Workshops / Chat Rooms A

Theme Key (Click here to see activities listed by theme)

WORKSHOPS (Friday, 11:30 am)

Freeing Minds Through Community-Based Writing (AS)

Representatives of community-based writing groups in three cities--New York, Chicago and New Orleans--explain how educators can use writing as a tool for critical thinking and freedom of thought. This workshop uses mini writing lessons to demonstrate best practices.

How to Get Disability Cool: Including People with Disabilities in Youth Organizing (CC)

Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago

Many youth organizing groups have few or no members with disabilities. This training will review disability inclusion in youth groups and seek to create a safe place in which participants can think about how to increase disability inclusion. It will cover some disability rights movement history, disability sensitivity, and empower people to increase the disability accessibility of all their activities. 

Popular Education as a Tool for Working with Youth Impacted by the Sex Trade (CD)

Young Women’s Empowerment Project

Experienced and trained popular education workshop facilitators will present Young Women’s Empowerment Project’s popular education curriculum at this session. It will provide participants with elements they need to develop their own youth led and created popular education workshops about the sex trade and street economies. Participants will learn about the skills and techniques that have reached hundreds of youth impacted by the sex trade and street economies.

Know Your Rights: Trouble at School (CY, SBO)

Blocks Together Youth Council's "Graduate Don't Incarcerate" Campaign

The Blocks Together Youth Council's workshop uses popular education, role play and games to inform participants about the policies in the Chicago Public Schools Student Code of Conduct, the process of appealing a disciplinary decision and how to deal with police. It will also engage them in dialogue about how they experience discipline at school and propose community and youth empowerment-based alternatives to out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and arrests. NOTES      PHOTOS      COMMENTS

The Neighborhood Bridges Program: Theatre and Critical Literacy Empowering Classroom Citizens (LA)

The Children's Theatre Company

The Children's Theatre Company Neighborhood Bridges is critical literacy in action. This workshop will show participants how to use Little Red Riding Hood to challenge young people to identify and question the values infused in fairy tales. Using this analysis, students learn how to retell these stories to reflect their own values. COMMENTS

African-Centered Rites of Passage for Urban Youth: The Ifetayo Approach to Holistic Youth Development

Ifetayo Cultural Arts, Inc.

This workshop will focus on the Ifetayo Cultural Arts rites of passage programs - Sisters in Sisterhood (SIS) and I am My Brother (IAMB) - which are designed to ensure that adolescents of African descent flourish throughout their transition to adulthood. Drawing on traditional African values, these programs use cultural knowledge as a way to prepare youth to become active in the healing and renewal of themselves, their families and communities. PHOTOS     COMMENTS

 How to Design Citywide, Multi-School Social Justice Projects (SB)

Chicago Youth Initiating Change

Teams of students and educators from three different Chicago area schools will discuss how to create a citywide social justice curriculum and activist agenda. In the workshop we will discuss the various campaigns we've worked on in the last school year: the Immokalee Tomato workers struggle, anti-gentrification work in Chicago, and counter military recruitment. We will address how our different schools worked to incorporate these diverse campaigns into a citywide social justice exposition. A copy of CYIC's social justice curriculum will be distributed.

 COMMENTS

Political Economy of Education: Building a Framework to Educate Leaders for a New Society (CBO)

Philadelphia Student Union

The Philadelphia Student Union, in conjunction with some of our organizing partners, has been developing an analysis that links public education to the economic structure of our society. This workshop will guide participants through developing an analysis that is based in their own experiences with education as well as the history of public schools and that uses storytelling and interviewing skills as tools to develop a common understanding. The session will result in a podcast that will be accessible to all of the participants.

 COMMENTS

CHAT ROOMS

The Halls of Justice: Creating and Sustaining a Social Justice School (SJ)

Sistas and Brothas United and the Leadership Academy; Dorothy Stang Adult Popular Education High School; Social Justice Academy at Kelvyn Park; Little Village/Lawndale High School; Moderator: David Stovall

With dozens of schools in Chicago and New York calling themselves "social justice" themed schools, the popularity of theses types of institutions is on the rise. Many are charter or small schools. What does it mean to be a social justice school? How are these schools created? What are the challenges and benefits to developing social justice institutions? What impact do they have on the public school system as a whole?

COMMENTS

Educating Liberatory Educators

Lauren Catts, Loyola College, Maryland; Kevin Kumashiro, Center for Anti-Oppressive Education; Elaine Brigham., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Carlos McBride, M. Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Moderator: Rico Gutstein

How should we train social justice educators? What is the value of social justice education programs at teachers' colleges? To what extent is it possible or desirable for these values to be part of the academy? What are alternative methods of training teachers for liberation?

COMMENTS