Current list of confirmed workshops
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| Community-Involved Special Education | |
| Educators and communities need to develop a united front against racist and classist outcomes of special education policies and procedures. This front struggles for special education that is constructive rather than deficit-oriented, democratic rather than authoritarian, and equity-based rather than “politically neutral.” Capitalist society includes elitist interests in privatizing public education, which spell disaster for the most vulnerable young people, especially students of color with special needs who are economically disadvantaged. Our workshop, with audience participation in groups, hopes to convey how grassroots organizing is the only effective response against this draconian agenda and for a democratized special education curriculum. | |
| Jessica Magnusson is a first year grad student with a background in serving individuals with mental health and developmental disabilities.Will Ehrenfeld helped design and cofounded a unique secondary school in central Brooklyn, where he teaches history and coaches soccer.Mark Abendroth, a former social studies and ESL teacher, is assistant professor of teacher education at SUNY Empire State College. | |
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Contemporary Art in the Classroom |
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| The Artist in Public Space: What are artists responsible for?This session will introduce educators to strategies for using contemporary art in the classroom as a means to empower youth to think critically about social issues. Through inquiry strategies, interactive activities, and introductions to projects by artists who negotiate public space in their practices, teachers will learn fun and engaging ways to help students develop their own cultural perspectives. | |
| Audrey Hope is Associate Educator, High School Programs at the New Museum. |
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Beyond Diversity: The Compelling Case for Antiracist Education |
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| Natania Kremer, LCSW, MSEd has infused a commitment to racial justice and equity into her professional roles as social worker, educator, early childhood mental health consultant, supervisor, consultant and diversity trainer.Esther Hatch is co-founder/director of the Independent School Diversity Network (ISDN), an organization dedicated to connecting schools, educators and families to create equitable and inclusive educational communities.Onaje Muid, MSW is a social work administrator concentrating on historical trauma, healing and reparation – especially rehabilitation of African and indigenous peoples – from human rights abuses.Erika Bernabei holds a Masters in politics and education from Teacher’s College and currently works on the Promise Neighborhoods Institute (a resource for communities advancing opportunity and academic achievement for children and families), a program of PolicyLink, a national research and action institute for economic and social equity.Dr. Fatima Hafiz, PhD. Is a Professor of Urban Education at Temple University and chief executive officer and founder of Transformative Education Associates, which facilitates workshops for organizations and city and state governments in reducing violence and building effective relationships within and among communities.Megan Campbell is pursuing a Master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University focusing on Family, Youth and Children and International Welfare and Services to Immigrants and Refugees, and is co-leader of the Transnational and Asian Pacific Islander (API) Caucuses. | |||
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Contesting the Neoliberal Infiltration into Teacher Education |
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| This workshop proposes to facilitate a deep exploration of one of the manifestations of the neoliberal attack on public education through teacher education reform, the Teacher Performance Assessment, and to examine and learn from resistance to this reform. Led by members of the activist group, Can’t Be Neutral (UMass Amherst), who have actively opposed the incursion of the Pearson-Stanford TPA in the UMass Amherst teacher education program. | |
| Nini Hayes is an educator, activist, and doctoral student in Social Justice Education at UMass Amherst.Javier Campos is an educator, activist, and doctoral student in Social Justice Education at UMass Amherst.Barbara Madeloni is an educator and activist living in western Massachusetts.Dani O’Brien is an educator, activist, and doctoral student in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at UMass Amherst. | |
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The Power of Peers |
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| This workshop uses stories written by teens and young adult literature to facilitate experiential learning activities and discussion around issues relevant to adolescents. We will review excerpts of youth-written stories, practice facilitating discussion around those stories and reflect as educators on how to best use these strategies with our students. The session will use the Real Stories curriculum that consists of active, opening activities to get participants thinking about the topic, a reading of the youth-written story or young adult novel excerpt, facilitated discussion and more experiential learning activities that help participants to ask questions, express their thoughts, hopes and fears, develop their ideas and consider various perspectives. | |
| Lissette Gomez is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, staff and curriculum developer, and the Vice President of Development Without Limits.Eric Gurna, President and CEO of Development Without Limits, sets the organization’s vision and hosts the podcast Please Speak Freely. | |
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| Addressing Xenophobic Bullying of South Asian & Muslim Youth | |
| It is critical for educators to develop an understanding of the particular historical and contemporary effects of common phenomena such as xenophobia and racism on diverse communities to develop authentic and robust forms of inclusion and solidarity in schools. Xenophobia has become particularly acute for youth of South Asian descent in diverse locales in the post-9/11 context. This workshop presents the curricular and pedagogical strategies for educators in school and after-school settings seeking to interrupt Islamophobia and xenophobia, specifically targeting and exclusion of youth from South Asian and Muslim communities. | |
| Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher is a Senior Lecturer at University of Pennsylvania, and conducts research within the US and in Muslim majority contexts.Karishma Desai is a doctoral student at Teachers College, and works as a staff developer and curriculum specialist in Queens. | |
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MEET THE AUTHORS SERIES Teaching History through Biography to a New Generation of Changemakers |
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| In the tradition of Howard Zinn, the 101 Changemakers book is a classroom resource that offers a “people’s history” version of the lives of people who have shaped the United States. The workshop aims to provide teachers and students (5th grade and up) with new ways of understanding how history is written—and made. Presenters will highlight how to use the text in curriculum and offer a student’s perspective on why the book is useful in learning history. | |
| Pedro Lahoz Wolfe attends the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering and is on the board of IndyKids.Dao X. Tran is an editor based in the Bronx whose latest coedited work is 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History. | |
| School Communities and Restorative Justice | |
