Critical Urban Education Speaker Series

Thursday, January 30th, 2025 at 5:00 pm EST

The Critical Urban Education Speaker Series (CUE) welcomed Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, acclaimed scholar, author, and advocate for justice in education. In this interactive talk, Dr. Sealey-Ruiz guided participants through deep self-reflection, uncovering internalized biases and their impact on teaching. Emphasizing the essential role of self-work, she provided tools to commit to justice-oriented teaching and reimagine education from within. Participants left inspired to foster meaningful change in classrooms and beyond.

The Critical Urban Education Speaker series (CUE) welcomed Dr. Deonna Smith, author of “Rooted in Joy: Creating a Classroom Community of Equity, Belonging, and Care,” educational justice advocate, and former school leader and teacher. Dr. Smith focused on building a toolkit for leading with liberation and community-building to reimagine the potential of schools. She utilized accessible academic frameworks, shared insights from educators, and drew from her personal experiences to help participants navigate toxic school cultures and foster joyful classrooms.

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.

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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.