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Kass Minor
Inclusive Educator & Community Organizer
Kass Minor
Inclusive Educator & Community Organizer
Biography
Kass Minor is an inclusive educator and community organizer who is deeply involved in local, inquiry-based teacher research and school community development. Alongside partnerships with the University of Chicago, Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project, The Author Village, and the New York City Department of Education, since 2004, she has worked as a teacher, staff developer, adjunct professor, speaker, and documentarian.
Along with her partner and husband, Cornelius Minor, she established The Minor Collective LLC, a community-based movement designed to foster sustainable change in schools, redefining what it means to develop affirming, welcoming school culture and instructional practice through the lens of racial justice, decolonization, and liberation.
Her work has recently been featured in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, KQED Mindshift, Parents Magazine, Teaching Tolerance Magazine, and New York Times Serial Podcast Nice White Parents.
These days, you’ll find Kass rekindling her inner-child through ongoing experiments in urban gardening with her two daughters, curating numerous at-home libraries (different ones full of tea, recipes, and yes, books!), in the company of her fluffy Siberan cat, Boris, and husband, Cornelius, in Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker Videos
No More Business As Usual
Speech Topics
Never Too Young to Think: Creating Authentic Literacy Experiences For Young Learners
How do we teach young learners about class, gender, race, and other nuanced topics? In so many school spaces, we struggle with how to talk to our youngest learners about the things that are emerging in our communities. Discussing differences and difficult histories can feel tricky. But not discussing these things gives kids a false sense of the world and who they are in it.
In this session we will consider methodologies, approaches and resources that allow us to talk to children in honest, developmentally appropriate ways about the world that they are growing into.
This session is about doing the work beyond merely expecting that kids will be the “leaders of tomorrow”. This is about giving them a framework for how they - in their play and among their friends - be the leaders that they were born to be today.
*Note: This talk can be amended for a parent/caregiver audience as well.
Back to Life: American Public Schools and The Killing of the Imagination
The goal of a powerful education is to keep humans curious and engaged with the world and each other. The outcome of education is not simply “knowing” or “accumulating” information. The outcome of an education is “doing” - (re)making, reflecting, and building ideas, opportunities, questions, and solutions. In far too many places, the goals of school have not been in alignment with the goals of education.
Our shared histories have taught us that to some, schooling is about standardization. As a result, children lose out on educational opportunities to make, reflect, and build in service to the school-based drive to “produce”. This kills the imagination. It happens disproportionally to BIPOC children. And we are all complicit. We cannot attend to racism without attending to this.
In this keynote, we will explore what that can look like, and we will work together to discover our roles in activating the imaginative life of kids, their teachers, and their families. We cannot work toward a sustainable future, if we lack the imagination to even envision it. In this session we will catalyze that foundational work.
The Kids Will Be Alright: An Exploration of What Kids Are Really Learning Right Now
Neither youth nor their teachers have built classroom community on a foundational paradigm like the one that exists post 2020. Kids need a lot. What we can accomplish in remote/hybrid learning feels different than what we used to accomplish. No one is really sure of what to do with this reality given that standards and expectations have not changed in any explicit way.
The back to school rhythms of assessment and community building have been disrupted. While the pressure to return to business as usual feels intense, in this session, educators will explore the possibilities in taking pause, scaling back to the roots of teaching and learning, and exploring how joyful learning communities are cultivated by allowing kids to take the lead.
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