| Teachers Unite members and allies will lead a session about Restorative Justice in the context of schools. Presenters will speak about the history of school discipline and the political context of the school-to-prison pipeline and will model a restorative practice with participants. Then the group will talk about ways to bring restorative justice to our individual classrooms and schools as well as ways to engage with a campaign to end student pushout and the criminalization of youth of color in NYC and across the country. | |
| Presenters are members and allies of Teachers Unite, an independent membership organization of public school educators supporting collaboration between parents, youth and educators fighting for social justice. | |
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Active Listening for Social Justice |
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| While we fight identity-based inequalities by trying to make systemic change, we also need to bring anti-oppression principles into daily interactions. How can we actively communicate abstract ideas like “respect” or “openness”? At this workshop, you’ll learn concrete verbal and non-verbal techniques that work immediately to address power differentials within groups and improve one-on-one communication. Whether you are a teacher, student, or activist, you’ll learn how to improve your effectiveness by communicating to others that you value them as human beings, a central task of building strong relationships and equitable communities. | |
| Pippi Kessler is Program Director at Ma’yan where she runs programs for teen girls and workshops for parents and educators. | |
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Bringing Social Studies to Life: Using Theatre in the Classroom |
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| In this workshop, we will share our experience in elementary classrooms using theatre-in-education or process drama as a tool and framework for exploring stories of the struggle for social justice in our world. This session will be on-your-feet and interactive as participants experience a 1-hour long process drama that will include many drama conventions that can be used in an elementary classroom. Participants will experience how theatre in the classroom invites students to see themselves as active participants of history, not merely observers, as they take collective action to solve problems and enact solutions. | |
| Kelli Holsopple is an educator for InFlight Program, collaborating with teachers to bring social studies to life through theatre arts.Elaine Chu is 4th grade teacher with 10 years of experience integrating drama, writing, math, and reading into social studies curricula. | |
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Educators of Color: A Culture Circle Discussion |
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| The NYCoRE People-of-Color (“POC”) contingency is a group of educators of color, working in a variety of capacities throughout New York City. Racism, feelings of isolation, accountability, the push for privatization, and school closings are but a few of the mechanisms at play that affect educators of color in very specific ways, creating unique struggles. The NYCoRE POC group would like to engage participants in a conversation about the important need for safe spaces for educators of color against the increasingly demoralizing political backdrop. Furthermore, we will be challenging participants to consider the importance of the presence of educators of color in schools. | |
| Maria Ponciano is a Bilingual Special Education elementary school teacher and has been involved in NYCoRE since 2011.Jennifer Phuong is an English teacher who works with students with disabilities at Midwood High School at Brooklyn College and has been involved with NYCoRE since 2011.Laura Kaneko is a Masters candidate at Teachers College studying Bilingual and Bicultural Education and has been involved in NYCoRE since 2011. | |
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SCREENING ROOM SERIES: |
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| Join the Venceremos Brigade in watching a documentary featuring present day interviews with women who volunteered to teach their country to read in 1961. With archival footage and still photos from the US, Catherine Murphy has begun the recording of an oral history of one of contemporary Cuba’s greatest achievements.The Venceremos Brigade is a coalition of young people formed in 1969 as a means of showing solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by working side by side with Cuban workers and challenging U.S. policies towards Cuba, including the economic blockade and our government’s ban on travel to the island. The oldest Cuba solidarity organization in the world, the VB has never requested permission from the U.S. government to go to Cuba–and never will! We have much to learn from Cuba and the best way to do that is to travel there and see for ourselves! | |
| Members of the Venceremos Brigade. Natalia Ortiz has been organizing with the Brigade since her first trip to Cuba in 2008. She is an educator and believes that all teachers should experience Cuba for themselves.Kathe Karlson has gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade over ten times. She is an experienced organizer and social worker in one of New York’s public schools. | |
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Tell a Story, Hear a Community: Community Building and Storytelling |
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| With such violence, alienation, and injustice in the world, storytelling and story sharing can be an act of radical healing and is a necessary step in creating effective and humane educational spaces. Members from the ACTION Project will lead workshop goers in writing and storytelling exercises around the central questions: What builds community? What breaks down community? Participants will share personal stories and have an opportunity to hear how the DreamYard ACTION Project builds community with its participants. Workshop goers will also have an opportunity to ask questions about their own practice and contribute their ideas, expertise, and solutions. | |
| The Legacy is the newest group of DreamYard ACTION participants. They are sophomores from a variety of schools and are united by a commitment to social justice and art-based activism. They have participated in public actions, street performance, guerilla art, and this will be their first workshop presentation. Each Saturday and for an intensive month in July participants investigate social issues, root causes, and personal connections. They make art that “speaks” to each other, their community, and their world. | |
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| Addressing Structural Inequality Through Student Assignment & Admissions Policies | |
| Emphasizing how segregation and inequality affect access and opportunity in NYC, activists, scholars, and advocates will share experiences and perspectives on the following questions: How can educators and families help create schools that reflect, respect, and serve all our communities? How can we make sure that all of our students get great educations, regardless of family resources and/or connections? How and why should we challenge segregation and inequality? What is being done, locally and nationally, to create assignment plans admissions policies and that are equitable, fair, and transparent? What resources are available for people who want to support this work? | |
| Gina Chirichigno is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Coalition on School Diversity and co-directs One Nation Indivisible. Yasmin Secada is an organizer with the Parent Leadership Project (PLP) and The Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing (PARCEO). Currently a sophomore at Guilford College, Alexandra Haridopolos was part of a group that organized for a more equitable admissions policy to be adopted at her high school, and now belongs to a student group working to adopt anti-racism training and multi-cultural education as a part of students’ required curriculum. Damon Hewitt is Director of the Education Practice, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Dennis Parker is Racial Justice Program Director, ACLU | |
