Face and Embrace Conference

by Sonia Mathew, Civic Learning Manager

On August 15th and 16th, nearly 300 teachers came together for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), “Face and Embrace: Waking up to Racial Equity in Education” conference at North Grand High School, sponsored by the CPS Social Science and Civic Engagement Department.

Guiding principles for this conference included the opportunity to:
  • Reflect on our own awareness and relationship to race
  • Build knowledge, skills, and conviction
  • Engage in building equity to make strategic and informed decisions
Throughout the two-day conference participants, speakers, and presenters worked to answer these guiding questions:



Presenters created sessions that connected to the essential questions, which provided a great framing for attendees as well as questions for educators to reflect on their practice as it relates to building racial equity in education.

I presented a session on Racial Equity in Democracy Schools, where teachers had the opportunity to analyze the civic empowerment gap in recent cohorts of Democracy Schools and discuss how teachers can address issues on inequity as it relates to civic learning and engagement. The first breakout session I attended was titled, “Trauma and Resilience: Tools for Educators,” presented by Laura Ramirez, Executive Director of the Chicago Freedom School. There was an emphasis on how teachers can work to move towards “Radical Healing,” a concept framed by Shawn Ginwright. Attendees also examined how educators can utilize “Transformative Healing” in the classroom through an analysis of:
  • Culture: My identity
  • Agency: Individual and collective ability to act, create, and affect change
  • Relationships: Capacity to create and sustain healthy relationships
  • Meaning: Profound discovery of who we are
  • Aspirations: Explorations of possibilities for the future
I also attended a session titled, “Breaking Silence: Unpacking Power, Perception and Bias,” presented by Jarret King and Stacey Mann from Unsilence. Their framework explores institutional silencing, cultural silencing, and personal silencing as they uncover hidden stories of human rights. As they “unsilence” these stories, they create learning experiences and provide leadership training that includes opportunities for reflection, building empathy and healing. In this session, they highlighted the work of artists Garland Martin Taylor and Julie Green, exploring how artistic expression can be used to address controversial topics and promote civil dialogue.

The final breakout I attended was “Confronting Discipline Disparities,” presented by Claire Schu, the former Tier 1 SEL Manager with Chicago Public Schools. This session examined the disparities that exist with school discipline policies and strategies for participants to address this. To reduce racial bias in discipline, teacher can work to humanize relationships, recognize cultural orientation and bias, and build a classroom environment and learning structure that match students and accelerate their learning.

The conference ended with a dynamic closing panel moderated by Jessica Marshall, the former Director of Social Science and Civic Engagement. Panelists included Dr. Cathy Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago; Mayra Almarez, CPS Educator; Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Assistant Professor of History at UIC; and Terry Keleher, Director of Strategic Innovations for Race Forward.

The panel addressed how we need to re-imagine how we interrogate forms of political knowledge in the classroom. Additionally, there needs to be a systems approach to equity. For educators, Teaching Tolerance has social justice standards that can be helpful for grounding this work. Ultimately there needs to be a shift in power in our classrooms and educators are doing work that may make them uncomfortable, especially when addressing issues related to race.

The CPS Social Science and Civic Engagement Team did a fantastic job with this event, surfacing an important conversation about racial equity in education. The event closed with an On the Table discussion about racial equity and opportunities for participants to share learnings from how they were able to Reflect, Build and Engage during the conference. We look forward to seeing how they build on this work, supporting teachers in CPS, as well as being a model for other districts across Illinois on building racial equity in education.

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