Workshops and Facilitated Dialogues

I think about education very broadly, adapting my praxis according to my audience and their needs. I provide education designed to increase understanding, prompt critical self-reflection and awareness of individual behaviors and their impact, and analysis of systemic (departmental and institutional) dynamics and their impact. The framework through which I approach education — regardless of audience, context, or content — is to help individuals and institutions align their values with their practice by creating space for critical conversations about why the work needs to be done and how to do it. Below is a sample of past workshops, many of which can be adapted for different audiences and contexts.

Supporting Students in the Wake of Traumatic Events   

This 90-minute workshop will explore the different ways students experience and respond to traumatic events that occur within the campus community, ways faculty and staff can be responsive to student needs, campus resources available for support, and strategies for making effective referrals.  

Leading with Humility: Taking Accountability for Harm  

This 90-minute workshop will explore the dynamics typically associated with causing harm and attempting to apologize, the reasons most apologies cause additional harm, and how to take accountability and acknowledge impact in a way that is restorative.

Reframing Grace and Shame: Accountability and Mutual Liberation   

We all say and do things that impact people in ways we don’t intend. We also recognize the value of grace as the space given to us to unlearn behaviors that have the capacity to cause harm. However, desiring—or expecting—grace without being willing to acknowledge the impact of our actions on those around us perpetuates rather than disrupts the dynamics of harm. This 90-minute workshop will unpack how we think about grace, the implications of shame, and how we can lean into accountability to foster a culture of mutual liberation. (See also related resource, "Practices for Mutual Liberation.")

Manifestations of Racism on Campus: Recognizing Microaggressions (part 1 of 2) 

This 90-minute workshop will explore microaggressions and their impact on students, including common examples that faculty and staff should avoid. 

Manifestations of Racism on Campus: Responding to Microaggressions (part 2 of 2) 

This 90-minute workshop will explore strategies for engaging effectively when students make comments that cause harm, with a focus on helping students develop the capacity for critical self-reflection and perspective taking. 

Unpacking What’s Happening: Engaging with Call-Out Culture  

This 90-minute workshop will explore the dynamics of call-out culture, including how those dynamics are influenced by who is calling out, who is being called out, and why. The workshop will also address ways to help students critically reflect on those dynamics and their impact and how to help students frame their engagement with others in ways that increase understanding while centering social justice.  

Who’s in the Room: Managing Power and Privilege Dynamics  

This 90-minute workshop will explore the ways power and privilege manifest in interpersonal dynamics and how to increase students’ self-awareness of the way their behavior impacts others in order to promote greater equity, inclusion, access and full participation.  

Setting the Tone: Establishing Expectations for Learning Environments on Day 1  

This 90-minute workshop will explore strategies for increasing clarity and transparency with respect to how students are expected to engage with each other in learning environments and the rationale behind those expectations with respect to student learning and campus climate.  

Framing Difficult Discussions: Acknowledging Impact, Using Trigger Warnings, and Fostering Engagement  

This 90-minute workshop will explore strategies to foster engaged discussion related to difficult topics (such as systemic racism and violence) while being mindful of the impact those topics/discussions might have on students.  

Navigating Flash Points: Facilitating Difficult Dialogues in Response to Campus and Cultural Tensions  

This 90-minute workshop will explore strategies for facilitating difficult dialogues when flash points arise due to campus events, cultural tensions, or critical national/international incidents.  

A Critical Conversation about Students’ Perceptions of Classroom Climate and What that Means for Faculty  

This 90-minute workshop will explore some of the factors that impact students’ perceptions of classroom climate, ways faculty can periodically assess how students are experiencing the class, and how intentional outreach and transparency can increase equity, inclusion, access and full participation.  

The Weight of Words: A Critical Conversation about Course Content, Class Discussions, and the Relationship between Historical and Contemporary Harm  

This 90-minute workshop will explore what it means to engage students in discussion about course content that contains dehumanizing language such as identity-based slurs, how to name and critically engage with the capacity for language associated with historical violence to cause harm in the contemporary classroom setting, and how to facilitate those conversations using an anti-oppression framework. 

Practice Scenarios + Responses  

These 90-minute skill-building sessions will each present a series of scenarios that faculty and staff will practice responding to in order to increase their capacity to recognize and respond to microaggressions. (Note: Each session will feature different scenarios, and the scenarios for these sessions will be different from the ones included in the previous sessions. Faculty and staff are welcome to sign up for as many practice scenarios sessions as they want.)  

Accessibility as a Practice, Not a Response: Reducing the Need for Academic Accommodations   

The way disability services are structured in higher education is responsive: students request accommodations to address access barriers they commonly encounter in learning environments, and faculty work with students individually to provide accommodations designed to mitigate the impact of those access barriers. The result of this structure can feel overwhelming for both students and faculty. This 90-minute workshop will explore ways to focus on accessibility as a proactive practice that works to reduce access barriers in the way courses are designed, which makes courses more accessible for all learners, reduces the number of accommodations disabled students need to utilize, and reduces the number of accommodations faculty need to provide.  