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No Papers, No Fear! Undocumented Student Rights |
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| Feeling safe is crucial to any student’s success. Anti-immigration laws in Arizona have instilled fear in underrepresented communities. Xenophobic sentiment led to the banning of ethnic studies in public k-12 schools. Learn how students, educators, parents, and community members in Arizona are fighting back to protect the rights of underrepresented students and undocumented youth. | |
| Sandra Castro is an activist, community organizer, and graduate student in the Human Rights Program at Columbia University.Nuvia Nevarez is an activist and graduate student in the Educational Leadership Politics and Advocacy Program at NYU. | |
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Making Media, Shaping History |
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| This workshop will allow participants to explore the power of media in reflecting and shaping our society. We’ll look at our historical past to help inform our current and future media work and place our work within the larger social justice movement. Participants will be immersed in thought provoking conversations through games, media viewing and by engaging with our interactive Media History Timeline. Global Action Project (G.A.P.) is currently embarking on transforming this workshop into an accessible online tool for media makers, educators and organizers. Your participation will support the development process of this online tool. | |
| Global Action Project (G.A.P.) is a social justice youth media organization that work with young people / communities most impacted by injustice. The presenters of this workshop are youth producers and educators that have shared G.A.P.’s media literacy and media justice curriculum to organizers all over the country. | |
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Uncovering bias to transform pedagogies in racially diverse classrooms |
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| In this session, participants will engage in activities that examine their personal experiences and thinking about the racial backgrounds of their students so they can make an action plan for specific steps they can take to support a classroom community that is responsive to the diverse racial backgrounds of its students. | |
| Mira A. Carberry lives in San Francisco, organizes with the Teachers 4 Social Justice, and teaches 3rd grade at a dual-immersion school in the Mission District. | |
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Transforming Schools into Safer Spaces for Undocumented Youth |
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| This workshop will provide tools to understand the larger political, social and economic context that shapes how undocumented youth navigate NYC schools, and to improve how educators can support youth entangled in our broken immigration system. | |
| Members of the No Human Being is Illegal ItAG who have met weekly to discuss the critical issues that undocumented youth and families face in New York City and to explore and develop tools for transforming NYC schools into safer spaces for immigrant youth. | |
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Developing a Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Your Practice |
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| This workshop will focus on exploring the role of culturally-relevant pedagogy in building equitable educational communities. Participants will begin to construct a shared understanding of culturally-relevant approaches to pedagogy by examining the work of scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings as well as concrete examples of culturally-relevant pedagogy in living schools. Participants will have an opportunity to begin to develop strategies for integrating culturally-relevant pedagogy into their own practice. We will also discuss the ways in which we, as school-based educators, consider the communities in which our schools reside and build our work in partnership with those communities so that culturally-relevant pedagogy is not kept inside our classrooms. | |
| David R. Rosas, a native New Yorker, works in education to foster critical consciousness and self-determination with young people. Mónica Amaro is from the Mexico/U.S. borderland and former Xican@ Studies teacher in Tucson. She has over 10 years experience as a middle school teacher and a proud mother of two native New Yorkers. Rachel Seher is on the leadership team of City As School, a New York City public school that provides an experiential approach to learning for young people who have struggled in traditional academic settings; she also teaches courses in research for educational change at Bank Street College of Education. | |
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MEET THE AUTHOR SERIES: NYCoRE Affiliated Authors on Educational Justice |
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| Meet the Authors is a new feature of the NYCoRE conference. The session highlights six NYCoRE-affiliated authors who have recently published books on education and activism. Participants will listen to authors of such pivotal books as Growing Up Hip-Hop, The Future of Schools, Youth Held at the Border, Practice What You Teach, Critical Small Schools and Police in the Hallways as they discuss their work and activism. Audience participants are encouraged to engage in dialogue with the authors and community members on key issues in educational justice and strategies for mobilizing for social change for public education. Immediately following the panel, authors will be available to sign their books. | |
| kahlil almustafa is a poet and educators who has written five collections of poetry, including Growing Up Hip-Hop, which is used in more than forty classrooms nationally. Maria Hantzopoulos author of Critical Small Schools, is an Assistant Professor of Education and Coordinator of Adolescent Education Certification at Vassar College. Chapter contributors Rosa L. Rivera-McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Lehman College CUNY and Alia Tyner-Mullings is a founding faculty member and assistant professor of sociology at The New Community College at CUNY. Leigh Patel author of Youth Held at the Border, is a sociologist, educator and writer whose work advocates for low-income communities of color. Bree Picower is the author of Practice What you Teach, an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University and a core member of NYCoRE. Lois Weiner author of The Future of Schools, a former high school teacher and union activist, is an internationally-known scholar on urban teaching and teacher unionism. |
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Meet the Authors Series: |
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| Educators who have shown courage resisting current profit-driven educational policies will share their stories and strategies of hope. These contributors to “Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education” and its website will describe how they’ve crafted inspired learning for students despite dehumanizing educational policies, as well as how they’ve built alliances to organize to reclaim public education for the public good. Workshop participants will share their own stories of resistance and hope. All will engage in a dialogue about ways we can build on these initiatives to collectively work for educational justice and strengthen our connections to one another. | |
