Critical Conversations in Urban Education

WELCOME TO CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS IN URBAN EDUCATION

Our Mission

The Critical Conversations in Urban Education (CCUE) Series is the School of Education’s vehicle for critical dialogue and continuing education on issues important to the education of youth in urban settings, including Philadelphia. Through the CCUE Series, we endeavor to effectively frame and facilitate critical discussions related to preparing urban educators, optimizing academic achievement for all students, and fostering university-community partnerships.

Our Vision

CCUE seeks to connect the academic and broader communities together for collaboration, understanding, and support that empower urban schools, educators, families, and students.

Contact Us

For questions about CCUE, email ccue@drexel.edu.

Values

Social Justice and Equity

We work toward activism and change where inequities and injustices exist in urban educational settings and systems. We believe in taking a systemic approach to create individual and societal change that supports the value, dignity and opportunity of every person.

Asset-based

We ground our work in asset-based language, frameworks, and positionalities. We challenge deficit perspectives and see through the lens of possibilities and solutions.

Inclusive

We promote inclusive contexts for learning and teaching. We seek out and celebrate multiple perspectives and voices. We are interdisciplinary in our approach, recognizing intersectionality and diverse bodies of knowledge (across disciplines in the academy, community, practitioners).

Bridging Research and Practice

We believe that research and practice go hand and hand and therefore that research informs practice and practice informs research. We value multiple ways of knowing. We assume an epistemological stance that sees knowledge as a collectively constructed and collaboratively generated. We believe the role of the modern urban university is to relentlessly seek new information and partner in bold ways with diverse stakeholders such as, schools and communities, to apply that learning.

Lifelong and Life-wide

We define education broadly to include pre-K-12, post-secondary, workforce development, and community development.

Communication

We believe that language is a site of struggle, in that words are coded in layers of meaning. The same word can be used to convey different ideas and emotions, to and for different groups of people. Connected to this, we believe that words have the power to define and frame reality. The words that we use to communicate our ideas shape how we see social problems, opening the doors to some possible solutions while closing the doors on others. For these reasons, we believe honest and authentic discussion about critical educational issues is necessary to unpack language and lead to shared meaning. We believe the collective consideration of social issues can generate consensus, lead to action, and result in meaningful and transformative change in urban schools.

Our Role Within Drexel University's School of Education

Our Part

Critical Conversations in Urban Education (CCUE) is the School of Education’s vehicle to facilitate a critical ongoing dialogue between the Drexel community, members of the surrounding communities, and the broader research community. These are discussions related to important issues about the education of youth in urban settings, preparing urban educators and developing university-community partnerships. Since its inception in 2012, the CCUE lecture series events have provided a voice for pressing issues in urban education today in Philadelphia and beyond. We would be honored to have you join us at our next event!

See Our Series

Our events have taken on many formats over the years, for example, keynote speeches, panel discussions, roundtables, exhibit halls, a moderated debate for high school students, a film screening, a creative dance performance, and fireside chats for doctoral students.

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