2024-25 INSTITUTE FOR TEACHERS OF COLOR COMMITTED TO RACIAL JUSTICE
ITOC is on-going critical professional development space designed to support wellbeing, strengthen racial literacy, and cultivate the racial justice leadership capacities of teachers of Color who work in K-12 public schools that serve students of Color. A unique collaboration between the disciplines of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Ethnic Studies, this national conference rigorously selects and supports ITOC Fellows across the U.S. and beyond each year.
Applications are now closed for the 2024-25 school year.
Please check back on February 1, 2025 for next year's application or sign up for our mailing list to stay in touch.
Applications are now closed for the 2024-25 school year.
Please check back on February 1, 2025 for next year's application or sign up for our mailing list to stay in touch.
VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING KEYNOTES
A “Dream-Like World”: Girls and Femmes of Color Freedom-Dreaming Through the Arts
Dr. Grace D. Player
September 25, 2024; 4:30-6:00pm PST
This talk will invite the audience to consider the ways that Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC) freedom dream beautiful educational worlds through artistic practices, including art-making and curation. Through the exploration of a year-long project with a curatorial board of 5 GFOC, this talk will explore the ways that GFOC use curatorial praxis and the arts to 1) conceptualize education justice, and 2) create radical pedagogical artspaces that center GFOC learning, teaching, and creative practices. In doing so, this presentation understand GFOC as sophisticated teachers, learners, creators, and theorists of educational justice and offers suggestions for how educators might collaborate with GFOC to dream of and construct more just educational worlds.
Dr. Grace D. Player is an Associate Professor at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Player's work is rooted in her experiences as a mixed-race Asian American woman of Color and a daughter of a Japanese Brazilian migrant woman. She is a literacy scholar, educator, and artist who has a longstanding commitment to collaborating with communities of Color to work toward educational justice. Following a career of classroom teaching and literacy professional development, she pursued her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania where she developed as a community partner, researcher, and educator. Her work takes on a feminist of Color lens and inquires into how Girls and Women of Color mobilize their raced, gendered, and cultural knowledges and ways of knowing to forge sisterhoods that resist injustice and transform worlds. Pushing against constricting and Eurocentric research methods, she pursues work that center relationality, story, art, and aesthetics as ways of making meaning. Her current project, funded by a Spencer Racial Equity Grant, uses radical collaborative curation as a method to inquire into the ways Girls and Femmes of Color harness their multiple literacies toward envisioning and enacting educational justice through the arts.
Dr. Grace D. Player
September 25, 2024; 4:30-6:00pm PST
This talk will invite the audience to consider the ways that Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC) freedom dream beautiful educational worlds through artistic practices, including art-making and curation. Through the exploration of a year-long project with a curatorial board of 5 GFOC, this talk will explore the ways that GFOC use curatorial praxis and the arts to 1) conceptualize education justice, and 2) create radical pedagogical artspaces that center GFOC learning, teaching, and creative practices. In doing so, this presentation understand GFOC as sophisticated teachers, learners, creators, and theorists of educational justice and offers suggestions for how educators might collaborate with GFOC to dream of and construct more just educational worlds.
Dr. Grace D. Player is an Associate Professor at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Player's work is rooted in her experiences as a mixed-race Asian American woman of Color and a daughter of a Japanese Brazilian migrant woman. She is a literacy scholar, educator, and artist who has a longstanding commitment to collaborating with communities of Color to work toward educational justice. Following a career of classroom teaching and literacy professional development, she pursued her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania where she developed as a community partner, researcher, and educator. Her work takes on a feminist of Color lens and inquires into how Girls and Women of Color mobilize their raced, gendered, and cultural knowledges and ways of knowing to forge sisterhoods that resist injustice and transform worlds. Pushing against constricting and Eurocentric research methods, she pursues work that center relationality, story, art, and aesthetics as ways of making meaning. Her current project, funded by a Spencer Racial Equity Grant, uses radical collaborative curation as a method to inquire into the ways Girls and Femmes of Color harness their multiple literacies toward envisioning and enacting educational justice through the arts.
Silence as Agency: Navigating Ruptures, Resistance, and Healing in Classroom Spaces
Dr. Timothy San Pedro
October 16, 2024; 4:30-6:00pm PST
This keynote discusses the multifaceted role silence played in a course focusing on Native American history and literature. Using three students’ storied navigation in this classroom space, San Pedro explores how silence—often interpreted as passive disengagement—can instead be a form of active resistance, cultural preservation, and critical literacy. By re-storying three students’ interactions in this learning space, San Pedro shares the ways they navigated moments of rupture, resistance, and eventual healing. In doing so, their stories reposition silence as a powerful agentive tool for both students and educators, challenging dominant narratives around learning and knowledge production. Additionally, the session highlights the concept of culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) and how fostering such environments can allow alternative voices to shape the curriculum, build agency, and facilitate healing from curricular inequities. Key questions addressed are: How can silence be reinterpreted as forms of agency? In what ways can moments of rupture in the classroom be used as opportunities for negotiation and re-centering voices often marginalized in the curriculum? How does culturally disruptive pedagogy facilitate the dismantling of hegemonic norms and empower students to critique social inequities?