| Lee Ann Bell: Teacher in the Barnard College Education Program, a social justice oriented program where undergraduates student teach in NYC public schools. Sam Coleman: NYCoRE and Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) Brian Jones: CUNY Graduate Center and Movement of Rank and File Educators Jessica Klonsky: English teacher at International High School at Prospect Heights Edwin Mayorga: NYCoRE and CUNY Graduate Center Brett Murphy – US History teacher at Sunset Park High School Nancy Schniedewind: Co-editor, “Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education” and Coordinator, Masters Program in Humanistic/Multicultural Education, SUNY New Paltz. | |
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A Social Justice Response to the Common Core |
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| Everyone is feeling the pressure to fully incorporate the Common Core into their teaching in preparation for state testing. How does one meet the standards-driven expectations while maintaining the integrity of a social-justice oriented curriculum? In this student-driven workshop, you will hear from a group of 5th Graders on a unit that does just that. These amazing kids will be sharing their work in a Social Studies and Literacy unit on Upstanders during the Holocaust. Participants will watch a video of students working in the classroom and then participate in a round-table discussion led by the students. | |
| Abby Emerson is a 5th Grade Teacher at La Cima Elementary Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She is also joined by a group of 5th Graders. | |
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Creating Together(ness): Dialogue using Theatre of the Oppressed |
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| We are not all the same! We cannot achieve unity by feigning invisibility of our differences or ignoring social inequities. Instead we must creatively work to dismantle the systems of power that divides and oppresses. Using Theatre of the Oppressed activities, we can deconstruct the frames by which we divide ourselves and build a better understanding of how we can achieve unity. Through games and theatrical exploration, participants will collaborate together in creative dialogue to examine systems of privilege and oppression and craft possibilities towards liberation—all while having a lot of fun! | |
| S. Leigh Thompson is a social justice artist, critical educator, raging queer, and the Executive Director of The Forum Project. | |
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Exploring Intersectionalities: How your identity affects your process. |
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| Inspired by conversations from the NYCORE ITAG: Listening to Marginal Voices: Exploring Queer Latino Male Identity, this workshop will have participants explore aspects of their own identity and how it affects their pedagogy. Through interactive activities that explore the connections between power, privilege and identity, participants will participate in a dialogue discussing their individual intersections of their sexual identity, race and gender. After an exploration of our intersections, we will begin a dialogue that explores how this affects our teaching and our interactions with students. The session will close with collective thoughts on strategies to navigate our intersections of identities within our classrooms and school communities. | |
| Benny Vasquez and Jose Menjivar are both NYCoRE members and facilitated an ITAG focusing on Queer Latino Identity. | |
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Whose Schools? Our Schools! Truth-telling Power of Maps |
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| This interactive workshop invites participant to critically examine how specific spaces and places in schools are produced. Participants will draw maps of their schools, or the educational setting they represent, to document their personal lived experiences with space and place in school. Collectively, and with the help of their maps, participants envision student- and teacher-centered learning and teaching spaces. The workshop’s central goal is to create action plans that inform and strengthen school-wide practices, both inside classrooms and in communities. | |
| Patricia Krueger-Henney is a participatory action researcher who documents with young people how they perceive and experience educational injustices. | |
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Teachable Race Moments in the Elementary Classroom |
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| What do you say when a child asks you a difficult question about race?’Talking About Race With K-5 engages participants in a discussion of what race is and isn’t, how children come to understand race, and what tools we can use to address their comments about it. This is not a lecture or a presentation – we use interactive theatre and critical pedagogy to collectively discuss race’s role in our lives, share experiences of significant moments with students, develop strategies for confidently entering into conversations about race in the classroom and practice what to say when challenging situations arise. | |
| Jaime-Jin Lewis and J’nelle Chelune, Executive and Program Directors of Border Crossers (respectively), actively work to create programs that aspire to empower educators with concrete tools to interrupt the cycles of systemic racism within the NYC school system. | |
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Schooling vs. Education: Working Towards Democracy and Liberation |
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| This interactive workshop session will engage young people in the sharing and meaning making of their schooling and educational experiences while drawing upon their expertise to create a common and foundational understanding of envisioning and demanding a public education for democracy and liberation that centers their voices, concerns, and solutions. Through individual reflection, group and partner interactions, participants will address how to work toward emancipatory education through a social justice lens. | |
| Nini Hayes is a former middle school teacher and is currently working on her doctorate in Social Justice Education at the UMass Amherst. | |
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Building Anti-Racist Community through White Identity Caucusing |
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| In this workshop, NYCoRE‘s white affinity group, the Anti-racist White Educators Group (AWE-G), will share its experience building community around racial identity and developing anti-racist tools to be more effective allies in the struggle to undo racism. Participants will get a glimpse into what one of AWE-G‘s meetings looks like through participation in the story circle process and other group activities. Participants will also receive a resource packet with sample protocols and articles about identity caucusing and white anti-racist ally-ship. | |
| Susannah Gund is a teacher of French and Arabic at a private school in Manhattan.Emily Miller is a bilingual elementary school teacher in Brooklyn.Alanna Navitski is a teacher of young children and a teacher educator.Margrit Pittman-Polletta teaches in a kindergarten Integrated Co-Teaching class in Brooklyn.All facilitators are members of NYCoRE and its Anti-racist White Educators Group. | |
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Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline |
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| In this workshop, participants will hear from prison and education justice organizers working together in PA to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Participants will discuss causes of the school-to-prison pipeline, learn about cross issue organizing happening in PA to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and challenge education funding and prison expansion, as well as brainstorm strategies for effective collaboration between education and anti-prison activists. The workshop will be facilitated by a group of teachers, organizers, and young people from Philadelphia. | |
