Culture Shock

How can we stand up for what we believe when we face social pressure? Work with Lori Eberly to think about how you can use your voice to let others know your needs and to support the needs of people in your school environment.

This workshop will explore the dominant culture beauty standards by reflecting on media portrayals of female beauty and cultural appropriation of Black beauty traditions. How do we as media consumers voice our dissent and recognize the beauty of the Black female body?

How has China adapted communism? How has the system developed politically and socially in the last seventy years.

Work with our keynote speaker spoken word poet Gina Loring to explore your narrative via poetry. This workshop will focus on composing your story and owning it. There will be an opportunity to share your work with other participants.

In 1997 Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act (DwDA). Join us in a session to hear how different clergy and religious functionaries view the act based on their faiths doctrine. Then explore what you believe in a discussion. Will you be left with a deeper understanding of your own view of DwDA? Will you leave with questions? Join us to find out.

Why are women paid less than men? Are women less competitive than men? What are the economic implications of gender differences? Join us to look at the experiments conducted by two economists to discover the answers to these questions and more.

Join us to examine how different cultures look at the euthanasia.

In this workshop discuss how to uncover fake news and bias media sources. You will never look at news and information in the same way. Guaranteed to be an intriguing discussion.

Learn about how societal norms and pop culture skew our ideas about gender, power, and healthy sexuality. Participants will look closely at important statistics and dig into hard conversations that will inspire them to make the world a safer and more respectful place for all genders.

Professor Richard Estes refers to the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) as a "national epidemic." Join us to learn about human sex trafficking and how you can identify predators. Be the difference for a young victim.

What if you had to flee your home and move to a country with a totally different culture and language? How would you survive? Learn about the challenges refugee youth and their parents face when they are resettled to the United States after living for years in limbo, in refugee camps, or other adverse circumstances.

Colorblindness is a rhetoric that has been used to disregard systemic racism. This workshop will use discussion to compare and contrast two systems: Jim Crow and mass incarceration.

An opportunity to choose your own topic and discuss with other conference attendees. Open space is available during workshop session III.

Using historic and current photographs we will look closely and bear witness to these moments by writing poetry.

What do you know about the word "queer"? Join us for this workshop to discuss the meaning of the word and to explore queer theory.

Examine Hip Hop and its connection to social justice. Explore the four elements of Hip Hop and how its use as a tool to challenge oppression and marginalization.

What is the effect of social media on the culture of high schools? Join us to look at some data about social media and to consider how we use it in our schools.

What barriers exist when you do not share the dominate culture? What can communities do to overcome these barriers? What can communities do to overcome strangeness, to get to know and be known?

How would you manage with limited economic resources? This simulation allows you to think about the strategies used by people that are financially under-resourced.

What does it mean to be a student activist? In the first half of the workshop, ​you will take a look at historical student movements around the world and here in the USA. Additionally, ​you will investigate more recent movements such as the wave of activism after the multitude of school shootings over the past few years. In the second half of ​this workshop, we will talk about how we, as students, can be activists today in our local, and national, communities and make an impact. 

Somewhere in San Francisco at this moment, a team of media strategists are playing pingpong while figuring out how to reach you, keep you, and turn you into a narrow market segment. Not kidding. Come learn about the sneakiest tactics, the coolest (read: most duplicitous) companies, and the thin gray line that separates who you think you are from who advertisers want you to be. Unless you're super intentional about what you're double-tapping, it's impossible to know the difference. Don't let the "media" that's in your feed define you: It's time to redefine your feed. 

Join this discussion based workshop to put human faces to the impact of the travel ban. Who is burdened by the ban? Who will benefit from it? How will we as a state and country be impacted?

What do you know about the Chinese education system? What stereotypes might you hold? Come and learn what education is like in China. How is it different from or similar to experiences you have had?

Come participate in a world cafe to discuss how students can create a welcoming experience for recent immigrants to our area during the City of Beaverton's Welcoming Week (September 14-23, 2018). This discussion will include a brief overview of Welcoming Week and the City of Beaverton's inclusion work.

Culture Shock is a student diversity and social justice conference designed by students at OES with the goals of celebrating and learning about cultures and lived experiences while increasing students’ cultural competence via workshops, affinity groups and other experiences.

All US students attend Culture Shock. This year the student planning committee, the Intercultural Student Association, has invited students from Southridge, St. Mary's Academy, Beaverton, De La Salle North, Grant, Central Catholic, Jesuit, Wilson, and Lincoln to attend.

This year we will begin the day with a keynote titled: What narrative are you committed to? Transforming our Trajectories Through Self Awareness from poet, writer, and thinker Gina Loring.

Gina Loring

Gina Loring is a professor, poet, and workshop facilitator. Her extensive professional field experience informs a unique and effective teaching philosophy. She has performed and guest lectured at countless high schools, colleges and universities both nationwide and internationally. As guest artist of the American Embassy under the Obama administration, she traveled to Kuwait, Russia, West Africa, Denmark, Turkey, Greece, Ireland, England, and Tunisia. Of African American, Eastern European Jewish and Muscogee Creek Native American descent, she is currently procuring a poetry workshop series focused on the teenage demographic of post-colonially marginalized indigenous communities throughout the world. She was featured on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry, BET's Lyric Cafe and TV One’s Verses and Flow, and was one of the winners of Queen Latifah's CoverGirl Persona Contest for female lyricists.

With a B.A. from Spelman College and an M.F.A. from Antioch University in Los Angeles, Gina is an English professor in the Los Angeles Community College District, a volunteer creative writing teacher with Inside Out Writers working with incarcerated teens, and the poetry workshop facilitator at the Los Angeles Annual Empowerment Conference for CSEC youth. Additionally, she served as poet-in-residence at Culver Academies and writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. Her work is featured on two De La Soul albums and The Brand New Heavies album, “We Won't Stop,” and she was a writer/performer on Norman Lear’s nationwide "Declare Yourself" poetry tour. For more, visit: www.ginaloring.com