Join Quetzalli Laidley and Joe O’Hara for an engaging workshop designed to empower educators to better support LGBTQ+ students and foster inclusive spaces in elementary and high school settings. This session will guide teachers through a journey of self-reflection, as we assess our own identities, assumptions, and understanding of LGBTQ+ communities. Through meaningful discussions, we'll explore strategies for holding ourselves accountable and creating supportive environments that resonate with students. Participants will leave with practical ideas, including next steps for fostering LGBTQ+ visibility, building supportive groups, and implementing clubs and activities that enrich the school community.

In this workshop, educators will explore how white supremacy culture shows up in mathematics classrooms. We will collaborate around how we can be creative in resisting the norm and work towards a vision of social justice in the ways we teach and learn math. The workshop will center on a paper by Alexa Lee-Hassan (UIC Doctoral Candidate, UTEP Cohort 5), No Simple Formula: Navigating Tensions in Teaching Postsecondary Social Justice Mathematics, which will be shared with participants in advance of the workshop, and unpacking some of the key ways in which social justice and mathematics can be conceptualized in the K12 math classroom space. Facilitators: Sara Rezvi and Alexa Lee-Hassan, UIC Doctoral Candidates and UTEP Alumni

Join a community of educators for an evening of exploring and collaborating around what a Restorative Framework that integrates trauma-informed care for self and students, transformative relationship building, and social justice-oriented curriculum can look like in classrooms and schools. The evening will include an educator panel, small discussion groups, and a closing restorative circle.

Group work is great...unless it’s not. In this session, we will explore how to disrupt hierarchies among students and build more equitable collaborative spaces. We will choose a lens (teacher as athlete, coach, or researcher) through which to apply cooperative strategies in our classrooms. This workshop will be facilitated by Kate Carter, who is an instructional coach at the UChicago Charter School Woodlawn Campus. Dinner and PD hours will be provided.