Facilitators:
Tiah Barnes (she/her/ella) & 
Steve Quester (he/him)

Essential Question:
How does my own identity impact my engagement with young people and the communities I serve?

Target Audience:
Educators and professionals that engage with young people

Workshop Description: 
This workshop will guide participants on a personal introspection of how experiences and identities impact engagement in a racialized society. Participants will experience interactive activities that will explore their identities to help strengthen connections with the communities they serve. Attendees can expect to experience personal stories, explore their own identities and walk away with tools to enhance authentic connections.

Facilitators:
Keturah Proctor (she/her) & 
Jillian McRae (she/her)

Essential Question:
How do we use ABAR theory and pedagogy as educational practice?

Target Audience:
K12 Educators

Workshop Description: 

The workshop is designed to help educators develop a foundational understanding of anti-racism, defined as the active process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, policies and practices, and attitudes, so that power is redistributed and shared equitably. Our broad goal is to center teaching practices and concepts that are anti-bias, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive in order to help educators become more culturally responsive to student needs. This experience will provide participants with a deeper understanding of theory and pedagogy. Our purpose is to continue to uphold our commitment to disrupting and dismantling oppressive structures within education while  creating learning experiences that center joy, students’ lived experiences, and authenticity.

Facilitator: 
Jeremy Chan-Kraushar (he/him)

Essential Question:
How can a better understanding of the history and justifications for the concept of ‘race’ empower us to dismantle racism’s enduring ideologies and legacy today?

Target Audience:
Everyone

Workshop Description: 
Join the session for an interactive and challenging exploration of the ugly history of race and racism in the American context. Gain an understanding of the basic underpinnings and lasting ideologies behind the pseudo-scientific concepts of race and racism, most of which have been intentionally obscured or erased by those intent on hoarding wealth, privilege, and power. Confront your own pre-existing views on race and racism with under-taught truths from history.

Facilitator: 
Paul Forbes (he/him)

Leading with Hearts and Minds

Essential Question:

Why are we not seeing more progress and traction in the area of DEI and racial justice? Why does it feel like we are barely making incremental changes and merely "tinkering around the edges"?

Target Audience:
Everyone

Workshop Description: 
To truly commit to equity and racial justice in schools and communities, we must first be willing to examine and address our bias-based beliefs…"the work behind the work". During this interactive and engaging session, participants will learn about implicit bias and how implicit bias manifests daily in our personal and professional life. Participants will come to understand how we can hold egalitarian values while simultaneously behaving and creating policies that do not reconcile with those egalitarian views and we will see how that can then lead to inequitable and disparate outcomes. 

While we cannot eliminate our implicit biases, participants will learn 5 strategies that can be implemented to mitigate the effects they have on our practices, policies, procedures, and behaviors.

Facilitators:
Nakeeba Wauchope (she/her) &
Luis Alejandro Tapia (he/him)

Essential Question:
How can we operationalize a framework of liberation through the arts using our own socio-political context and multifaceted literacies?

Target Audience:
Students & the educators & adults who serve them

Workshop Description: 
This interactive and arts-based workshop will provide a platform for participants to examine the transformative POWER of youth culture through an equity lens. This experience will allow student participants the opportunity to access and utilize their own socio-political context and multifaceted literacies as the framework for liberation through the arts. Participants will engage in activities centered around their own "literacy banks" to articulate and translate change by design as creatives.

Facilitators:
Cathleen Antoine-Abiala (she/her)
ANYANWU 

Essential Question:
What does it mean to collectively matter outside of an oppressive narrative/structure?

Target Audience:
Black Folx

Workshop Description: 
Pan-Africanists and Racial Justice Strategists Cathleen Antoine-Abiala and ANYANWU have designed an explorative practice which curates a container for Black Folx to hold one another. This is a space for realization and generative healing through collective connection. Beyond Black History Month Collective Model (BBHMC) has been curated for Black People to have independent self reflective and restorative engagement for visioning freedom and acting on what our healing has taught us. This container is an honest response to the Black perspective needing opportunity to seek out answers to the question “how can I make a better space for myself, community and the Black youth I serve?”  Through this model’s use of media, art, literature, collective consciousness and practices of deepening engagement we generate indigenous teachings of love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth.  These steps in collective development are precursors to having collective action among different intersectional identities, experiences and needs. 

One of the most essential belief systems at this time for us as Black People is to have a relationship with the authoritative narratives that belong to us and the freedom we contain within ourselves. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, she wrote, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”  In this session, participants will receive a guide to the BBHMC Model, a developmental practice grounded in Black History as an act of resistance. Through engagement with this model, Black People will have an opportunity to imagine what it means to cultivate a Black experience based in liberatory impact and through cooperative freedom practices.

The BBHMC Model invites the following Cycle of Freedom Claiming for self and Black collective: 

1. Visioning & AfroFuturism 
2. Reclaiming Wholeself 
3. Building through Practice
4. Freedom Practice & Action

Facilitator: 
Megan Ohlssen (she/her)
Sahba Rohani (She/Her)

Essential Question:
How might we cultivate a deep sense of belonging in all staff and how might that impact students?

Target Audience:
Educators, coaches, leaders, systems leaders, organizations

Workshop Description: 
Think about a space where you feel a deep sense of belonging. Now think about a space where you feel the opposite - a feeling of being othered. In what ways do we create or maintain systems and practices that further those feelings within students and staff? Belonging is more than an invitation. Belonging is greater than inclusion. To cultivate a deep sense of belonging in all staff and students - including students with disabilities, we need to prioritize an anti-bias, strengths-based culture across our school community.

Facilitators:
Régine Romain (she/her) &
Lyrica Fils-Aimé (she/her)

Essential Question:
How do we decolonize our imagination and broaden our approach to inclusive storytelling?

Target Audience:
Everyone

Workshop Description: 

“If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison

“Any time we eliminate or wall off certain narratives, we are not getting a whole picture of the world in which we live. ” — Jason Reynolds

Anyone with a story can write a book, but no one can write your story. Your family’s history, ethnicity, and unique background need to be seen and heard. Art and writing can be tools to help us unlearn colonial thinking and release internalized colonial practices. Writing and reading remains our best avenue for directly and profoundly accessing the perspectives of those different from us. 

CRSE and student centered learning environments broaden representation and narrative. In complex, multicultural, and multilingual societies like our own, literature allows us to develop empathy and illuminate a path forward.  This writer’s workshop seeks to decolonize our imagination and broaden our approach to inclusive storytelling.