BREAKOUT SESSION A1

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8:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Hazel McCallion A

Social Justice in the Classroom

1.    Mathematics Through a Social Justice Lens: Inquiry, Empathy & Action in the Elementary Classroom

Michael Frankfort, ETFO / OISE TELC

This interactive, inquiry-based workshop invites educators to explore how mathematics can be a vehicle for social connection, empathy, and action. Drawing on the short film The Bully Dance (NFB) and the Six Elements of Social Justice Curriculum Design (Picower, 2012), participants will experience classroom-ready activities that position mathematics as a tool for understanding and addressing real-world issues such as bullying and inclusion. Educators will engage in rich learning tasks data analysis, spatial reasoning, and design challenges while developing inquiry questions that connect math concepts to curriculum expectations and social-justice themes. The session emphasizes inquiry, reflection, and collaboration, empowering teachers to integrate authentic problem solving and student voice into their math programs immediately.

2.    Education for Repair, Healing, Joy, and Relational Renewal in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom

Claire Ahn, Thashika Pillay & Clarissa de Leon, Queen’s University 

As educators and students grapple with teaching and learning about a myriad of issues in our local, national and international communities, there is an urgent need for education that can enhance teacher capacity to integrate learning for repair, healing, joy and building new relationships with each other and to the land. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to and engaging with the LOCALE framework which was developed by the facilitators, and relevant mentor texts. LOCALE offers secondary English educators and students a framework to identify texts that are tools to both understand oppression and find and imagine a world of possibility and joy, responding directly to the needs of collaborating communities. Accordingly, LOCALE can be applied to meet the culturally responsive aims of local school boards and broader communities through conscious integration of diverse knowledge systems and pedagogies. Based on findings from our study and related workshops, when we introduced LOCALE to English educators we found that both educators and students resonated with having an explicit framework that called for learning about the world, including the peoples, lands, waters, and air through a strength based perspective that centred everyday life in all its possibilities and challenges, that did not only focus on the trauma but on what does and can exist and on supporting education to build more just futures for all.

3.    Disrupting Harm in Health & Phys Ed: Building Spaces Where Every Student Thrives

Andrea Haefele & Deniece Bell, Ophea

In recognizing Health and Physical Education (H&PE) learning environments as a site of potential harm for students, Ophea, a provincial subject association for H&PE, acknowledges the collective responsibility to re-imagine these spaces through an inclusive, identity-affirming lens. Doing so will help ensure that every student is supported in reaching their learning potential and meeting curricular goals of developing an appreciation for lifelong healthy, active living. 

Join us in this session to: 

-         Explore the intersections between H&PE and some of the various marginalized identities students may hold.

-         Participate in discussion about shifting practices to create the conditions for safe, supportive, and identity-affirming conversations at home, in schools, and throughout school communities.

-         Learn about Ophea's Stop, Start, Consider! resource to support educators in providing alternative strategies and encourage meaningful discussion about how expanded equity-driven considerations might be implemented in a variety of settings.