Houston

June 25 to 28, 2009

Conference News Update--The Call for Proposals is here! We invite K-12 teachers, community-based educators, students, activists/organizers, artists, parents and academic researchers to submit proposals for workshops, panels, poster sessions and other activities.  If you are interested in proposing a workshop or poster session, click here for proposal guidelines. If you are interested in proposing an academic research paper, click here for proposal guidelines. When you have written your proposal you can submit it online.

Deadline for submissions: January 15 for workshops and poster sessions. January 19 for academic research presentations.

Free Minds, Free People is a national conference that brings together teachers, high school and college students, researchers, parents and community-based activists/educators from across the country to build a movement to develop and promote Education for Liberation. Education for liberation prepares the most excluded, under-served members of our society, in particular low-income youth and youth of color, to fight for a more just world by: 

• Teaching students the causes of inequalities and injustices in society and how communities have fought against them.
• Helping them develop both the belief in themselves that they can challenge those injustices and the skills necessary to do that.
  
• Supporting them in taking action that leads to disenfranchised communities having more power.

Goals
The goal of Free Minds, Free People is to provide a forum for sharing knowledge, experiences and strategies that support the use of education as a tool for liberation by:

• Connecting local community efforts to national education for liberation activities.
• Expanding our network of education liberators by building relationships that cross barriers of geography, race, age, class, gender, sexual orientation, profession and other identities.
• Showcasing a broad spectrum of strategies, including arts, popular education, organizing, dialogue and scholarship, and their related impacts.
• Acting as a catalyst for the continued development of a social movement around education for liberation.

The first Free Minds, Free People took place in Chicago in 2007. For more information on that conference, visit the conference archive.

Registration Fees
We will be offering a fee range to all participants that will make it possible for you to decide how much to pay. The range will start at $15 for youth (21 and under) and $60 for everyone else. The top end of the range is $300, and there will be several levels in between--$100, $140, $180, $220 and $260. We ask you to be as generous as you can in deciding which level is right for you. The actual cost of the conference is $140 per person. If you are able to pay at one of the higher levels, your contribution will help us ensure that the conference is accessible to all members of our community. If all of these levels are unaffordable to you, we still want you to be a part of this conference. Please email Tara (tara@edliberation.org) and we can discuss other options.

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