Increasing Access and Assessing Learning: Crowdsourced Notes in the Classroom  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore the benefits of using crowdsourced notes in the classroom and ways to manage that process logistically. 

A Critical Examination of Learning Materials: Strategies for Increasing Content Accessibility  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty and staff will explore ways faculty can assess and increase the accessibility of materials in order to increase access and full participation.  

Beyond Lectures and Group Work: Multimodal Approaches to Classroom Engagement and Learning  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty will explore different strategies for engaging students in the classroom and how each strategy can increase or decrease access and full participation.  

Transforming Group Work: Avoiding Ineffective and Exclusionary Dynamics in Collaborative Learning  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty and staff will explore ways to frame and implement group work in order to promote inclusive and collaborative dynamics.  

Beyond Essays and Exams: Multimodal Approaches to Assessing Student Learning  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty will explore the relationship between student learning outcomes and the tools faculty use to measure learning with a focus on utilizing a variety of approaches in order to assess outcomes and allow for learner variability.  

Designing Accessible Course Syllabi  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore ways to frame information on course syllabi in order to establish clear expectations for students and to reduce barriers to access and full participation.  

Best Practices for Administering Student Exams: Distraction-Reduced Spaces and Extended-Time Testing 

This 60-minute workshop will explore strategies to increase the accessibility of student exams with a focus on best practices related to distraction-reduced spaces and extended-time testing. 

Planning and Hosting Accessible Events  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty, staff, and students will provide an overview of best practices for event planning in order to proactively address barriers to access and full participation.  

Rethinking Our Relationship to Disability 

This 90-minute workshop will explore the medical and social models of disability, how each model impacts policies and practices, and ways faculty and staff can reconceptualize disability in order to reduce barriers and increase access, equity, inclusion and full participation. 

Understanding Gender and Sexuality  

This 60-minute workshop for students will explore sex, gender, sexuality, common barriers faced by LGBTQ students, and the coming out process.  

Trans 101  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore gender, gender identity, gender expression, and ways to support transgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, non-binary, and agender members of our campus community.  

Knowing and Respecting Who’s in the Room: A Guide to Using Gender Pronouns  

This 90-minute workshop will explore gender, gender identity, gender expression, and how and why to use gender pronouns to increase equity and inclusion. 

LGBTQ Violence, Threat Assessment, and Safety Planning  

This two-hour workshop for survivor advocates and CARE team members will explore characteristics of IPV and sexual violence in the LGBTQ community, common barriers experienced by LGBTQ survivors, and safety planning and support strategies for LGBTQ survivors.

Gender and Sexuality Abroad  

This two-hour workshop for faculty and staff will explore sex, gender, sexuality, common barriers faced by LGBTQ students, the status of protection and criminalization of sexuality around the world, and how to help prepare LGBTQ students to safely navigate the study abroad experience.  

LGBTQ-Inclusive Healthcare Practices  

This two-hour workshop for healthcare providers will explore sex, gender, sexuality, barriers to care for the LGBTQ community, health disparities in the LGBTQ community, how gender expression tools can impact health outcomes, and how to take an inclusive sexual health history.  

Shelter For All: Creating a Transgender-Inclusive Environment in Homeless Shelters  

This three-hour workshop for staff and managers of homeless shelters will explore sex, gender, rates of homelessness within the transgender community, rates of discrimination and harassment faced by members of the transgender community when accessing shelter care, best practices related to anti-discrimination and accommodations policies for shelters, best practices for shelter intake and paperwork, and strategies for creating and maintaining an inclusive shelter environment.

Supporting Religious Observance: Understanding Religious Holidays and What they Mean for When and How Students and Employees Participate on Campus 

This 60-minute workshop will explore major religious holidays, how they are observed, and what faculty, staff, and supervisors should be mindful of in terms of participation in the classroom and workplace. 

Engaging Harms We Might Be Hesitant to Name: Responding to Antisemitism   

This 90-minute workshop will explore common manifestations of antisemitism on college campuses, the discomfort and uncertainty faculty and staff often feel about naming and engaging with it, and strategies for responding to it when it happens.

Self-Awareness and Cross-Cultural Engagement  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore the scope of values and attitudes that constitute what we understand as “culture” and how differences in cultural orientations in relation to dimensions such as time, power, communication, and conflict impact the dynamics of cross-cultural engagement.  

Understanding and Reducing Barriers for First-Generation Students 

This 90-minute workshop will explore common barriers faced by first-generation students and strategies that faculty and staff can use to reduce those barriers and their impact. 