| Hanako Franz is a 9th grade teacher at Olney Charter High School and an active member of Teacher Action Group Philadelphia. Joshua Glenn is leading the fight against mass incarceration through his work with the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project and Decarcerate PA.Sarah Morris has worked as an adult ally with YASP for the past seven years and is an active member of Decarcerate PA.Crystal Pulle is an 11th grader active in Decarcerate PA, Juvenile Law Center and Youth United for Change.Anissa Weinraub has worked in the Philadelphia School District for seven years and is an active member of Teacher Action Group Philadelphia. | |
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Undocumented and Unafraid: Youth Voices on Immigration, Invisibility and Resistance |
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| This workshop brings together and amplifies the voices of undocumented youth who have faced tremendous challenges as young people caught in the crossfires of a broken and unjust immigration system. Youth panelists will share some of their personal journeys and will speak specifically to the role of schools, schooling, and educators in either empowering and supporting them, or silencing and misunderstanding them. This will be a space in which social justice minded educators can hear directly from undocumented youth about ways that we can better support all our immigrant students. | |
| Leydi Bautista is a Global Kids alumna, co-founder of the West Side HS DREAMTeam, and a mother of two boys.Mariaelisa Flores is a Global Kids youth leader, a senior at West Side HS, and member of the DREAMTeam. Jacki Cinto is a co-founder of the NY State Youth Leadership Council and has an MA in Education from CUNY. | |
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Teaching Gender and Social Justice for Middle Schoolers |
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| We are not all the same! We cannot achieve unity by feigning invisibility of our differences or ignoring social inequities. Instead we must creatively work to dismantle the systems of power that divides and oppresses. Using Theatre of the Oppressed activities, we can deconstruct the frames by which we divide ourselves and build a better understanding of how we can achieve unity. Through games and theatrical exploration, participants will collaborate together in creative dialogue to examine systems of privilege and oppression and craft possibilities towards liberation—all while having a lot of fun! | |
| Gigi DiBello is the Head of School at Sophia Academy, an independent school for low income middle school girls and co-facilitator of the Justice and Gender Seminar. Tatiana Cozzarelli is a 4th year Social Studies faculty member at Sophia Academy, and co-facilitator of the 8th Grade Justice and Gender Seminar. Leidi Silverio is the parent of 2 alumnae and current student, Kiara, as well on the Sophia Academy board of directors and a frequent chaperone on trips. Estephany Avila is a 2010 graduate of Sophia Academy and the Vice President of junior class. Harielys Jerez is a 2012 graduate of Sophia Academy and an active member of Youth in Action, which empowers young people to solve relevant community problems. Kiara Perez is an 8th grade student at Sophia Academy, is particularly interested in domestic violence prevention and combating the lure of U.S. consumerism. Sheila Bautista is also an 8th grade student at Sophia Academy, has become an advocate against bullying after a 7th project on the issue. | |
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Are You Well? |
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| Until 1973 anyone with a queer identity could be identified as mentally ill according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But what is the relationship between identity and wellness? Are you well? Your school? Your students? What does that mean? Where does wellness fit into our lives and our work: structurally, instructionally, extracurricularly, and intimately? Join NYQueer for a facilitated conversation that seeks to uncover the potential power of wellness in our communities. We welcome the experiences and perspectives of all ages and educational backgrounds. The more varied, the more valuable the conversation will be. | |
| NYQueer is a working group of NYCoRE focused on gender and sexuality in relation to school communities. Facilitators for this session are K-12 educators in New York City Schools. | |
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Uniting Parents and Teachers Against High Stakes Testing |
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| Change The Stakes is a group of parents, teachers, and community members who are working together to end the destructive policy of High Stakes Tests (HST). We will discuss: How do HST affect students, teachers and schools? What do HST cost in time and money? What are the different types of HST? What legal questions surround HST? What strategies are parents, teachers and administrators using to stop HST? How have principals and the DOE responded to resistance? How do teachers build bridges to work with parents and keep them informed on issues of HST? We will also discuss questions and suggestions raised by the participants. | |
| Lauren Cohen teaches in NYC public elementary schools and is a member of Change the Stakes and MORE.Diana Zavala is a parent, former teacher, and education activist, and a member of CTS and MORE. | |
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The Schools We Deserve |
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| While our schools should be a safe and exciting spaces for learning, often they are not. Too often we enter schools that view us as stats and test scores. We want schools where young people are valued for our ideas and questions, creativity and culture. Those are the type of schools we deserve! What do you think? Join us for an interactive workshop about visioning the schools we deserve and what young people can do to get them. This youth-centered workshop will share a unique visioning strategy and share our organizing work. | |
| The presenters are all from The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (BHSS).Jay Pimentel (BHSS Member) loves to sing and can’t wait to attend college this fall.Jose Gomez (BHSS Member) will begin college this fall and his family inspires his activism.Cidra M. Sebastien (BHSS Associate Director) is a youth ally, graduate student and community leader. | |
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American Justice Missing in Action: Inquiry and Restoration (#AJMIA) |
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| Utilizing print, videos, social-media and non-traditional media sources which chronicle disparities in the American fabric, American Justice Missing in Action guides practitioners through a themed multimedia inquiry/prism to problematize, recontextualize and reimage modes of energizing middle and high school students thru a systematic analysis of social justice issues. As such, we fashion a platform upon which students unsilence and unleash their suppressed artistic/creative voices thus allowing them to be change agents in the quest for societal transformation. By critically examining (unpacking) trends and policies which privilege the 1% students begin to debate and embrace the call to “Fight the Power.” | |
| Kanene Holder: Educator Using Entertainment to Enlighten. Multiple award-winning satirist and activist engages through dialog, media and mime.Michael Wiggins is the Fresh Prep Manager for Urban Arts Partnership, an innovative program fusing hip-hop and a standard based history curriculum. | |
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Strategies for Creating Culturally Responsive Curriculum |
