Creating empowered, humanizing classrooms
How can schools, classrooms, and other spaces of learning become sites for justice and liberation? When and how should we encourage young people to break rules? When and how should teachers make trouble? We will share practices, principles, and resources that empower young people and educators to teach to and for their human being.
Connections will be made locally and nationally on humanizing and creative ways to educate for liberation. Participants will walk away with spirit and drive to create transformative educational spaces of teaching with a network to lean on for support, resources, and organizing.
Coordinators of this track are Nate Mullen, Thomas Nikundiwe, Ammerah Saidi, and Matt Homrich-Knieling.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Educators - join us in the pressing work of educational justice!
We are seeking proposals for panel discussions, workshops, presentations, and facilitated discussions that explore the ways in which we can teach for justice, liberation, and healing. Whether you’re a teacher, youth organizer, administrator, student, or activist engaged in educational justice, we are looking for presenters to collaboratively engage in this work by sharing your stories, your experiences and your skills, your successes and your challenges. Together, we can transform education to become a space to create and practice freedom!
Specifically, we’re looking for sessions that:
- Offer examples of humanizing and liberatory pedagogies and practices:
- Share ideas, successes & challenges, and lessons from both inside and outside of schools
- Bring the arts, movement, and media to the work of education for freedom
- Explore the lessons offered by culturally-sustaining, radical, and public pedagogies
2. Position students and young people as leaders and activists:
- Share examples, models, and stories of youth organizing and student-led campaigns
- Explore activist and community organizing pedagogies
3. Make space for building a local collective of social justice educators and creating connections with national networks:
- Share, uplift, and honor the work of Detroit students, educators, parents, and community members
- Propose a space designed to spark meaningful relationships among different constituents (youth, educators, organizers, media-makers) to further the work of education for freedom
- Gather an assembly of different constituents interested in a particular enactment of education for freedom (i.e. ethnic studies; social justice art-making; dance as liberation)
We see this track as building on the transformative educational justice work that is already happening inside and outside of classrooms, while also creating space for new possibilities, strategies, and collaborative networks.
If you have questions or want to discuss ideas for a proposal with the coordinating team, please contact us at matthewknieling@gmail.com.
PROPOSE A SESSION