Understanding the Campus Climate for Students of Color 

This 90-minute workshop explores common interpersonal and institutional barriers faced by students of color and strategies that faculty and staff can use to support students of color, help them navigate those barriers, and reduce the barriers and/or their impact. 

Disrupting Deficit Thinking 

This 90-minute workshop will explore the ways our assumptions about students can impact how we perceive and interact with them and how they can experience our interactions. This workshop will also explore strategies for affirming students’ strengths and leveraging those strengths to facilitate engagement and learning. 

Recognizing and Responding to Signs of Trauma 

This 90-minute workshop will explore the types of trauma students might be navigating, the ways trauma can impact learning and engagement, and strategies for providing trauma-informed support. 

Supporting Students Holistically: Affirmative Listening and Response  

Students come to and navigate campus with many factors impacting their daily lives, from academics and co-curriculars to family pressures, mental and physical well being, and social dynamics. Increasingly, students are seeking support and resources, often approaching faculty and staff they feel comfortable with or trust. This 90-minute workshop will explore ways to offer empathy and affirmation and to refer students to the offices/colleagues who specialize in the types of support students are seeking. 

The Politics of Public Restrooms  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore the cultural and legal landscape for transgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, non-binary, and agender individuals with respect to accessing public restrooms.  

Interpersonal and Sexual Violence in the LGBTQ Community  

This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will help participants understand the ways that interpersonal and sexual violence are experienced by members of the LGBTQ community, reasons why LGBTQ people are less likely to report, and ways to support LGBTQ survivors.  

Cultural Values about Gender and Violence in the Trans Community  

This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore the cultural values that contribute to a climate of interpersonal, social and institutional discrimination, oppression, and violence in the trans community.  

Understanding Heterosexism and Cissexism  

This 60-minute workshop for students will explore heterosexism, heterosexual privilege, cissexism, and cisgender privilege.  

Microaggressions in the LGBTQ Community  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore the microaggressions commonly experienced by members of the LGBTQ community and will help participants understand the assumptions underlying these microaggressions and how their impact.  

Dismantling White Supremacy in the LGBTQ Community  

This 60-minute workshop for students will explore manifestations of white privilege and cultural appropriation in the LGBTQ community, conflict related to respectability politics and assimilation, the politics of incrementalism, national campaigns versus grassroots activism, erasure of difference, and the narrative of ideal victimhood.  

Responding to Gender-Based Harassment  

This two-hour workshop for faculty explores the climate for women faculty and students in higher education, the impact of sexual harassment on academic and professional success, climate barriers that contribute to low rates of reporting, and strategies for navigating and responding to harassment.  

Historical and Contemporary Manifestations of Racism  

This three-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore what racism is, how racism functions systemically, how racism manifested historically and how its manifestations have evolved, common cultural norms and the disparate impact they have on white people versus people of color, how racism operates interpersonally, and how social institutions perpetuate racism.  

Historical and Social Legacies that Inform Contemporary Systems of Oppression  

This 60-minute presentation for students will explore historical legacies that impact contemporary manifestations of oppression within Indigenous communities (colonization, forced removal, genocide, denial of sovereignty, boarding schools, and cultural erasure) and Black communities (slavery, lynching, redlining, restrictive housing covenants, segregation, police violence, school to prison pipeline, prison industrial complex, and felony disenfranchisement).  

Sitting with Privilege  

This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will help participants critically examine the impact of their identities on their lived experiences, recognize the barriers they may or may not face depending on their identities, identify common behaviors that can perpetuate barriers for others, and explore ways to use their access and opportunity to create space for others.  

Internalized Oppression  

Internalized oppression refers to the ways that individuals unconsciously learn, accept and reinforce ideas and attitudes that perpetuate inequity and oppression. This includes learned attitudes and actions related to internalized dominance and internalized subordination. This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will help participants learn to recognize the everyday, unchallenged assumptions we all make, to understand the impact of our assumptions on our own and others’ lived experiences, and to increase our ability to interrupt these dominant narratives.  

Recognizing Our Role in Classism  

This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will help participants critically examine their own social location with respect to class, increase their understanding of the way classism operates, and increase their ability to interrupt classist attitudes and actions.  

Recognizing and Responding to Microaggressions  

This three-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will help participants learn how to identify microaggressions, understand their impact, and respond appropriately when they occur.  

Recognizing Bias in Ourselves and Others  

This two-hour workshop for faculty, staff, and students will explore implicit bias and the way it manifests in judicial board or conduct review settings in order to help participants work collaboratively to evaluate cases equitably.  

Acceptance vs Tolerance: What Does Inclusion Look Like?  

