ETHICS AND JUSTICE:
UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN CONDITION

World History in the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework

A WORLD HISTORY Symposium

Friday, May 5th and Saturday, May 6th, 2000
Fees and Registration Information
Symposium Highlights

Curry Student Center
Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts

Jointly sponsored by the following organizations:

African Studies Center, Boston University
Asian Studies Curriculum Center, New York University
Center for Economic Education, Bridgewater State College
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
Children¹s Museum: Harvard East Asian Outreach Program and Teacher Center
Choices for the 21st Century Education Project, Brown University Concord Review
Cornell University Southeast Asia Program
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University
Facing History and Ourselves
Five College Center for East Asian Studies
Framingham State College Center for Global Education
Institute of Near Eastern and African Studies
Massachusetts Consortium for Global Education at Framingham State College
Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies
Massachusetts Field Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Massachusetts at Boston
Massachusetts Geography Alliance
National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, Harvard University
New England China Network
New England History Teachers Association
Primary Source
Teachers¹ Center of Global Studies, Clark University
World Affairs Council World History Center, Northeastern University


Symposium Overview

      For this Outreach Symposium, twenty-four educational organizations have pooled their efforts to help teachers convey world history to elementary, middle, and secondary students. This symposium builds upon the success of last year¹s event: Exchange and Conflict: Implementing the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework. Six more centers have joined us and we now have 30 workshops, as well as two keynote addresses.

     By focusing on the theme Ethics and Justice, this year¹s Symposium revolves around key struggles in world history, as people have attempted to create and dominate their surroundings, as well as to share their fruits. Two central questions in sharing the consequences of human labors are ethics (how people should behave toward one another) and justice (how to enforce appropriate, or moral, and fair behavior). These dilemmas of ethics and justice reappear at every scale of social organization and every level of technology. They pose questions of war and peace,and of choices between imposing unity and tolerating diversity.

      The dilemmas in ethics include the relations between men and women, between young and old, between species, between races, between those with resources and those without. The dilemmas in justice include the problems of establishing law and of enforcing it, of economic equity and of just relations between peoples within and between societies. Philosophy and religion, the repository of ideas from which emerge the choices in ethics and justice, are a necessary part of this investigation as they provide two ways in which society has struggled to deal with these dilemmas.

      Sessions at the Symposium will consider the details of ethics and justice in various social situations, and will also illustrate links among these situations across the globe. Sessions will explore how interaction in history has helped to promote these goals or compare how varying societies have risen, or not, to the challenge. As connections are made to the present, these themes will seem all the more relevant historically and currently, as we explore issues dealing with the environment, indigenous peoples, economic distribution, religious identity, and ethnic conflict. Sessions include cases from all parts of the world from ancient Mesopotamia to modern day Iraq and Poland.

      On Friday and Saturday participants will attend a series of workshops appropriate for the grade level they teach or on pedagogical issues of general interest. A late afternoon Friday plenary session, offered by Paul Michael Hill, an Irish human rights activist, who was arrested in London in 1974 on manufactured issues, will bring all participants together to look at issues of ethics and justice in a longstanding conflict in Europe. Saturdays plenary session will move to Africa, as speakers Martha Minow, professor of law at Harvard University, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, member of the Human Rights Violation Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Cape Town, South Africa, discuss issues of ethics and justice there.

Schedule at a Glance

Friday

8:00-8:30 Registration and Refreshments
8:30-9:00 A World History Symposium: The Second Annual Collaborative Event for Massachusetts educators
9:00-10:30 Concurrent Session A
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11:45 Concurrent Session B
11:45-12:45 Informal Resource Sharing. Box Lunch provided
12:45-1:45 Concurrent Session C
1:45-2:00 Break
2:00-4:00 Keynote: Paul Michael Hill
Reception
Wrap-up and evaluation


Saturday

8:15-8:45 Registration and Refreshments
8:45-9:00 A World History Symposium: The Second Annual Collaborative Event for Massachusetts educators
9:00-10:15 Keynote: Martha Minow and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
10:15-10:30 Break
10:30-11:30 Concurrent Session D
11:30-12:15 Informal resource sharing. Box Lunch provided.
12:15-1:15 Concurrent Session E
1:15-2:15 Concurrent Session F
2:15-2:30 Wrap-up and evaluation

Getting to the Symposium

Public Transportation

By subway: Orange Line (Ruggles stop) or Green Line: E (Northeastern stop)
By bus: #1: Dudley to Northeastern
By Car:
via Mass Turnpike: Take Exit 22, Copley Square and bear right. At first traffic light, turn right onto Dartmouth Street, then take the next right onto Columbus Ave. Parking garage is one mile on right: 795 Columbus Avenue.

via Route 3 (North or South): Take Exit 18: Mass. Ave. At the end of the ramp follow signs to Massachusetts Ave. and Roxbury, and then go straight onto Melnea Cass Boulevard. Go about two miles and take a right onto Columbus Avenue. Parking garage is on the right: 795 Columbus Avenue.

Parking is limited at the University, but available in Visitor Parking Lot off of Columbus Avenue ($6.00).