Thursday, October 28, 2021 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM CT)
An Indigenous Perspective on Equity and Opportunity in Wisconsin Public Education
Wisconsin is home to eleven federally-recognized tribes. 95% of Indigenous students attend Wisconsin public schools. However, policies and practices that are not culturally-sensitive impact the educational experience of all students. This discussion will address the role of boarding schools in Wisconsin and subsequent historical trauma; continued use of Native American mascots, imagery, nicknames and symbols in Wisconsin public schools and the negative impact, based on peer-reviewed credible research; Act 31 compliance, or lack thereof, in Wisconsin; and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Persons crisis and the role of public education as a tool to combat this ongoing epidemic. This discussion will also focus on addressing culturally-responsive school board policies specific to Indigenous students; the critical role of restorative justice; and the role of public education in closing opportunity gaps to address underrepresentation of Native Americans in many careers.
Finally, this discussion will conclude with a focus on the role of diversity in leadership in public education, including: the need to increase diversity to achieve policies and practices that address the needs of all populations; barriers to achieving diversity in leadership roles in public education; and meaningful actions we can take to achieve leadership that is reflective of society.
Thursday, October 28, 2021 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CT)
The Invisible Line that Divides & Unites Us: Racial Equity as a 21st Century Standard - Humanizing the educational process & establishing 100% engagement
The process of education and globalization are the two most significant 21st century issues that our world faces. In order to address the impact of globalization, a transformation of our educational institution is required. We need to redefine what educational excellence is for each student, whether it is the high end achieving student or the low-end achieving student. We cannot achieve educational excellence for all students without addressing the inequity of certain students. Similarly, we cannot achieve global sustainability for the entire planet without addressing social justice for all human beings.
This session is designed for educators ready to engage in strategies that focus on dismantling systemic oppression. Many of us attend conferences with racial battle fatigue as a result of taking on both institutional and individual micro & macro aggression as others resist the necessary work for a more social just environment. Our motto - Don’t let your passion overcome your purpose. Participants will explore how to navigate their communities in a sustainable approach. Participants will identify differentiated engagement strategies that are culturally responsive to their community.
While oppression manifests uniquely in each community, do not mistaken that oppression is interconnected globally. This means that our liberation is in the global connections we make. What if we then could co-create language for our liberation?
Thursday, October 28, 2021 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CT)
Creating Just Futures: Forecasting for Black Lives
The purpose of this learning journey is to examine the role of futures and forecasting methodologies in actively reimagining and planning for equitable and just futures. Participants will be invited on a journey into the year 2031 as they imagine both individual and collective futures. What kind of educator do you want to be? What would it take to get there? How can educators support students in futuring their own lives?
Participants who attended Professor Winn’s Spring 2021 workshop will see connections but also experience new material.
Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CDT)
Exploring Community Engagement
The relationship that institutions have with the communities they serve is vital in confronting the racial inequities present in today’s society. This relationship has shown to not only have impact on the practice of teaching done in schools, but it contributes to the impact that institutions can have on numerous aspects of a community’s overall well-being. As the social and political landscape of our world continues to shift, our institution’s relationship is seen to become increasingly important in order to remain an effective, diverse, and inclusive institution. In an effort to remain in tune with the needs of the communities while remaining an institution that local communities can turn to and trust, it is important for educators to find ways to fully engage with communities and become a partner working to achieve social equity. By doing so, institutions can ensure that they are fully invested in meeting the needs of those they serve.
To move forward in this direction, it is necessary to better understand what it means to be fully “engaged”. Institutions and communities may have different perceptions, understandings, or expectations of engagement and what it means to be engaged with one another. Until these interpretations are aligned, community engagement will remain ambiguous and ambivalent in both practice and scholarship. This session will explore the concepts of community engagement with particular attention paid to the relationship that educational institutions have with Wisconsin’s Tribal communities.
Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CT)
With Liberty and Linguistic Justice for all: Pledging Allegiance to Anti-Racist Language Pedagogy
The truth is that all Americans speak an English that has been transformed by the language of Black Americans” ~ James Baldwin (1980)
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Black Language (BL) must be a part of teachers’ conceptualizations of multilingualism. BL is a living linguistic legacy, an embodiment of Black culture, and much more than simply a list of grammatical features that veer for White Mainstream English. Thus, for teachers to move toward dispositions and language and literacy pedagogical practices that are inclusive, just, and anti-racist, they must become aware of and interrogate their real trouble with BL through guided and continuous critical, introspective, and reflexivity. After providing an understanding of BL through a sociolinguistic perspective, Dr. McMurtry will engage participants in activities that elucidate concepts that are vital to Black linguistic justice. She will conclude by providing recommendations and resources for how teachers can begin and sustain their journey in committing to anti-racist linguistic justice in educational contexts and beyond.
Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 1:00 - 2:15 PM (CT)
Using a Race Lens in Decision-Making and to Analyze & Revise Policies, Practices, Programs, and Services
A predictable trap for leaders and change agents is to over-focus on interrupting interpersonal microaggressions while ignoring the pervasive systemic barriers to racial equity and inclusion embedded in policies, practices, programs, norms, and services. However well-intentioned, inclusion efforts can fall devastatingly short and allow structural obstacles, unproductive dynamics, and uninclusive dominant culture norms to continue to manifest. In this engaging virtual session, participants will experience and review practical resources to implement in their daily activities to use an Racial Equity Lens to both analyze and revise existing policies, programs, practices, norms, and services as well as keep racial equity and inclusion centered in all planning and decision-making processes.
Thursday, December 16, 2021 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
What Makes ‘Systemic Racism’ Systemic
In this lecture, Professor Bonilla-Silva will explain why and how racism becomes systemic. After defining the concept, he will describe the nature of the dominant racial regime in the USA since the 1970s (the “New Racism”) and its accompanying ideology: color-blind racism. He will then argue that systemic racism is expressed in all institutions in the USA and will illustrate this with an examination of HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities). This discussion will allow him to explain how average, nice white people participate in a mostly habituated way in the reproduction of the racial order of things, which is how “systemic racism” becomes systemic. He will conclude suggesting lines of work to fight systemic racism at the organizational, individual, and collective levels.
Thursday, December 16, 2021 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CT)
7 Steps to Developing your School's Racial Equity Strategic Plan
The purpose of this workshop is to provide K-12 teachers and school administrators with a 7-step framework for designing and implementing a strategic action plan for racial equity within their school or district. During the workshop, participants will acquire a 7-step framework for implementing racial educational equity, with high-level strategies and reflective questions. This workshop is ideal for educators and school admins who are new to the work of strategic thinking/strategic planning for racial equity, and who may need support with designing and implementing a school-wide or district-wide strategy for racial educational equity. Participants will also receive a workbook to be used during the workshop training.
Thursday, December 16, 2021 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CDT)
Building a Social and Emotional Learning Fully Integrated Classroom
Participants will be led through a dissection of a drumming class using the STAY Social and Emotional Learning framework developed by Dr. Yorel Lashley to understand how to create their own plans and foundational routines based on the SEL and academic demands and opportunities in the subject(s) they teach. This workshop will support both educators yet-to-begin integrated social and emotional learning teaching as well educators who have started down that path without fully-integrating SEL and/or establishing youth empowerment as the explicit developmental outcome of all learning.
Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
Our Roles in a Social Change Ecosystem
Deepa Iyer, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Building Movement Project, will lead us in a session to explore the various roles that support social change. This session will give participants a tool to sharpen their roles and strengthen their ecosystems in order to more effectively advance equity and inclusion.
Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Our Experiences, Our Truths: Understanding the Intersectional Lives of Disabled People
When it comes to the largest minority group in the United States and the world, our experiences cannot be overlooked. This exclusion and erasure is especially harmful to the lives of disabled people of color, who are living intersectional lives that must be told fully to capture the unique barriers and triumphs that exist. Centering the experiences of disabled people of color, particularly Black disabled people, is imperative so that freedom and liberation can become reality. As Black disabled Ancestor Fannie Lou Hamer is infamously known to have stated, “Nobody's free until everybody's free.” The injustices we dismantle will be successful once solidarity leads the work that we are determined to do. That solidarity and work must include disabled people of color; no exceptions or excuses will suffice.
Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 1:00 pm - 2:15 PM (CT)
Roots of Social Justice, Healing and Radical Imagination
How do we find ourselves where we are? How do we know where we want to go? In order to fathom the depth and complexity of our current situation, we need to understand something of our history, and its impact on culture and identity. In order to imagine what liberation looks like, we need to address our individual and collective trauma. And so we begin....