This 90-minute workshop for students will explore the difference between “tolerance” and “acceptance” and what it means to foster an environment of inclusion on campus.  

Conversations about “The Other” and the Cultural Creation of Oppression  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore the way the media portrays underrepresented communities and its impact on the way members of underrepresented communities are treated, how oppression operates systemically, and how internalized assumptions and attitudes cause us to perpetuate oppression.  

Unlearning Diversity: Unpacking the “Cultural Baggage” We’ve Been Taught  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore personal, social, and structural dimensions of diversity; the cycle of socialization; stereotype, bias, and prejudice; and how student leaders can work to foster an inclusive environment.  

Showing Up on and off the Field: Creating an Inclusive Climate within College Athletics  

This 60-minute facilitated dialogue for students will explore how identity impacts the experience of team dynamics and how teams can be proactive about fostering an inclusive environment.  

Key Components of Peer Education: Strategies for Facilitating Dialogue  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore challenges associated with facilitation, key components of facilitation, and strategies for fostering critical self-reflection and perspective taking.  

The Importance of Critical Self-Awareness in Community Service Work  

This 90-minute facilitated dialogue for students will explore how identity and lived experience influence how and why individuals engage in service work, how power and privilege impact the way individuals engaged in service work are perceived within the communities they are working in, and what accountability means when working with and within communities.  

Critical Self-Awareness to Better Support Survivors  

This two-hour workshop for student advocates will explore how oppression operates systemically and how internalized assumptions and attitudes function as barriers to inclusive support services for survivors.  

Critical Analysis of the Institutional Barriers Facing Survivors  

This two-hour workshop for survivor advocates will explore perceived and actual institutional barriers related to reporting and accessing resources as well as strategies to help survivors navigate those barriers.  

From Complicity to Conscious Community: Challenging a Culture of Sexual Violence  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore characteristics of rape culture on college campuses, how students can be complicit in perpetuating rape culture, when and why students have conversations about sexual violence, barriers to having conversations about sexual violence, and strategies for engaging in conversations about sexual violence.  

Providing Inclusive Support Services for Students  

This three-hour workshop for faculty and staff will explore how power and privilege impact lived experience, how power and privilege impact interactions with students, and how to provide intentionally inclusive support services for students.  

Thinking Critically about our Evaluative Lens  

This three-hour workshop for college admissions staff will explore how identity and lived experience shape attitudes, assumptions, and values; how bias can manifest in the discussion of applicants and factors that impact decisions about naming and pushing back against bias with colleagues; and factors that impact recruitment, admission, and acceptance rates of underrepresented students.  

Pushing Back: Navigating Barriers and Advocating for Change  

This two-hour workshop for staff will explore the institutional barriers that students face, barriers related to advocacy, and strategies staff can use to create buy-in for change.  

Supporting Student Activism: Fostering Resilience through Resistance  

This 60-minute presentation for faculty and staff will explore the way colleges respond to student activism, the role of activism in higher education, student learning outcomes associated with activism, and strategies faculty and staff can use to support activism as a form of student development.  

Leveraging Student Power: Action Planning for Change  

This two-hour workshop for students will explore spheres of influence, the importance of self-work for capacity building, how to use a goal progression framework to engage others, and the steps involved in collective action planning for change.  

Exploring Manifestations of Oppression in the Public School System  

This two-hour workshop for school teachers and administrators will explore how oppression operates systemically, how types of oppression (sexism, cissexism, xenophobia, heterosexism, racism, and classism) manifest in school systems, current capacity (awareness, knowledge, and skills) to interrupt oppression, and next steps (individual and collective) for capacity building.

Recruiting a Diverse Applicant Pool  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore the impact of diversifying the faculty, barriers to diversifying the faculty, and strategies for recruiting a diverse applicant pool.  

Hiring for Multicultural Competency  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore common market tips for writing inclusion statements, aspects of multicultural competency (awareness, attitude, experience, and growth orientation) to screen for, and how to evaluate multicultural competency during the review process.  

Ensuring Equity in the Application Review Process  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty will explore implicit bias, common forms of bias that manifest during the review process, and how to develop and use rubrics to increase the equity of the review process.  

Ensuring Equity in the Interview Process  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore issues of equity and access related to the interview process and how to use behavior-based questions to increase the equity of the interview process and improve the depth of information provided by applicants.  

Preparing for the On-Campus Interview  

This 60-minute workshop for faculty will explore factors that shape the overall impression candidates have of the interview process, best practices for communicating with candidates and planning itineraries, and strategies to increase the equity of the final evaluation of candidates.  

Strategies for Mentoring and Retention  

This 90-minute workshop for faculty will explore best practices for facilitating the transition process for new faculty, needs of new faculty that impact retention, and strategies for mentoring new faculty and supporting them through the tenure review process.