Dr. Timothy San Pedro is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Education: Race, Justice, and Equity at Ohio State University. He is Filipino American and grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. His experiences there led him to focus his scholarship on the intricate link between motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, perspectives, and literacies. San Pedro is an inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow, Ford Fellow, Concha Delgado Gaitan Council of Anthropology in Education Presidential Fellow, and a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Learn more about Dr. San Pedro's work at www.timsanpedro.com
Dr. Timothy San Pedro
October 16, 2024; 4:30-6:00pm PST
This keynote discusses the multifaceted role silence played in a course focusing on Native American history and literature. Using three students’ storied navigation in this classroom space, San Pedro explores how silence—often interpreted as passive disengagement—can instead be a form of active resistance, cultural preservation, and critical literacy. By re-storying three students’ interactions in this learning space, San Pedro shares the ways they navigated moments of rupture, resistance, and eventual healing. In doing so, their stories reposition silence as a powerful agentive tool for both students and educators, challenging dominant narratives around learning and knowledge production. Additionally, the session highlights the concept of culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) and how fostering such environments can allow alternative voices to shape the curriculum, build agency, and facilitate healing from curricular inequities. Key questions addressed are: How can silence be reinterpreted as forms of agency? In what ways can moments of rupture in the classroom be used as opportunities for negotiation and re-centering voices often marginalized in the curriculum? How does culturally disruptive pedagogy facilitate the dismantling of hegemonic norms and empower students to critique social inequities?
Dr. Timothy San Pedro is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Education: Race, Justice, and Equity at Ohio State University. He is Filipino American and grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. His experiences there led him to focus his scholarship on the intricate link between motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, perspectives, and literacies. San Pedro is an inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow, Ford Fellow, Concha Delgado Gaitan Council of Anthropology in Education Presidential Fellow, and a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Learn more about Dr. San Pedro's work at www.timsanpedro.com
PUBLIC KEYNOTE
Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz
November 6, 2024; 4:30-5:45pm PST
Co-Sponsored by: UCR School of Education's K-12 Ethnic Studies Speaker Series
*This keynote is free and open to the public!*
Keynote description coming soon!
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In May, 2024 Yolanda was recognized with the prestigious Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award from New York University. She is co-editor of five books and is co-author of the multiple award-winning book Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021) where she examines her concept of Archeology of Self ™ in education. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems, was published in March 2020. Her sophomore book of poetry, The Peace Chronicles, was published in July, 2021. Yolanda opened the 2022 TEDx UPENN conference at the University of Pennsylvania with her TEDx Talk: Truth, Love & Racial Literacy. For three years in a row, she was named one of EdWeek's EduScholar Influencers -- a list of the Top 1% of educational scholars in the United States -- a highly selective group of 200 scholars (chosen from a pool of 20,000). At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC, and the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, where for 15 years, national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity. Yolanda appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016), a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou, and "Defining Us, Children at the Crossroads of Change, a documentary about supporting and educating the nation's Black and Latinx males youth. Connect with Yolanda on Twitter at @RuizSealey and on Instagram at @yolie_sealeyruiz
Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz
November 6, 2024; 4:30-5:45pm PST
Co-Sponsored by: UCR School of Education's K-12 Ethnic Studies Speaker Series
*This keynote is free and open to the public!*
Keynote description coming soon!
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In May, 2024 Yolanda was recognized with the prestigious Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award from New York University. She is co-editor of five books and is co-author of the multiple award-winning book Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021) where she examines her concept of Archeology of Self ™ in education. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems, was published in March 2020. Her sophomore book of poetry, The Peace Chronicles, was published in July, 2021. Yolanda opened the 2022 TEDx UPENN conference at the University of Pennsylvania with her TEDx Talk: Truth, Love & Racial Literacy. For three years in a row, she was named one of EdWeek's EduScholar Influencers -- a list of the Top 1% of educational scholars in the United States -- a highly selective group of 200 scholars (chosen from a pool of 20,000). At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC, and the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, where for 15 years, national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity. Yolanda appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016), a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou, and "Defining Us, Children at the Crossroads of Change, a documentary about supporting and educating the nation's Black and Latinx males youth. Connect with Yolanda on Twitter at @RuizSealey and on Instagram at @yolie_sealeyruiz