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| This workshop highlights the voices of in service teachers and teacher educators who interrogate their socialization and the intersections of their identities and how they impact their students and vice versa. This interactive institute will provide the audience with opportunities to learn and use culturally responsive teaching strategies. They will engage in teacher introspection exercises and create transformative curriculum appropriate for P-12 and higher education classrooms. Participants will receive an electronic packet of teaching resources including websites for lesson plans, and articles discussed in the presentation and used in the course from which this training was adapted. | |
| Erica R. Davila, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Education at Arcadia University. She teaches courses in urban education, international service learning and teaching for social justice.Ellie Hutchinson-Montague is a poet and educator. She graduated with a degree in English and Master’s Degree in Special Education from Arcadia University. | |
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Urban Education and Settler Colonialism: Connections for Decolonization |
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| In this interactive workshop, participants will learn about the connections between settler colonialism and how urban schooling has been designed and instituted. Participants will see how the settler colonial triad (comprising of Indigenous peoples, arrivants, and settlers) is enacted in urban schools resulting in the inequitable resources and outcomes commonly referred to as the “achievement gap.” In the closing of the session, participants will think together about strategies for decolonization. Facilitators include students in a course on urban education at SUNY New Paltz. | |
| Eve Tuck teaches courses in urban education, multicultural education, social foundations, and Native American Studies and is the author of Urban Youth and School Pushout (Routledge, 2012).Brian K. Jones, Christina Phelps, Kimberly Rivas-Adames, Juan Urena, and Kristen Wohlgemuth are graduate students in the School of Education at SUNY New Paltz” | |
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SCREENING ROOM SERIES 180 Days Well Spent: Parents & Teachers United |
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| 180 Days Well Spent began with a group of low-income mothers of NYC public school students who got together to discuss the impact of high-stakes tests on their children. Together, they began to envision what a good classroom and school would look like without high-stakes tests, this film is the result of that exploration. In this screening educators will have an opportunity to discuss the value of real grassroots organizing as opposed to “astroturf” organizing depicted in films like Won’t Back Down. | |
| Yasmin Secada, a recent graduate of a Masters Program in Educational Leadership, Politics, and Advocacy from NYU/Steinhardt, is an organizer with PARCEO. She is currently also working as an organizer with the Parent Leadership Project. | |
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Critical Multicultural Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom |
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| Multicultural education seeks to respect the humanity of every person, prioritizing teachers’ and children’s personal, practical knowledge as foundational to promoting change in early childhood settings and beyond. Yet, despite its promise, little is truly known about how to do multiculturalism in early childhood classrooms. The practices portrayed in this session invite us to enter six early childhood classrooms and help us gain insights into how to do multicultural education in early educational settings, yet did not fall into the trivialized infusion of celebrations and commemorations while ignoring the everyday issues and tensions experienced by diverse children and their families. | |
| Mariana Souto-Manning is an Associate Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is a former preschool and primary grades teacher. | |
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SCREENING ROOM SERIES: Together/Unidos: Making the Invisible Visible |
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| This presentation features three Global Action Project youth-made films that focus on different issues that are important to different NYC students and are rarely addressed by mainstream media. We will provide educators with tools to use video and popular education to make these struggles visible and create opportunities for solidarity. | |
| Presenters will be Global Action Project and Flanbwayan youth producers from three programs: Youth Breaking Borders, SupaFriends and Community Media in Action. | |
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Youth Climate Activism: Schools, Policies and Action |
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| How are high school students in NYC–and around the country–advocating and organizing for environmental sustainability and climate justice?This workshop will be led by student activists involved in the National Youth Climate Exchange with interactive and hands-on work that reflects collective work with youth climate activists from NYC, DC, New Orleans and Southern West Virginia. Participants will learn about campaigns and activism that links educational justice, climate resilience and youth leadership from a range of diverse communities, while creating mini-action plans to take back to friends, students, schools and communities. | |
| Makayla Comas is a junior at Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn.Samrwawit is a sophomore at Curtis High School in Staten Island.Redwan Pranto is a sophomore at Aviation High School in Queens and has been in Global Kids for two years. | |
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Fostering youth empowerment and action through media literacy. |
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| The media’s ubiquitous presence demands students’ attention. The ability to navigate and make sense of this labyrinth is essential to engaged citizenry. This workshop introduces strategies for using Democracy Now!, (independent news hour) to provide students with critical thinking skills for the media they consume. We will compare DN! clips of youth to mainstream coverage. Discussion questions include: Whose voice drives the story? Whose interests are served? What would an inclusive news coverage look like? Together participants will design a “palm card” with critical questions that provide student empowerment vis-à-vis the onslaught of media they face everyday. | |
| Simin Farkhondeh is Education Director for Democracy Now!; an artist and media activist she has taught Media Studies and Film/Video Arts at various levels.Katie Schlechter is a Democracy Now! Education Intern who taught English after finishing her undergraduate studies in Political Science, Gender and International Studies. | |
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Prioritizing Mental Health in Social Justice Education |
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| A facilitated discussion on the importance of prioritizing our mental health as social justice educators working under the pressures of neoliberal reform. How do we see foregrounding mental health as a strategy for teachers and students in the face of union busting, standardized testing, euro-centric curriculum, policing, and high youth suicide rates? How do we model self-care practice for our students? How do we best hold space as caregivers while also not being trained clinicians? Students welcome. | |
| Erik Reinbergs is a graduate student in the Social Justice Education program at UMass Amherst.Kim Ashby is a doctoral student in counseling psychology at Boston College. | |
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Facilitating Conversations on Military Recruitment and Resistance |
