Texas Education Alumni Conference

I am happy to be presenting again this year at the UT College of Education Alumni Conference. In 2018 I was chosen as a recipient for the Alumni Teacher Research Grant Award, and tomorrow morning I will be presenting about my work centered upon justice oriented citizenship. In the afternoon, I will be joining Saba Vlach again for our second round of our NCTE presentation, “What Will We Do?”: Enactment of Critical Pedagogy in the Elementary Classroom. Resources for teachers are all included in this post. Enjoy!

Breakout Session One, 11:00-12:00, Room 284:

• Peacekeepers vs Peacemakers: Teaching Towards Justice Oriented Citizenship in the Middle Grades
  • What does it mean to be a good citizen? How is “good citizenship” constructed in schools? How can we encourage students to take on a justice oriented construction of citizenship?
  • I’ll be building off of Westheimer and Kahne’s three conceptions of citizenship (personally responsible, participatory, and justice oriented) to talk about how these conceptions can be applied directly to the classroom through social studies and language arts curriculum, both in elementary and middle school. I’ll be sharing the resources I have created for an eighth grade social studies project, as well as work done previously in my fifth grade classroom, and sharing literature that teachers can use to bring conceptions of justice oriented citizenship into the classroom.
  • presentation slides
  • Middle School Citizenship Project 
  • Peacemakers Book List

Breakout Session Two, 1:30-2:30, Room 286

• “What Will We Do?”: Enactment of Critical Pedagogy in the Elementary Classroom, 11:00am-12:15am, 360 E
  • Facilitated by Saba Vlach, I’ll be presenting alongside three other Austin teachers and Dr. Keffrelyn Brown to discuss the ways in which we capitalize upon Humanizing Sociocultural Knowledge (HSCK) in our classrooms. Specifically, I’ll be discussing the framework of “peacekeepers vs. peacemakers,” and how we refer back to this framework and build upon it all year through several avenues, including a study on The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, our study of the activism of the Parkland survivors, and capstone projects centered on student agency in the community.
  • presentation hand out
  • additional resources:
    • Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, pre-reading activity
    • Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, ch. 3 close read
    • “Famous Speeches: ‘We call BS,’ Emma Gonzalez’s speech to gun advocates,” adapted on Newsela
    • Emma Gonzalez’s Speech to Gun Advocates, student analysis