workshops
Professional Learning for Educators
As an independent consultant, I work with school leadership to identify areas of growth for teaching staff in the areas of culturally competent curriculum building, maximizing project-based learning and student engagement, embracing and facilitating student activism, creating positive relationships amongst staff and students, and cultivating affirming environments. Once areas of growth are identified, I create unique workshops that address these challenges. Through the use of personal case studies, teachers are guided to first analyze their school community’s current conditions. Research-based best practices are then shared to empower teachers and administrators with the tools they need to make tangible improvements in their school.
Teaching is Political: Conversations about Liberatory Education
In this workshop, educators interrogate the ways that residual impacts from generations of structural racism find their way into our classrooms. After unpacking the ways that we intentionally and unintentionally harm students, educators brainstorm ways we can create spaces that begin to undo the psychological harms of racial oppression.
Affirmed: Creating and Maintaining a Culturally Affirming Classroom Environment
In this workshop, educators will confront the unintentional ways that white dominant culture plays a lead role in their classrooms. After considering the power of images, color, language and tone, we brainstorm ways to make our classrooms sites of cultural pride and healing joy.
How to Facilitate Grassroots Campaigns with Youth
A workshop for educators who seek to incorporate a dynamic, effective classroom tool. Organizing campaigns invite students and educators to stay informed, think locally and globally, exercise critical thinking, practice civic-engagement, research, collaborate with local activists and artists, extend learning beyond the classroom, and most importantly, transform ourselves and our communities.
Culturally Responsive Teaching & Culturally Competent Instruction: A Journey
Educators explore CRT and CCI components and frameworks to identify where they are and how they’re progressing on their journey to becoming educators who transcend challenges to support excellence and belonging among all students.
I See Color: Understanding Your Responsibility as a White Person Who Educates Black Students
In this workshop, white educators will confront whiteness as the most salient part of their identity that they must own in a present and historical context. From there, educators will develop their understanding of critical whiteness, consider exercising vulnerability and authenticity, and brainstorm anti-racist teaching practices.
Culturally Responsive Brain Rules for Fostering Connection
Using Dr. Zaretta Hammond's theory and framework as published in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, educators learn the neuroscience behind connection along with culturally responsive practices to foster connection- both positive relationship building and relevant and meaningful connections to academic content that spark students' brains for higher learning.
Customized Workshop
Share your school’s culture, strengths, challenges, circumstances and we’ll work together to devise a strategy to advance equity in a manner that directly addresses your unique needs and desired outcomes.
This was definitely one of the most engaging professional development sessions I have ever participated in... I am pretty sure we all left wanting to learn more!
Em Crespi
Teaching Artist
youth education
Taking Action! Workshop
An introduction to grassroots organizing strategies, this workshop begins with a screening of Change the Name followed by an examination of both the grassroots organizing strategies employed by the Change the Name youth activists and injustices that exist in their communities. Then through a collaborative project, students create a plan for how they would apply these tactics to launch their own campaign to address some injustice in their midst.