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| This workshop provides film and articles to use with high school students to present the realities of what it means to be in the US military today, both on-the-ground and as a participant in drone warfare. As economic conditions remain difficult for young people, the military, in its various manifestations, looks like an option to many. Students need information in order to make intelligent and moral decisions about Militaryservice. We will watch clips and read sections of articles to plan, in a workshop format, how to use these resources most fruitfully with our students. | |
| Samantha Goldman is an environmental educator who currently teaches kindergarten. She is a member of the World Can’t Wait steering committee.Sharon Pavlovich is a long-time NYC teacher who works in the World Can’t Work national office.Stephanie Rugoff has taught in NYC public schools and worked as a literacy staff developer. She is also on the World Can’t Wait national office staff. | |
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¡Basta Ya!: The Consequences of [Not] Saying “No” |
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| Teachers in the U.S. face daunting obstacles to practicing the kinds of emancipatory pedagogies advocated by progressive thinkers like Paulo Freire and John Dewey. How do we respond to state and federal repressive policies that constrain our creativity and agency? [How] do we say “no” to these policies? What are the consequences of [not] saying “no”? This workshop poses these questions to educators who struggle against racist and anti-immigrant ideologies in schools and communities. The goal is to directly address what it means to be an activist educator within a larger political and social context. | |
| Mary Carol Combs is a professor of practice in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies, University of Arizona.Kevan Kiser Chuc is an ethnic studies teacher and curriculum specialist at the University of Arizona | |
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Traditional ecological (indigenous) knowledge in K-12 science classrooms |
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| Though (re)integrating indigenous knowledge in formal K-12 schooling is wrought with both tensions and possibilities, we align ourselves with others in the field of Indigenous Science Education (i.e., Glen Aikenhead, Gregory Cajete, Elizabeth McKinley) who uphold that the possibilities outweigh the tensions and are worthy of cautious exploration. In this session, participants will engage in 3 lesson activities (1 for elementary, 1 for middle school, and 1 for high school), to help them consider how they might begin to cautiously integrate Indigenous knowledge in their own classrooms. | |
| Sara Tolbert is Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Arizona and former secondary science teacher in the Bronx, NY and Atlanta, GA.Marti Canipe is a doctoral student in science education at the University of Arizona and former secondary science teacher.Beau Vezino is a doctoral student in science education at the University of Arizona and former elementary teacher. | |
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Take back OUR Union! Social justice unionism in NYC! |
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| Find out what it means to struggle for a democratic social justice teachers union here in NYC. Meet members of MORE (Movement of Rank and FIle Educators), that are running against the current UFT leadership RIGHT NOW. Learn some basics about the UFT and discuss with colleagues what your ideal union would look like. Ask questions of our candidates and find out how you can become involved in this vital struggle for democratic control of our schools. | |
| Julie Cavanagh teaches in Brooklyn, is an active chapter leader and is running on the MORE slate for president of the UFT.Sam Coleman teaches 3rd grade and is running on the MORE slate for UFT vice president for elementary schools. | |
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Running Your Own Free Skool: Lessons and Encouragement |
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| Can Free Skools save us from fractured communities, alienating public schools, and corporate-crazed universities? Taking the New Haven Free Skool as a case study, we’ll explore an educational model that uses community organizing to champion both the exchange of practical skills and the nurturing and dissemination of non-oppressive art, thought, and action. We must create spaces that are radically welcoming and free from monetary exchange. Join us to see how a Free Skool can do this — across geographical, racial, and generational boundaries. Last, we’ll have ample time to break out into groups and consider what our own Free Skools might look like. | |
| A queer, poor, Latino poet, playwright, educator, and organizer, Kenneth Reveiz is a founder of the People’s Arts Collective of New Haven, where he organizes, teaches, and learns at the New Haven Free Skool. | |
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Critical Exposure: Youth Photographers Creating Real Change |
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| Through this workshop students, teachers, educators, and activists will learn how to use photography as a powerful tool for social change. From documenting an issue, to building power around solutions, to holding public officials accountable, photography can play a crucial role in youth-led efforts to make change. This workshop will mirror Critical Exposure‘s work facilitating photography and advocacy workshops in D.C. public schools, and it will equip youth and adults with skills needed to implement their own projects. | |
| Andrew Anastasi is the Youth Development & Advocacy Coordinator at Critical Exposure, based in Washington, D.C.He will be joined by a student-leader, photographer, and organizer in Critical Exposure s Fellowship Program and a D.C. public high school student. | |
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Revolutionary Becoming: Doing Critical Literacy with Urban Youth Activists |
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| This session is designed to engage conference participants in reflexive dialogue around social justice, youth human rights activism, literacy practice and critical education in out-of-school spaces. The focus of the session is on exploring the research findings from the Drop Knowledge Project in New York City (DKPNYC) as well as creating new opportunities for activist research projects. The session will be facilitated by four young people who are 8th grade students and emerging social activists. | |
| Elizabeth Bishop is a NYC-based educational researcher, school administrator and humanities teacher, currently completing her PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture.Timothy Brescia is a well educated kid that likes to read.Sydney “Let’s Go” Dominguez is a young woman that likes One Direction and is into math.Tania “Warrior” Guerrero is a 13-year-old girl with a strong heart and a brilliant mind.Mackenzie Martin is a journalist, singer and dancer who loves the theater. | |
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Supporting Religious Diversity in our Elementary Communities |
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| Religion is a topic often overlooked in multicultural education, yet also the source of so much misunderstanding, bias and stereotypes. It is therefore crucial that we teach students how to respect religious diversity. But how do we have this conversation with young children? This workshop will explore approaches to teaching about all forms of diversity, including religious diversity, in the early elementary years. Tanenbaum’s pedagogy, The Seven Principles for Inclusive Education, and new K-4 curriculum, Religions in my Neighborhood, will serve at the basis for our discussion. We will conclude with an action-planning activity using resources presented during the workshop. | |
| Marcie Denberg-Serra is the Education Program Associate at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. | |
