The Education Task Force of the MLK Action Team hosted its third professional development conference with an anti racism focus on July 11th. The conference was free to any educator on Cape Cod. Participants were from six Cape school districts as well as Cape Tech and both charter schools and were teachers, administrators, specialists, counselors, librarians and a school nurse. (Featured image above is Monomoy Superintendent Scott Carpenter and Assistant Superintendent Robin Millen welcoming the participants to MRHS)
We offered a selection of five workshops every 90 minutes. Our first session offerings included: “How to Have Difficult Conversations with Young Children Around Race, Racism and Other Topics”, “The Peace and Racial Justice Harmony Lesson” and “Culturally Responsive Education on Indigenous Land”.
Krissie Williams & Erica Anderson presented the workshop “How to Create an Anti Racist School”
Brad Lopes was the presenter of “Culturally Responsive Education …” and also had an exhibitor table for participants to visit between workshops.
The second session of the day included “Active Bystander Intervention”, “Expanding Our Understanding of Diversity & Equity Through Socratic Method”, “Restorative Justice” and more.
Henry St. Julien of Falmouth and Jessica Lynch of Sturgis offered “Cape School Leaders of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Why Are DEI Still Vital in Education, and How Do We Build Communities of Action?”
The conference organizing committee had collected 497 gently used fiction and nonfiction books featuring BIPOC authors and themes that attendee could select to take home or to their school. We also invited a number of local nonprofit and county organizations to have exhibitor tables to share their work with conference participants.
The third workshop session included a number of presenters who joined us from Martha’s Vineyard for the day. Topics included “History Through US Slave Songs”, “Arts Based Curriculum for Social Justice” and “Facing History, Facing Ourselves” among others.
Kyle Williams of The Long Talk, hosted the most highly attended workshop titled, Cultivating a Culture of Anti-Racism” to equip people with tools to navigate challenging topics effectively. His “Iceburg” slide kicked off some great discussion.
The final session of the day featured Superintendents and DEI coordinators to share work they have been doing in their districts.
From left to right: Jessica Lynch of Sturgis, Sarah Ahern of Barnstable, Joseph Maruszczak of Sandwich, Lori Duerr and Henry St. Julien of Falmouth and Marc Smith of Dennis-Yarmouth.
Lead conference organizers Karen Boujoukos (left) and Angelina Raneo Chilaka were very happy with the conference and wish to thank our Gold Star financial sponsor The Cooperative Bank of Cape Cod and our donors, Cape Cod 5, Stop & Shop (of East Harwich), Shaw’s and Dunkin Donuts of Harwich Port for helping to make this conference successful.