In this special episode of the Forum podcast, we talk with Paul Neimann, one of the originators of the Forum.
He and his wife Diane moved to Minneapolis in the 1970s and believed their new home deserved a great speaker series. That idea became the nationally renowned Westminster Town Hall Forum.
Diane passed away in 2019. But Forum director Tane Danger sat down with Paul to learn more about the origins of the Forum. Where did the idea originally come from? Who was it intended for? Was the Forum always free? How did they find the first speakers?
The Forum has now hosted hundreds of speakers and touched hundreds of thousands of hearts and minds. That's in no small part thanks to Paul and Diane Neimann's efforts more than four decades ago.
Please, enjoy this short history of the Forum's earliest days. And join us in thanking Paul and Diane Neimann for helping get this treasured program started.
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In this special episode of the Forum podcast, we talk with Paul Neimann, one of the originators of the Forum.
He and his wife Diane moved to Minneapolis in the 1970s and believed their new home deserved a great speaker series. That idea became the nationally renowned Westminster Town Hall Forum.
Diane passed away in 2019. But Forum director Tane Danger sat down with Paul to learn more about the origins of the Forum. Where did the idea originally come from? Who was it intended for? Was the Forum always free? How did they find the first speakers?
The Forum has now hosted hundreds of speakers and touched hundreds of thousands of hearts and minds. That's in no small part thanks to Paul and Diane Neimann's efforts more than four decades ago.
Please, enjoy this short history of the Forum's earliest days. And join us in thanking Paul and Diane Neimann for helping get this treasured program started.
Emily Hanford: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
Westminster Town Hall Forum
55 minutes 58 seconds
2 years ago
Emily Hanford: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
Senior correspondent for APM Reports Emily Hanford speaking at the Westminster Town Hall Forum.
For more than a generation, schools across the U.S. embraced a specific methodology of teaching kids to read. The problem? Cognitive scientists had proven decades before it didn’t actually work. In her award-winning podcast "Sold a Story," Emily Hanford investigated the influential authors who promoted this idea and the company that sold it to schools across the country. She spoke at the Forum about what that has meant for millions of kids and what it says about education in the United States.
Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and producer for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative reporting group at American Public Media. Her work has appeared on NPR, in The New York Times and other publications. For the past several years, she has been reporting on reading instruction. Her 2018 podcast episode “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?” won the inaugural public service award from EWA.
This program was recorded in front a live audience at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis on September 12, 2023.
Learn more about the Westminster Town Hall Forum at our website: www.WestminsterForum.org
Westminster Town Hall Forum
In this special episode of the Forum podcast, we talk with Paul Neimann, one of the originators of the Forum.
He and his wife Diane moved to Minneapolis in the 1970s and believed their new home deserved a great speaker series. That idea became the nationally renowned Westminster Town Hall Forum.
Diane passed away in 2019. But Forum director Tane Danger sat down with Paul to learn more about the origins of the Forum. Where did the idea originally come from? Who was it intended for? Was the Forum always free? How did they find the first speakers?
The Forum has now hosted hundreds of speakers and touched hundreds of thousands of hearts and minds. That's in no small part thanks to Paul and Diane Neimann's efforts more than four decades ago.
Please, enjoy this short history of the Forum's earliest days. And join us in thanking Paul and Diane Neimann for helping get this treasured program started.
