I’m back on the JP HigherEd team for 2018/2019! I’m facilitating 4 webinars this year, this first of which is on Tuesday, October 23rd.
One of the reasons I wanted to join the JP Higher Ed team again is to revisit some concepts from my previous stint facilitating webinars and one that is increasingly important to me. We need to know how to make social justice a practice. It needs to be something tangible that we can use in our day-to-day work.
That’s a thread that runs through my four sessions. Please check out the links to register for the webinars below. I’m really excited for all of them and hope you can make it.
Tuesday, October 23rd at 2 PM EST
We are inundated with news about hate bias incidents, the growth of hate groups, and governmental actions that push people further into the margins. What do we do with this? How can we continue to develop as educators? How do we make sense of this for ourselves and with our colleagues and students? We must develop and advance our capacities for social justice.
We must have frequent conversations with each other about social justice because we need to support our communities and critically analyze our own practices. To do that we need to be able to plan workshops, book clubs, curricula, affinity groups, and critical reflections of our own practices. This webinar will help us identify the needs of our community and draft plans to facilitate professional development learning.
Tuesday, December 4th at 2 PM EST
Higher Education in the United States was founded within the context of race, gender, and class dominance and those influences continue to this day. We see this in the work that we do on a daily basis. We see our students struggle to adapt to the culture of our institutions. We see “diverse hiring practices” but a lack of effort put into the retention of our diverse staff. We know that there are issues of hunger and homelessness on our campuses. How are we contributing to these issues? How can we confront these issues?
Developing a keen eye to see the influences of white middle-class dominance in our universities will help us counteract them and create more inclusive communities. In this webinar, you will see examples of these dynamics, evaluate your own workplace for these methods of dominance, and reflect on how you can create change.
Tuesday, January 22nd at 2 PM EST
As educators and administrators, we improvise daily. We find ways to solve problems that did not exist the day before. We create processes on the fly. Because of the speed in which we do things, there is not always time for critical reflection of these practices. We should change that.
Cornel West tells us that Jazz, an art form based on improvisation, is so much more than a musical genre, but that it’s a method of being suspicious of “either/or” viewpoints. As critical educators, it is essential that we take on this worldview as we improvise in our work. In this workshop, we’ll reflect on the ways that we improvise in our work, find ways that we’ve made mistakes in the past, and identify ways we can be suspicious of either/or viewpoints.
Developing Critical Reflection in your day-to-day work
Tuesday, April 30th at 2 PM EST (Link coming soon!)
Sometimes we live day-to-day without critically reflecting on the impact our day-to-day work has on the people around us. We can make a decision without considering the impact it will have on everyone involved. We can “use our best judgment” without reflecting on what has informed that judgment. We can unintentionally cause harm without including critical reflection in our daily practices.
We will explore what critical reflection is and why it is important for us to include in our practices. In this webinar, we will focus on strategies you can implement to reflect more critically on your daily practices in order to be a more inclusive, mindful, and engaged leader to your family, colleagues, students, and yourself.