Thursday, February 24, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Asking a Different Question
Learn more from Dr. Ladson-Billings about her new book “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Asking a Different Question” (2021) provides a definitive collection of her groundbreaking concept of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). After repeatedly confronting deficit perspectives that asked, “What’s wrong with those kids?," Ladson-Billings decided to ask a different question, one that fundamentally shifted the way we think about teaching and learning. Noting that “those kids” usually meant Black students, she posed a new question: “What is right with Black students and what happens in classrooms where teachers, parents, and students get it right?” This compilation of Ladson-Billings’s published work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy examines the theory, how it works in specific subject areas, and its role in teacher education.
Thursday, February 24, 2022 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CT)
Five Questions for Building Transformative Power
Inspired by the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, this session will focus on five questions for people who are interested in, or already committed to social justice and transformation:
Who am I?
Who are my people?
What do we want?
What are we building?
Are we ready to win?
We will explore each question using self-reflective and group discussions. We will move from the personal to strategy focused questions.
Thursday, February 24, 2022 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CT)
MONUMENTS: How do they show up in my school/organization and what is my role in addressing them?
Since the murder of George Floyd we have increasingly seen the toppling of Confederate monuments around the country. While the removal of these statues is long overdue, their removal is really just the beginning of the antiracist work that is necessary. There are the physical monuments and then there are the monuments that have been erected that reside in my beliefs and behaviors, as well as in systems, structures, practices, policies, and ways of being that perpetuate a racial hierarchy. We will examine monuments as a metaphor and how monuments have been erected in our schools and organizations that continue to perpetuate racialized outcomes. We will explore the question: how do monuments show up in me? My organization? What is my role in naming them and addressing them? What is our collective role?
Thursday, March 24, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality
How do school district leaders respond to demographic change? Why do they take managerial approaches to the equity issues they identify? What are the implications for educational leaders and equity in schools? In this talk, Dr. Erica Turner will address these questions through stories and lessons gleaned from her study of two Wisconsin school districts' efforts to address increasing inequality and diversity while grappling with pressures associated with major economic, political, and demographic shifts that have challenged school districts across the country. Centering race and using the notion of "colorblind managerialism," she explains how and why these two districts--one relatively well off and more progressive, one conservative and more working class--adopt similar, business-inspired policy approaches that do not fully address the inequality and diversity district leaders faced. Indeed, these efforts can perpetuate existing inequalities and advance new forms of racism. But there are ways forward. The talk is based on Dr. Turner's book, Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Thursday, March 24, 2022 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CDT)
Dignity and Embodied Pedagogy
How does it feel to be learning in a liberated space with a liberated educator utilizing liberated learning? During this session, Dr. Liston will journey with educators around embodied pedagogy both inside and outside the classroom that challenges anti-Blackness while also affirming marginalized genders, queer, trans, non-binary, and other intersectional identities. In order to create the equity we seek in institutions and systems outside of us, we must be conscious of and attuned to how equity resonates with us physically, intellectually, and emotionally. This session will raise questions, invite practitioners into a space of conscientious reflection, and offer an opportunity to explore personal and collective embodiment towards liberated futures.
Thursday, March 24, 2022 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CDT)
Advancing Equity in Dual Language Programs
Bilingual and multilingual learners represent one of the fastest growing groups of students in public education in Wisconsin and across the nation. Despite strong and consistent research in the field of education indicating the value of supporting multilingual students’ home languages as part of the instructional practices, school districts have often favored approaches that are deficit-based and ultimately ineffective. In this presentation, Dr. Silvia Romero-Johnson will discuss the role that Dual Language Programs can play in addressing the equity imperative for bilingual and multilingual learning.
Thursday, April 28, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CDT)
Guide for White Women (Educators) Teaching Black Boys
This interactive session introduces the book, A White Women's Guide to Teaching Black Boys. It was created to support White Women (educators) to engage in concentrated, focused inquiry around their relationships with Black male students and the impact on those relationships related to issues of supremacy, privilege, race and oppression. Using stats, facts, testimonials, professional (personal) experiences and video, this session is designed to generate new avenues of reflection and action for White (all) teachers, educators, parents, guardians, mentors and others.
