Teaching the Days After Workshop

What do you do in class the day after a major event, trauma, or tragedy? What if you feel that the news is important to discuss, but you don’t feel like it connects with your course content? Maybe you’re not sure how to discuss such events in a way that is compassionate and inclusive? Perhaps you’re cautious to bring up “hot topics” in class? Then, please join us for our upcoming workshop where participants will dialogue about what happens in classrooms on the days after major events at the local, state, national, or international levels (elections, natural disasters, mass violence, or other tragedies or traumas). Attendees will work to consider how they might alter their pedagogy and curriculum to be responsive to students’ needs and to principles of justice and equity while maintaining their commitment to their course content. The workshop will be hands-on and dialogue-based, and participants should come prepared to actively engage in conversation, reflection, and action planning.

The workshop will be led by Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an associate professor of teacher education in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Dr. Dunn is a former high school English teacher, and she now researches and teaches about the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of urban teaching and learning, specifically racial and social justice. She has written two books and dozens of journal articles and served as a contributor to the Huffington Post and National Public Radio. Dr. Dunn is a winner of MSU’s Teacher-Scholar of the Year Award, MSU’s Excellence in Diversity Award, and the Critical Educators for Social Justice Revolutionary Mentor Award from the American Educational Research Association. She is currently finishing her third book, The Day After Teaching for Equity in the Wake of Injustice, due out in November 2021 with Teachers College Press.

Register Here!