• 1.1 Power Conversations: Student Lead Critical Conversations about Education

  • Dr. Marc Brasof, Dr. Priscila Jeter-Illes, Tobi Tella, and Noel Gonzalez

Youth-adult leadership is an important component of critical pedagogy and central to Arcadia University's Social Action and Justice Education Fellowship (SAJE). SAJE is designed to recruit, train, and employ the next generation of diverse social justice educators. One part of our program is the Power Conversation, a monthly critical conversation series in which students and educators craft and participate in a timely topic related to critical education. This strategy has fostered a shared understanding and sense of community across the fellowship and enabled pre-service educators an opportunity to flex critical intellectual muscles. This session will explore this model and some of the topics that most engaged the fellowship.

• 1.2 Mitigating Bias in Hiring

  • Tiffany Clemmons and Naomi Fortis-Gebresalassie

District and school administrators are tasked with recruiting and hiring great teachers that reflect a diverse landscape of educators. In order to do this effectively, administrators must confront aspects of bias in the hiring process. In this session, participants will explore their own cultural identities and reflect on how they intersect with the identities of your staff and potential candidates. They will also identify potential sources of bias in operational practices that may create less inclusive environments processes. By the end of the session, they will have strategies to prevent and/or mitigate bias in the hiring process.

• 1.3 How to Do the Work: Beginning the Journey to Cultural Competence

  • Dr. Amber Jean-Marie Pabon and Rochelle R. Peterson-Ansari

What does it mean to be culturally competent? How are positionality and cultural consciousness relevant to cultural work in schools? In what ways can schema, concepts, and vocabulary support the implementation of culturally-based pedagogies and praxis? Drawing from James Banks’ knowledge typologies, this session addresses these questions and more towards disrupting problematic belief systems and implicit bias. Participants can expect to re-imagine critical self-reflection and anti-racist leadership praxis.

• 1.4 Teaching to Transform: Building a Framework for Infusing Studies in Anti-Black Racism into the Curriculum and Pedagogy at Arcadia University

  • Dr. Christopher Allen Varlack and Dr. Doreen Loury

This presentation will offer an opportunity to walk through the Framework for Infusing Studies in Anti-Black Racism into the Curriculum and Pedagogy designed to facilitate conversations regarding race and curricular redesign at Arcadia University. It will also address the initial findings of the pilot program, discussing the undergirding theoretical perspectives that have informed its development. Through this presentation, attendees will gain access to an adaptable antiracist framework in addition to insights into critical areas (the under-representation of BIPOC voices, race- and class-bound assessment metrics,tokenism, etc.) that need to be addressed to counter discrimination and marginalization that may be embedded in the curricula we teach.

• 1.5 Building Together: Cultivating Places of Connection in Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education (CRSE)

  • Dr. Donna-Marie Cole-Malot, Dr. Monique Alexander, Dr. Tanya Garcia, Dr. Leighann Forbes, Dr. Laura Roy, Dr. Michelle Sobolok, and Dr. Ronald Whitaker, II

Culturally-relevant and sustaining education (CRSE) competencies, which support educators to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to meet the needs of all learners, have been drafted for use in Pennsylvania's teacher education programs and will be finalized by PDE soon. However, competencies that support culturally relevant pedagogy and practice have been implemented for many years within various educational contexts. This session will provide an overview of the drafted CRSE competencies for implementation within PA's teacher education programs, a panel discussion regarding their necessity and examples of how colleagues in education identify their "places of connection" with the competencies, and a break-out session for participants to identify and reflect upon their own "places of connection" with the CRSE competencies.