Keynote Speaker • 9:30-10:45am

Developing Culturally Responsive Practices for Teachers of ALL Students

Jeanine Staples, Associate Professor of Literacy and Language & African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Keynote Area • Grade Range: PreK-12 • Area: Culturally Responsive Practices • Level: Introductory to Advanced
You don’t need “different” people to do culturally responsive practice. You need different consciousness: developing anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist pedagogy for teachers of all students.

Jeanine Staples is Associate Professor of Literacy and Language & African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is an educational anthropologist. Her new literacies scholarship, teaching, and coaching push forward anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-ableist education through a concept called Supreme Love. She calls experiences with racism, sexism, and ableism “terrors.” She does this to illuminate the serious, negating impact these ideological phenomena have on the emotional, psychological, and physical health of all people. Transformative healing of terrors, and (r)evolutions beyond them, happen through her work on three levels: the levels of Self, Schools, and Society.

She outlines the initial transformation in her first book, The Revelations of Asher: Towards Supreme Love in Self (in press). In it, she explores Black women’s terror in love. Another transformation is being explicated in her second book. It is entitled, Bones.Flesh.Blood: Towards Supreme Love in Schools (in production). In it, she explores predominantly white pre-service teachers’ experiences with terror in teaching and learning. A final transformation is being outlined in her third book, How To Die Peacefully: Toward Supreme Love in Society (in progress). In it, she will forefront a methodology for managing terror in life.