CASE - Council on American Studies Education

CASE Conference Update

2011-12-20T23:50:46-06:00

We are excited to announce some breakout session presenters that have been confirmed since our initial notice. They include:

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn: “Occupy This, Occupy That, Occupy Everything: Opening the Radical Imagination”
John Alba Cutler: “The Vietnam War and the Poetics of Race”
Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust
An entire theater/drama strand: Lookingglass Theater and The Gift Theatre education department will present multiple workshops on how to incorporate drama into the American Studies classroom.
The Newberry Library will introduce their outstanding new digital collection.

Reminder: December 22nd is the last day to register at the early registration fee of $79. After the 22nd, the fee goes up to $89. Register now.

Break out session proposals are due by January 6, 2012. Submit your own proposal.

CASE Conference 2012: Meet the Keynote

2011-11-30T07:11:22-06:00

We are pleased to announce that John Musial of Lookingglass Theater will be the keynote speaker of CASE Conference 2012: "American Imagined."

As writer/director with Lookingglass, he created The Great Fire, The Grail '97, Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day, and Our Future Metropolis.

Hear his recent discussion with WBEZ on history and myth-making in his latest production: The Great Fire.

CASE Conference 2012: Call for Proposals

2011-11-28T18:57:03-06:00

At the heart of the CASE conference is the opportunity to learn from a variety of local American Studies teachers. Please consider sharing your classroom experience with your fellow teachers. Submit a proposal today.

Please provide all of the following information when submitting your proposal:

1. Presenter name(s)
2. Presenter school
3. Contact person (email address and preferred phone number)
4. Title of presentation
5. Presentation description
6. Equipment needs

Deadline for submissions is Friday, January 6, 2012. Please email all submissions to akrukowski@maine207.org.

Here are possible presentation topics, but we encourage you to submit your own:

Using theater techniques in the classroom
Myth and American society
The American dream
Immigration and migration
Using photography in the classroom
Burnham and his Plan of Chicago
Your own idea!

CASE Conference 2012: America Imagined

2011-11-28T18:50:17-06:00

The 2012 Council for American Studies Education (CASE) Conference, will be convening on February 24, 2012, at the Newberry Library in downtown Chicago. The theme is "America Imagined."

Register now (early registration ends December 23). Even better, submit a proposal for a breakout session (by January 6).

From deCrevecouer to Obama, America has evoked powerful motivation to generations of Americans and immigrants as a physical place and as an imagined space. We have long been a place of myth and promise, tied to place and yet always moving. Imagine the dotted lines tracing the movement from South to North (and back again), East to West, and West to further west. These lines represent those who are looking for the better America, the promise fulfilled.

American history, literature, art, and especially American theater exists in the dramatic tension between the imagined vision of America and the tragic failures of the American reality: individuals, families, and communities struggling to make ends meet in a country that can not or will not live up to its founding creed that all men are created equal.

Consider America as it exists on stage, screen, page, and canvas. Our imaginations are often as large as the physical landscape of this place. From Algren, Wright and Motley to Jane Addams and the White City, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, Chicago has provided particularly fertile landscape for this America Imagined.American Studies provides a rich framework for students to encounter the drama and ambiguity that plays itself out throughout American history and literature. This CASE Conference will challenge us to think about how America has been defined by place, both imagined and real, and how we might engage our students in that dramatic tension in the classroom.

The CASE 2012 Planning Committee is the Maine South American Studies Team.