Monday, June 9th

Cornelius Minor works with teachers, school leaders, and leaders of community-based organizations to support equitable literacy reform in cities (and sometimes villages) across the globe. His latest book, We Got This, explores how the work of creating more equitable school spaces is embedded in our everyday choices — specifically in the choice to really listen to kids.

Cornelius has been featured in Education Week, Brooklyn Magazine, and Teaching Tolerance Magazine. He has partnered with The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, The New York City Department of Education, The International Literacy Association, Scholastic, and Lesley University’s Center for Reading Recovery and Literacy Collaborative. Out of Print, a documentary featuring Cornelius, made its way around the film festival circuit, and he has been a featured speaker at conferences all over the world. 

Tuesday, June 10th

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she received the President’s Engaged Scholar Award in 2021. She was Guggenheim Fellow in 2022-23. She is a Nonfiction Judge for the National Book Awards for 2024.

Child is the author of several books in American Indian history including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; and Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014) won the American Indian Book Award. She edited a book, Ojibwe and Ocheti Sakowin Artists and Knowledge Keepers (Minnesota, 2024) with Howard Oransky, and curated an exhibit of the same title that was at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota in January-March 2024. Her current book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country.

Child is the author of a best-selling bi-lingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow (2018), and the forthcoming BlueBearies. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian (2013-18) and was President of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (2017-18). She was consultant to a major exhibit, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories at the Heard Museum. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-1S71fHKs

Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. She was part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000- member nation. She lives with her husband, the Mille Lacs Ojibwe artist Steven Premo, and family in St. Paul and Bemidji, Minnesota.

Dr. Courtney Bell-Duncan

Wednesday, June 11th

Dr. Courtney Bell-Duncan is a multi-award-winning emancipatory educator and transformative servant leader with over a decade of experience helping K-12 institutions achieve new levels of systemic educational equity.

Dr. Bell-Duncan enjoys leveraging this lived and academic-rich dynamicity to not only propel educational justice initiatives forward, but also to create equal opportune learning environments that allow every student to excel. 

Raised in North Minneapolis as one of the four children of matriarch Tosha Bell-Wooten, Dr. Bell-Duncan learned early on the innate value of perseverance, community connection, and possessing a strong work ethic to get ahead. Part of this stems from her natural progressive nature and part from her experiences as a K-12 student subjected to overcrowded classrooms, inadequate curriculum materials, and under-motivated staff.

With this as her base, it quickly became the catalyst for Dr. Bell-Duncan to transform those hardships to purpose and devote her life to creating solutions that don’t just mask educational inequity for underserved learners, but sustainably eradicate them.

In concurrence with her education, Dr. Bell-Duncan began her career in the education sector, initially as a North High School Senior Academy-Associate Educator in 2012. In fact, seeing just how influential caring relationships and high expectations on children were in these environments inspired Dr. Bell-Duncan to pursue her M.Ed. and social studies teacher licensure.

Since then, Dr. Bell-Duncan has scaled through various teaching, education leadership to now coaching roles with specialties in curriculum, instruction, policy, and leadership for equity. Notably, this includes being a Social Studies Teacher at North High School, a Program Manager of Culturally Responsive Instruction in Saint Paul Public Schools, an Assistant Principal, an Assistant Professor of Education Leadership, to now an Education Leadership Consultant. 

That said, Dr. Bell-Duncan’s measurable impacts certainly haven’t gone unnoticed over the last two decades. To date, Dr. Bell-Duncan earned the University of Minnesota TRIO Achiever Award in 2016, the Minneapolis Public Schools Excellent Teacher Award in 2017, was a 2018 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Finalist and was the recipient of the University of Minnesota Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019, among several others. 

As a professional fueled by an unprecedented desire to eradicate educational inequity, nothing makes Dr. Bell-Duncan happier than translating underserved institutional objectives into tangible, equitable realities that educators and students alike can mutually benefit from.

Overall, Dr. Bell-Duncan designed Courtney S. Bell Consulting LLC to bridge prominent gaps and become the unapologetic support system that she wished she had during her own experiences of racial and socioeconomic discrimination in the classroom.

This, in conjunction with her life’s mission to rectify the atrocities of ill-prepared and resource-deprived educational institutions, is what shaped Dr. Bell-Duncan into the educational change agent she is today: one who is uncompromisingly committed to creating a future where high potential is strived for, educational equity and social good is prioritized, and giving every child the foundation they deserve to excel is the core motivation.