Creating a Safe Space with Queer & Questioning Youth

Global Kids

This workshop explores the role that young people and educators can play in providing support for queer and questioning youth and their allies in schools and organizations.  What does safe space look like for youth of color exploring queer identity? Youth facilitators will share strategies for starting anti-bias campaigns in individual schools and creating city-wide coalitions around homophobia and heterosexism. 

Jackin' For Beats: Who Stole Hip Hop and How Do We Take It Back?

Hip Hop Detoxx

Hip Hop music and culture have played a huge role in the past in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality. This panel will discuss how Hip Hop was taken off that course and what can be done today to reclaim and restart the legacy of Hip Hop's Golden Era. Features legendary rappers as well as experts in other areas of the music industry.

Media Literacy as a Tool for Creating Culturally Responsible Messages  

Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, Media Advocates for Prevention Program

Youth Peer Advocates and adult staff will demonstrate how to create easily disseminated media messages, including culturally responsible characters, which engage youth through media literacy while developing youth leadership. The workshop will include film screenings, media deconstruction activities, and the creation of a film teaching tool around these issues. 

Message to Transformative Teachers: The Process and Potential of a Culturally Empowering Pedagogy   

Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco

From this workshop, K - 12 teachers will come out with a better understanding of how to help students critically make sense of their day-to-day reality, think through their liberation and oppression, and engage academic work that is connected to the pressing needs of their community.

Neo-Liberalism and Education for Liberation    

Pauline Lipman (University of Illinois at Chicago, Howard Machtinger and William Watkins (University of Illinois at Chicago)

This panel will look how neo-liberalism, with its privileging of free-market corporate capitalism, is impacting the educational policy and school reform on both local and national levels.  More specifically, the panel will look at how neo-liberalist educational policies serve as challenges to the education for liberation agendas, and we can conceptualize alternatives and countermeasures to the wave of neo-liberalist educational policies.    

Pedacacy on Networking   

Baltimore Algebra Project

The Baltimore Algebra Project has been networking with groups, individuals, and organizations all across the nation and locally. Through years of organizing our leaders discovered the most important element of networking which is the power of intimate relationships. Using the National Algebra Project’s pedagogical methods and the Baltimore Algebra Project’s organizing experience, we will share a method of building strong networks nationally.  

Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics    

Little Village/Greater Lawndale School for Social Justice

Workshop facilitators (students from a social justice high school in Chicago who graduated this June) will teach participants social justice mathematics that the students themselves studied, demonstrating how they learned to "read and write the world" with mathematics. They will help participants understand how they can develop and teach social justice curriculum (in mathematics and other disciplines) based on students’ lives and experiences.

Youth in Charge - How to Develop Effective Intergenerational and Youth-led Decision-making Structures Within Social Justice Organizations   

Chicago Freedom School

This workshop, led by an intergenerational team, explores approaches, practices, and structures that empower youth to participate  actively and effectively in decision-making and governing structures. Through fun and interactive exercises we will provide practical tools and ideas for how best to assess youth involvement, how to include youth on organizational boards, how to develop youth-led governing structures, and how to create meaningful intergenerational spaces.

Youth Organizing for Environmental Justice  

UPROSE

UPROSE youth organizers will give a workshop on environmental justice and how to engage youth where they live. We will focus on the effects of climate change in our hoods, our rights to green space and how to mobilize the community for governmental action. Through role-playing, storytelling and experience-sharing, we will help participants develop skills to confront the problems we face in the community.

Youth Participatory Action Research for Social change: Moving from Research to Transformative Action   

Girls for Gender Equity and Growing up in Salt Lake City

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to three youth participatory action research (PAR) projects, from Salt Lake City and New York City, that exemplify how to move from research to action on both the community and policy level. Participants will work in small groups to explore how various research products, such as youth produced video research, can be useful towards these aims. Open to all those doing or planning to do PAR Research.