We are living through a moment in time where equity work must be taken on with great thought and attention. We recommend beginning district-wide or school-wide equity work with building a relational foundation and then exploring historical legacies of oppression that are impacting our schools today.

Our Approach to Equity Work in Schools is based on:

• Racially diverse co-facilitation teams
  • Teams are led by Romina Pacheco, Ph.D. and Safire DeJong, Ed.D.
• A Relational approach to institutional and systemic transformation
  • Focused on engaging family and community as partners
  • Support youth / adult partnerships
  • Listening-based methods​
• Using tools that rely on joy and possibilities for transformation rather than shame and blame
• Taking into account a wide range of perspectives and experiences
• Leading for Equity Framework
• Our commitment to building capacity for this work across our state.
  • See more about our Transforming Educations for Social Justice Conference, Building Equity Teams, and Student-Centered Intergroup Dialogue training.. 

CES makes available a wide array of topics and training sessions

All development and training can be customized to meet your school and/or district’s needs.

Some of our most frequently delivered workshops include:

Building a Relational Culture for Equity Work: (3-4 hours)

• Building relational culture supports us to intervene on the ways that oppression creates isolation, suspicion, and trauma. What we will practice during this workshop is a sample of an ongoing practice that groups can use to create more relationships, more support, and more possibility for being able to do transformative work together that imagines something other than the current power relationships we live in.

Historical Legacies of Racism: (3 hours - 6 hours)

• 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.

Engaging Identity in Teaching & Learning (3 hours)

• Understanding who we are, in terms of identity, is empowering for people of all ages. Exploration of identity can serve as a pathway to understanding ourselves in relation to people who are both similar to and different from us. In this session we define what shapes our identities; explore the five identity anchor standards in the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards; and relate how identity has many characteristics and affects relationships within the school building and classroom.

Unconscious Bias, Microaggressions, and Stereotype Threat: Oh My! Introduction to Anti-Bias Education (6 hours or 2, 3-hour sessions)

• 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.

Building Student Centered Classroom Culture: Facilitating Brave Conversations (3 hours)

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

Foundations of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: (5 sessions, 3 hours each)

• This 5-day session will focus on building a foundation for educators to consider Culturally Responsive Teaching/Pedagogy (CRT/P) as an option in their work with students of all backgrounds. The course will center the building blocks of CRT/P in theory and practice; that is, we will be putting into practice CRT/P as we learn about it.  The building blocks include: humanizing relationships, balancing cultural orientations, improving information processing, cultivating academic mindset. 

Gender Diversity at School: (3 hours)

• In this workshop we explore gender diversity on a continuum. We use a storytelling approach to reflect on our own gender journeys (we all have one!). Through this reflection we focus on the skills we have and the skills we need to thoughtfully support trans* inclusion in our school community. The goal of this workshop is to support participant’s engagement in authentic and supportive allyship in schools.