8:15 - 9:00

Check-in

East Entrance, Penn Museum, 3260 South St (Map; Directions)

Continental Breakfast

Mosaic Hall

9:00 - 9:50

Keynote Session: "Cultivating Genius and Joy in Education through Culturally and Historically Responsive Pedagogies"

Rainey Auditorium

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, Associate Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois Chicago; Author of Cultivating Genius (2020) and Unearthing Joy (2023)

In this keynote, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad offers a unique, culturally, and historically responsive approach to cultivating genius and joy in education. This approach is essential for accelerating the growth of all students and uniquely youth of color, who have been traditionally underserved in learning standards, policies, and school practices. She will present her equity framework, called the HILL Model, to help educators develop students’ histories, identities, literacies, and liberation. The HILL Model consists of five pursuits in teaching and learning:

• Identity Development—Helping youth to make sense of who they are and others.

• Skill Development—Helping youth to develop proficiencies across the content areas and state learning standards. 

• Intellectual Development—Helping youth gain new knowledge set into the context of the world.

• Criticality—Helping youth name, understand, question, and disrupt oppression in the world.

• Joy—Helping youth uplift beauty, aesthetics, truth, and personal space fulfillment within humanity.

Participants will learn and understand history and policy and personal and instructional factors that justify the need and purpose for culturally and historically responsive education. Educators will be encouraged and motivated to be more inclusive of their teaching of these five collective pursuits while learning the importance of integrating cultural, racial, linguistic, and historical responsiveness into their learning goals, lesson plans, and the texts they use to teach. Additionally, participants will see sample lesson/unit plans across grade levels, moving theory into action.

10:00 - 10:50

11:00 - 11:50

12:00 - 12:50

Lunch & Plenary Session: "Developing Your 'Talking Game'"

Rainey Auditorium

Matt Kay, Teacher, Science Leadership Academy, School District of Philadelphia; Author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom (2018), and We're Gonna Keep on Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom (2023)

This session encourages teachers to reflect upon their strengths and weaknesses with communication, specifically as it impacts classroom discussions with students. In it, teachers work through strategies to develop communication skills that are too often thought of as fixed, working together to prepare themselves to lead powerful race conversations. We specifically work with how to enter and exit conversations thoughtfully, manage conflict, develop our conversational flexibility and agility, and determine which situations require which of these skills.

1:00 - 1:50

2:00 - 2:50