your proposals (due June 14, 2007).

The strands below reflect an effort to incorporate the work of the NNER at an important crossroads in its history. The network has experienced twenty years of sustained growth and progress, and this year’s conference is part of continued growth and success for the member settings. The themes also reflect the importance of what we have learned over that time, what new member settings bring to the conversation, and how the work of the NNER might impact the broader discourse about education practice and policy in our communities, states, and nation. A critical component of this year’s themes is the analysis of how our work might influence education policy stakeholders. The 2007 NNER Annual Conference will give us an opportunity for a focused dialogue around the following themes:

1) Bridging the NNER’s past, present and future
As the NNER begins its second 20 year span of work, there is much to learn from long-standing partnerships in member settings as well as those that are new to the network. This theme focuses on illuminating success stories and models of practice that are key to partnerships and the practices they support. Presenters may choose, for example, to focus on how the philosophical grounding of the NNER and the Agenda for Education in a Democracy presents challenges and opportunities for partnership work as we move rapidly into the 21st century, and as the network moves through its third decade. Presentations might focus on strategies and practices that have been successful, as well as struggles and challenges successfully confronted. In general terms, how can our settings – from the contextualized lessons that have emerged from their work – help to capture what is important about the first twenty years of the NNER, and what are the lessons that will illuminate how to move forward into the next twenty years?

2 )Bridging challenges and opportunities in rural and urban schooling
The challenges and conditions of schools and education in general in urban places has long been part of the national dialogue on American schooling. More invisible have been the same challenges and issues in rural places. There is likely much to learn by looking at these two contexts in conjunction with each other rather than in opposition. Both contexts, for example, face similar challenges in terms of recruiting and retaining teachers. Both urban and rural contexts are challenged in securing adequate and contextually important resources and support given the nature of the challenges each face. Important to practice in both, though, are the critical importance of commitments reflecting the principles of the Agenda for Education in a Democracy and the Postulates that ground educator preparation in the NNER. Presentations may address examples of promising practices that have emerged in either context that provide us with important lessons about the implementation of the work of the NNER in that context. Presentations in this theme will also highlight the ways that successes and models of practice in one context may inform the other and how successful initiatives might cross contextual boundaries. Presentations under this theme might illuminate issues around and provide insights into issues of social justice, equity and access that are linked across rural and urban settings. Finally, presentations under this theme might speak to how the Agenda can play out differently in rural and urban places and what can be learned from the differences.

3)Bridging philosophy and ideology with practice
The work of the NNER is built on a powerful set of principles embedded in the Agenda for Education in a Democracy, the Postulates, and the network’s framework for partner schools. Further, the work in the settings sits in the interface of P-12 schooling, schools of education, arts and sciences, and local community contexts. The NNER realizes its fullest potential when these principles are manifested in educator, institutional, and partnership practices. Presentations guided by this theme will focus on how local settings and partners – including community partners – are making the guiding principles in the mission and the principles of the NNER evident in practical applications. These presentations would include discussion of particular principles at work, how they are manifested, and the artifacts of the work that reflect the nature of their impact. Questions addressed under this theme would include the following: How do we provide examples and portraits of what the Agenda looks like in practice? How do different elements of the Agenda provide seamless connections across setting partners (Arts and Sciences, Education, P-12, communities)? How are pedagogical principles woven across P-12 and higher education? How are the principles of democratic practice reflected in the governance of partnerships, including issues such as parity, equity, integration of resources, power, and responsibility?

4) Bridging democratic practice, inquiry and education policy to support simultaneous renewal
Inquiry is a central component of the work of NNER settings. It serves as a critical tool to understand, critique and enrich the work of simultaneous renewal. Inquiry within partnership settings is also an important component of pedagogy and professional development as it supports access to knowledge, is a form of nurturing pedagogy, serves as a vehicle for stewardship of the work of educators, and is an act of democratic practice.

Inquiry embedded in practice within NNER settings needs to also be centered in the work of building support among stakeholders for our work, including the support of policy makers. This support is critical in sustaining the work itself, but also in ensuring that education policy becomes a constructive force in realizing the vision of the NNER, and that, where applicable, the negative impact of policy decisions is diminished. This is important both in a global sense in terms of systemic education policy at the state and national levels, but also in sustaining local work through local policy. Without better informed systemic policy, the work of settings will always struggle to be more than islands of success and best practice within a sea of limitations and constrained pedagogy. Without better informed local policy, key tools in the construction of systemic policy are lost. Critical to both is inquiry embedded in educator practice.

Presentations under this theme will focus on questions such as the following: How can the work of partnerships provide examples of the potential benefit of collaborative practice and seamless connections across education and community partners? How can examples of setting portraits, cases and models of NNER practice serve as vehicles for policy that sustains simultaneous renewal. How does the work of partnership settings provide narratives and counter narratives to inform current and foreseeable policy that may be on the horizon, and what evidence and artifacts of our work would convince policy stakeholders of the importance of the Agenda for Education in a Democracy, the Postulates, and simultaneous renewal?