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Freirean Culture Circles: Critical Literacy Across Classroom Contexts |
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| In the spirit of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) in Harlem is proud to present their understanding and use of “Culture Circles” across classroom contexts. Come learn about how you can implement Culture Circles in your K-16 classrooms to promote critical literacy and education as a practice of freedom. The concrete basis of Freire’s dialogical system was the culture circle, in which participants and facilitator together discuss generative themes that have significance within the context of students’ and educators’ lives, and are discovered through cooperative research of educators and students. | |
| Cati de los Rios and Jamila Lyiscott are community organizers, PhD students, and Research Fellows at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) at Teachers College, Columbia University. | |
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Diploma Justice Project: ESL? IEP? Stuck in the System? |
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| Students, parents, and educators often speak about the stigmas and struggles faced by students who receive educational services (ELL and/or Special Education) outside of the traditional classroom in NYC schools. This workshop aims, through stories and an interactive activity, to make transparent many of the structural obstacles faced by young people who fall within the educational margins of the NYC public school system and offer information, clarity, and an open floor to discuss how we, as a community of students, parents, and educators, can begin to remedy some of those institutional struggles. | |
| Sarah Camiscoli is the ESL teacher at Bronx Academy of Letters for the 6th- 12th grade in Mott Haven. Emily Clark is the ninth grade ELA teacher at Manhattan High School, a District 75 school.Tanya Kinigstein teaches GED classes at the Queens Library in Jamaica, Queens. | |
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Fight Racism!: Parent-Staff-Youth Leadership in Schools |
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| Learn skills the DOE will never teach: how to exercise democratic leadership in your school. Chicago’s Local School Councils, made up of parents, teachers, and community representatives, have been called “the most radical school reform in the country and … the largest body of elected, low-income people of color (especially women) in the United States.” With a similar structure, School Leadership Teams (SLTs) exist in every New York public school, but engagement is extremely low. In this workshop you will learn about the importance of school-based consensus-based shared leadership under mayoral control, and how to be a part of re-claiming it. | |
| Lisa Donlan is a long serving elected parent leader in District One and has worked on advocacy issues from admissions equity to governance.Sally Lee is Executive Director of Teachers Unite, a membership organization supporting educators, parents and youth to collaborate for social justice. | |
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Teach Palestine Workshop: Create Classroom-Ready Curriculum |
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| SThis workshop focuses on how to integrate teaching about Palestine into your current curriculum. The bulk of our time will be spent working with specific materials—from picture books to primary sources to poetry—in grade-level groups. You will leave with lessons and materials you can use this year. We will discuss challenges to teaching about Palestine and how to deal with them. | |
| Jody Sokolower, managing editor of Rethinking Schools, has been developing Palestine curriculum with the Middle East Children’s Alliance.Keedra Gibba is a middle school social justice educator in NYC. | |
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It’s a Class Thing: Multi-issue Organizing for Public Education |
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| Participants will explore why the explosive movements for public education-from freed Black slaves winning public education during Reconstruction to the stunning victory in Chicago-are ignited by people of color and women. Join a wide-ranging discussion on how to build grassroots campaigns that can win the fight for education and the rights of working people, and generate awareness of the need for fundamental social change. Participants will develop organizing plans and resolutions for unions and communities to fight for quality; integrated schools for all; local control of curriculum, and mobilization of students, staff, and parents and the community. | |
| Betty Maloney, Newark-AFT, is a veteran social justice organizer and Radical Women national leader who calls state control of Newark schools a sex, race and class issue.Robin Strauss, PSC-AFT and adjunct professor at Hunter College Silberman School of Social Work, is active in Radical Women and a parent of NYC public school graduate. | |
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Reflection as Action: Building Multi-Racial Conversations around Anti-Racism within NYCoRE |
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| In 2011, two groups emerged within the New York Collective of Radical Educators: the Educators of Color Working Group (PoC) and the Anti-Racist White Educators Group (AWE-G). In this session, members of both groups will facilitate an interactive workshop around the need for and potential of identity-based caucusing in educator communities for building spaces for critical reflection and developing tools for anti-racist organizing. This workshop is open to all educators who seek tools for strengthening their anti-racist muscles! | |
| Rita Kamani-Renedo is a youth development educator, NYCoRE member and member of Educators of Color group. Emily Miller is a bilingual elementary school teacher, a NYCoRE member and member of the Anti-Racist White Educators Group. Maria Ponciano is a bilingual special education teacher, a NYCoRE member, and member of Educators of Color group. Margrit Pittman-Polletta is a kindergarten special education teacher, a NYCoRE member, and member of NYCoRE’s Antiracist White Educators Group. | |
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Building the Movement to Challenge the Criminalization of Our Youth |
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| A new consciousness is growing about the problems of mass incarceration and the criminalization of young people, popularized by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Students are under attack inside their own schools through over-policing, suspensions, and even in-school arrests. At the same time we are facing another round of school closings and more of a focus on standardized testing that is being used to attack teachers and marginalize students. Join a discussion of educators and community activists working to connect the fight for quality education to the grassroots struggle to end mass incarceration. What role do radical educators have in building a movement that can defend and protect our youth and communities? | |
| Marissa Torres is elementary school teacher and a union activist. She is a member of the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), the social justice caucus of the UFT.Ashia Troiano was born and raised in Harlem NYC. She is a first year history teacher at West Brooklyn Community high school. | |
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NYCoRE has begun compiling resources to bring perspective regarding the tragedy in Newtown, CT. As Bob Peterson, President of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, reminds us: “In the coming days,...
INTERACTIVE WIKISPACE As NYC/NJ teachers get ready to return to schools this week, NYCoRE wanted to create a space for teachers to post and find resources to support us in...
