Critical Urban Education Speaker Series

Thursday, March 21st, 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. EST via Zoom

In this CUE talk, Dr. Smith will help you build your toolkit to lead with liberation and community-building in order to reimagine what schools can be. Using accessible academic frameworks, insights from educators, and her own experiences, Dr. Smith will support you to navigate toxic school cultures in order to root your classroom in joy!

The event will open with youth poetry and DJ Shell Spin!

The Critical Urban Education Speaker series (CUE) welcomed Dr. Bettina L. Love, bestselling author, abolitionist educator, and renowned public speaker.

The Critical Urban Education Speaker series (CUE) welcomed Dr. Harper B. Keenan, Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender and Sexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Keenan’s talk, titled “Boxed In: Trans Life and the Struggle for Self-Determination at School,” explored the conditions facing trans and gender non-conforming children and teachers in PK-12 public schools and what those conditions reveal about the role of school in society. The evening opened with an act by Per Sia, an educator and drag performer with Drag Queen Story Hour. It was then followed by a lecture by Dr. Keenan in which he addressed the current hostile political environment towards trans people in education and presented data from two studies. The first study included nearly 400 trans-identifying workers in PK-12 schools across the United States and Canada, while the second study was a two-year ethnographic project examining the struggle for gender self-determination in primary education in a large urban school district in Northern California. The findings from these studies provided insights into how schools teach the public about the social meaning of gender, including the intersection of gender and race. After the lecture there was a Q & A in which guests brought up and discussed their questions and concerns relating to this issue. The event was a genuine tribute to the experiences of trans and gender non-conforming individuals in PK-12 public schools, highlighting the importance of educators to generate communal understanding and empathy.

Dr. Carla Shalaby

In her book, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School, Dr. Carla Shalaby posits that classroom management is a curriculum–a series of lessons students learn from us–and invites us to consider: what do we teach now through our classroom management, and what we might want to teach instead? During her talk, she asked attendees to consider the troubling relationships between traditional classroom management approaches and carcerality, and to begin to wonder how intentionally shifting our models of power and authority in the classroom might instead support the teaching and learning of freedom. By seeing our troublemakers as a resource to leverage instead of a problem to solve, she urges us to imagine classrooms as a space in which we might practice the world we want to inhabit by rejecting disposability in favor of the struggle for love, justice, care, and healing.

Purchase the book

Critical Urban Education Speaker Series: Dr. Rosa L. Rivera-McCutchen
Radical Care: Leading for Justice in Urban Schools

In her new book Radical Care: Leading for Justice in Urban Schools, Dr. Rivera-McCutchen argues that care, as typically described and enacted, is not sufficient for leading schools, particularly those serving Black and Latinx children. Instead, school leaders need to embrace radical care. During her talk, Dr. Rivera-McCutchen outlined the five components of radical care—adopting an antiracist stance, cultivating authentic relationships, believing in students’ and teachers’ capacity for excellence, leveraging power strategically, and embracing a spirit of radical hope—while sharing vignettes from her personal experiences and research that exemplify each of the components. Calling for educators to thoughtfully challenge existing structures that reproduce inequality, Radical Care offers a much-needed framework that will guide practice with a sense of urgency and a spirit of hope.