All families, regardless of the language they speak, deserve to meaningfully participate in their children’s education. Promoting language access includes translation and interpretation. Language access also means removing systemic barriers that prevent families from sharing their authentic perspectives, wisdom and lived experiences. This session discusses strategies and challenges associated with providing equitable language access for all families. Practical tools and state and federal resources that schools can use to build their capacity to uplift all family voices will be shared.

Intended Audience: General Audience – Teachers, Counselors, Paraeducators, Administrators, Family Members, Community Members, Middle and High School Students

How could schools shift existing systems/schedules to incorporate student-led dialogues, deliberation and action into the school day? This session describes how Cromwell High School – beginning with an equity audit confirming the need to address equity challenges – formed district and student equity teams, developed a Theory of Action, identified, then implemented a plan aimed at increasing student engagement, with the goal of positively impacting school culture and eventually, student achievement. Participants will learn about the dialogue/deliberation/action model used nationally to train youth facilitators, and students will share how they identified conversation topics, researched materials and planned student conversations. The session also will cover how Cromwell High School ensured sustainability by fitting student-led dialogues into existing schedules, and how district leadership addressed challenges posed by parent, student, and community pushback.

Intended Audience: General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Administrators, Family members, Community members, High School Students

This interactive session seeks to improve upon the current culturally sustaining practices in university-based teacher preparation by engaging all perspectives and roles in the room. Participants will work directly with vignettes to address the question: What will develop prospective teachers’ ability to be a culturally sustaining educator who is an agent for social change? In small groups, participants will investigate standards for social justice learning to build shared understanding, language, and actions for prospective teachers to move beyond introductory diversity work to a multi-year opportunity to further construct their capacity and commitment to addressing systemic and local racial inequities. In addition to providing hands-on resources, the session will end with identifying next steps.

Intended Audience: General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Paraeducators, Administrators, Family members, Community members, High School Students

This session encourages participants to explore their personal and professional identities. It is designed to support greater awareness of how the social-emotional competence (SEC) of adults supports students’ social emotional learning (SEL), not only improving their academic achievement but addressing inequity as well.

Intended Audience: General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Paraeducators, Administrators

School counselors of today and tomorrow have an essential role in promoting equity in schools by employing anti-racist practices. Addressing root causes, interrogating current systems, dismantling systems that are not inclusive and building new multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) is very much the work of school counselors. This session will focus on specific things school counselors can do to reflect on their own implicit bias, analyze student data, and develop effective and nurturing transformational relationships with both their students and colleagues to instill hope and that essential sense of belonging. Case studies and helpful resources will be shared. We will discuss disparities in school counselor ratios, the need to intentionally recruit more school counselors of color to the profession, and the ways counselor preparation programs are shifting pedagogy and curriculum to promote social justice and anti-racist school counseling.

Intended Audience:
General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Administrators, Family members, Community members

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) offers teachers and community leaders a chance to engage students in a meaningful process of inquiry that has the potential to help elicit change and interrupt systemic racism. This presentation will define YPAR pedagogies, offer a historical context of this inquiry process, and illustrate its pedagogy in practice. Furthermore, participants will work together to consider what such inquiry might look like in their local settings. Beyond the possibilities to provide space for historically overlooked youth to exert their voices powerfully about issues that directly impact their lives, YPAR also bolsters students’ academic skills as they become apprenticed as critical social researchers who are in the driver’s seat of the inquiry process. We see this positioning of youth as expert knowledge holders, who have firsthand knowledge of social issues, as important in larger conversations about and interventions around equity, social justice, and anti-racist education.

Intended Audience: General audience – Teachers, Family Members, Community Members, High School Students

Facilitators will lead whole-group discussions regarding preconceptions of conversations of race across curriculum content disciplines. The presentation will then outline research-backed approaches to curriculum design through an equity lens. Participants will work in small groups to discuss curriculum examples from various disciplines that center race in the framing of curricular content, concepts and skills.

Intended Audience:
General audience – Teachers, Paraeducators, Administrators

This session will center practical application of an accountable leadership approach that can be leveraged in schools, districts, and youth-focused settings. Leadership often experience professional learning that is highly theoretical and conceptual, but not relevant to daily decision-making, inevitable structural challenges in schooling, or positioned to move beyond aspiration to implementation. This session will afford folx ways to apply an equity and racial justice lens in their daily roles. What is required is a deep interrogation of self and all societal and cultural advantages that inform how leaders lead, an understanding of the principles and values of equity and racial justice, and a willingness to push back against the status quo to both envision and embody a more liberatory way of leading through accountability. The session will be engaging, resource rich, and designed to position participants with practical tools and strategies to implement the type of leadership our children deserve.

Intended Audience: General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Paraeducators, Administrators, Family members, Community members

“Blues and Beyond” engages audience members by illustrating how to help students better understand and connect to our country’s history and culture through the power of music. It uses the universal language of music combined with the opportunities presented by digital technology to promote historic awareness, social emotional learning, and anti-bias and anti-racism education. During the interactive workshop, Eric and guest musicians will share their talents and teach minority American history through the context of music. Illustrating the impact of music on culture through the decades, the workshop will illustrate how the music and events of our past influence and shape our society of today. The workshop will include:

• Live, interactive discussion with a narrator and world-class musicians
• interactive videos including historic photographs, video footage and performance highlights
• Gullah and Geechie culture Lesson Plan
• West African Music and the influence on modern day popular music genres

Intended Audience:
General audience – Teachers, Counselors, Paraeducators, Administrators, Family members, Community members, Middle and High School Students