Co-conspiratorship: How White Educators Should Approach & Teach Black History

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Few teacher education programs ground future educators in a deep understanding and appreciation for Black history, let alone demonstrate how white educators should approach teaching the subject. Join this exceptional panel of white educators in conversation about how to enact co-conspiracy in educational settings from early-education through higher education. We know you’ll leave this event energized and ready to engage! This event will be live-streamed to YouTube and will not be recorded. We invite you to reserve a ticket at the price point that works best for you and your circumstances and look forward to your attendance!

Thomas Budday, Finneytown Local School District, (he/him/his) is originally from Detroit, MI. His personal journey as a social justice educator has roots in youth ministry, community service, and local arts activism. He earned a BS in English Education from Wayne State University. He is now a high school English teacher at Finneytown Secondary Campus in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the better part of two decades he has been facilitating creative writing and performance workshops and focusing on social justice curriculum for young adults.

Paul Gorski is an activist, author, and educator whose work revolves around racial and economic justice in education. After a long career in academia, most recently running and teaching in Social Justice and Human Rights programs at George Mason University, Paul left higher education and founded the Equity Literacy Institute, an organization that supports equity and justice work in schools and districts. In addition to writing and teaching about social justice in education, Paul has worked with teams of activist-scholars to better understand and write about the causes of activist burnout in racial justice and other movements. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his cat Buster.

Katy Swalwell, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in the School of Education at Iowa State University. A former social studies teacher, her research focuses on what teaching and learning supports critical consciousness, especially through social studies and in predominantly affluent white communities. She is the author of Educating Activist Allies: Social Justice Pedagogy with the Suburban and Urban Elite, co-author of To Build A Better World: Anti-Oppressive Social Studies with Young Learners with Noreen Naseem Rodríguez (forthcoming), and co-editor of One Way to Make Change? Anti-Oppressive Education in Schools of Wealth and Whiteness with Daniel Spikes (forthcoming). This spring, she and her friend Mandy Griffin are launching a podcast called Our Dirty Laundry about the history of white women's complicity in oppression. Katy lives with her two kids, husband, and dog in Des Moines, Iowa.

Dr. Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Broadly, Dr. Keenan’s work examines how adults teach young children about how society is organized. Dr. Keenan is interested in how these pedagogical interactions cultivate understandings of power, freedom, and control. His projects examine how complex social issues are constructed in early childhood and elementary education: topics like racism, gender, violence, and colonialism. Dr. Keenan is a former New York City elementary school teacher, and earned his PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His work has been published in academic journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Gender and Education.

Dr. Bree Picower is an Associate Professor at Montclair State University in the College of Education and Human Development. She is the Co-Director of the Urban Teacher Residency, Newark Teacher Project and the Critical Urban Education Speaker Series with Dr. Tanya Maloney at MSU. Her next book, Reading, Writing and Racism with Beacon Press will be released January 21 featuring a foreword by Bettina Love. The book is an unapologetic examination of how curriculum choices can perpetuate White supremacy, and offers radical strategies for how schools and teacher education programs can disrupt and transform racism in education.

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