Thursday, April 28, 2022 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CDT)
Calling All Educators to Choose Boldness
If you don’t value equity and justice as an educator, move over. Closing opportunity gaps and ensuring that every student feels a sense of belonging and mattering requires more bold educators who will resist the many forces working against the equitable educational experiences we seek. This session invites all educators, especially administrative leaders, to choose courage in order to shift ourselves and our schools toward becoming the schools our students deserve.
Thursday, April 28, 2022 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CT)
Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges of Teaching Ethnic Studies
Increased interest in anti-racist education has motivated the rapidly growing but politically contentious adoption of ethnic-studies (ES) courses in U.S. public schools. A long-standing rationale for ES courses is that their emphasis on culturally relevant and critically engaged content (e.g., social justice, anti-racism, stereotypes, contemporary social movements) has potent effects on student engagement and outcomes. Our research examining the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) 9th grade pilot ES course provides the first causal evidence of the positive short- and longer-term effects of ES on student’s academic outcomes.
In this session we will discuss the contextual and conceptual background for the development of SFUSD’s ES course and its continued growth. We will also discuss the genesis and evolution of our ES research through a robust Research Practice Partnership (RPP) with the SFUSD. This session will include key insights about the instructional evolution of the ES course and challenges relevant to the successful scale-up and replication in other contexts. We will conclude with a framework for integrating an improvement science mindset (i.e., a supported and recursive cycle of development, implementation, and evaluation) into the expansion of ES in other locations across the country and situating ES in a space of practice rather than as a “culture war” political battle.
Thursday, May 26, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CT)
Disability Justice in the Movement for Racial Justice
Disability Justice is a radically intersectional framework necessary to sharpen our political analysis, clarify our demands, and shape our everyday activism and organizing practice. Disability Justice offers radical and revolutionary ways of reimagining our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the communities where we live, work, and learn. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Disability Justice offers urgent and vital interventions for addressing and ending the myriad harms of race science/eugenics, the medical/carceral industrial complex, and capitalist oppression. Disability Justice enables us to understand and examine interpersonal, systemic, structural, and institutional ableism and its intersections via legacies of pathologization with queermisia and transmisia, capitalism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy. Disabled people at the margins of the margins have always been at the forefront of movements for justice and freedom, building networks of care and solidarity, and creating social and cultural transformations that enable us to experience rest and practice active love as co-teachers and co-learners.
Thursday, May 26, 2022 | 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM (CT)
A Conversation with Darnell L. Moore, Author of “No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America”
What energies are at the heart of survival? What does it take to disbelief the lies that others tell us about ourselves or the lies that we have vowed to believe? What are the costs of living authentically and telling the truth? And how do we write about the messy and beautiful complexities of our lives with an eye toward radical honesty and care?
Darnell Moore, writer and author, will join us for an intimate conversation on the textures of Black queer lives and manhood. Darnell is the author of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award winning memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America, which was listed as a 2018 NYT Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers' pick. Moore is also a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University and a 2019 Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. His writings have appeared in the New York Times Book Review; Playboy; VICE; The Guardian; The Nation; EBONY and other outlets. And he is currently at work on his second book, which is tentatively titled, Unbecoming: Visions Beyond the Limits of Manhood.
Thursday, May 26, 2022 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM (CT)
Teaching When the World Stays on Fire: The Need for Educators’ Political Clarity
Schools in the United States have often been places where systemic, racialized inequities are maintained and reproduced while presumably being disrupted. This paradoxical legacy of schools as sites of inequity and possibility has been on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly visible pandemic of anti-Black racism punctuated by the murder of George Floyd. As the COVID pandemic becomes endemic, like anti-Blackness, we are being challenged to rethink what schools can and should do for young people and the kinds of teaching and learning that will get us there. The choices we make about educational standards, funding, curriculum, instruction, assessment, discipline, and so on, reveal not only our assumptions about what and how children should learn, but also who is capable and deserves to learn deeply and with dignity. In this talk, Dr. McKinney de Royston invites participants to take up a more expansive view of teaching and learning, to reflect upon their own “political clarity” as educators, and to consider what we, as educators, are teaching towards within schools and relative to our respective visions of how society could and should be.
