Keynotes Offered

This keynote, based on Dr. Picower’s book, Reading, Writing, and Racism, provides educators with tools to take on this responsibility. Using evidence from two decades of teacher education work, this keynote will demonstrate how teachers’ ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach race in the classroom. This keynote examines viral racist curriculum and how it functions to maintain racial hierarchies.  By examining teachers understandings of race undergirding these examples, we are better positioned to make institutional changes that disrupt the permanence of racism in education.

Audience: School Teachers and/or Leaders, Educational Leaders, University Faculty and/or Students

Now more than ever, teachers and leaders must learn to recognize and dismantle racism within school communities, classrooms, and curriculum. This keynote, based on Dr. Picower’s book, Reading, Writing, and Racism, provides teacher educators with tools to take on this responsibility. This keynote focuses on findings from a study of racial justice teacher education programs and the common practices across them.  By examining the who, what, why, and how of racial justice education, this presentation provides radical possibilities for transforming how teachers think about, and teach about, race in their classrooms.  We offer several follow up workshops for this keynote.

Audience: School Teachers and/or Leaders, Educational Leaders, University Faculty and/or Students

The 6 Elements framework is for anyone thinking about how to advance racial justice in education.  It provides a framework of six elements of social justice curriculum design for elementary and/or humanities classrooms. The elements move from students learning self-love and knowledge about who they are and where they come from to learning respect for people different from themselves. Students explore social injustice, learn about social movements, raise awareness, and engage in activism. By addressing all six elements, teachers can support students to develop an analysis of oppression and the tools to take action. The elements help teachers visualize social justice education by providing examples of projects, making social justice in K-6 settings accessible, practical, and achievable   

Audience: Elementary Educators/Humanities Educators/Teacher Educators

Educators often view culturally relevant teaching or teaching for social justice as important but daunting tasks that seem above and beyond what they truly need to practice in order to be effective.  Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers, in particular, can even consider these practices irrelevant for their “politically neutral” content areas.  In this session, Dr. Maloney will make the case for culturally relevant teaching and teaching for social justice in STEM classrooms.  She will share her experiences designing teacher preparation programs with a social justice agenda. Dr. Maloney will focus on how STEM teacher educators can draw on the NGSS standards to prepare their pre-service teachers to begin to develop a practice that uses science to help their students understand and even act on real-world issues of inequity and injustice.  The session will include specific examples as well as a broader framework for thinking about and enacting this work.

Audience: Pre- or In-service STEM Educators/Teacher Educators