Social Justice PD

Equity work requires building cultures of connection and care that can help us to feel supported, seen, and valued. In this workshop, we will engage in a practice developed by Relational Uprising that can be used on an ongoing basis to create more relationships, support, and possibilities for doing transformative work together. This session serves as an introduction and sets an important tone for our longer-term equity-focused partnerships with schools and districts.

With ongoing tensions in our local, national, and global contexts and increasing anxieties of young people, we believe it’s imperative to support educators and students to navigate polarization in our communities. In our Bridging to Belonging workshops, we explore tensions across social differences and ideologies that are present in our schools and communities and share concrete tools and skills that can support all students and educators to feel a sense of agency and confidence to bridge those differences in a way that centers both learning and care.

In this session participants will reflect on their own social identities, their intersections, and how they show up in their daily experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Through current scholarship and reflective practices, this workshop will explore concepts of identity, intersectionality, socialization, bias, and positionality, illustrating how our own identities impact the ways we come to our classrooms and schools. Participants will engage in reflective conversations that deepen understanding of how their identities connect to relationships with students and communities and how their own self- and social-reflection is essential to supporting more thriving classroom communities.

It’s unsettling to know that our behavior may convey something that contradicts our values and beliefs. In this workshop we will explore the unconscious biases that are a part of our schema for understanding ourselves and the world. We will explore microaggressions, which come from bias and unexamined stereotypes. Microaggressions impact school culture and shape young people’s internalization of stereotypes. Stereotype threat can create serious challenges to learning. We will explore all of these concepts together and will engage in some practice for ways to intervene when microaggressions happen.

In this session, we will focus on ways to build classroom cultures that honor student identities and experiences and support critical dialogue and relational engagement. We will also explore value-based behavior management possibilities to reduce unconscious bias

In this workshop we explore some of the historical and structural forms of racism that impact our experiences around race, today. We will situate ourselves in this history to gain a deeper understanding of our own implicit bias. This awareness is a step towards empowering educators to engage more equity-focused pedagogy.

Experience and explore facilitation techniques for holding brave conversations and dialogue in our classrooms, practice skills, and leave with tools to support classrooms where students learn to exchange ideas and listen with care to different viewpoints. This supports students and educators together to deepen understanding, authentically share experiences, and build affirming communities.

In this session, we will explore the meaning of student agency and its critical role in shaping schools as places of joyful belonging and care. Based on the frameworks of Safir and Dugan’s Street Data, we will engage in conversations to deepen understanding of student agency and practices to both measure and increase it. This session will focus on ways to build classroom cultures that honor student identity and experience through critical dialogue and relational engagement.