LibGuides: Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB): Equity Immersion Conference: Home

Welcome: EmpowerED Equity - Make Equity Your Superpower

Hello! Welcome to your custom-curated resource space, created specifically to support the learning and equity journeys of attendees of the 2023 IASB Equity Immersion Conference! More specifically, these resources reflect the focus of the session EmpowerED Equity: Make Equity Your Superpower, which was created to support school district leaders in their comprehensive equity efforts. We hope that these resources will be advantageous to your continued journey!

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About the Center

The Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP Center) is one of four regional Equity Assistance Centers, funded by the United States Department of Education under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The MAP Center provides technical assistance and training, upon request, in the areas of race, sex, national origin, and religion to public school districts and other responsible governmental agencies to promote equitable educational opportunities and work in the areas of civil rights, equity, and school reform. The Center serves 13 State Educational Agencies, 7,025 Public School Districts, and 11,249,050 Public School Students.

Illinois Report Card: Equity Journey Continuum - Relevant Resources

In response to the Illinois Report Card's work towards supporting learners' access to high-quality education, we at the MAP Center have curated resources to support educators and administrators in this endeavor. Please see the resources below, mirroring the Equity Journey Continuum:

Student Learning
Learning Conditions
Elevating Educators

Student Learning

EquiLearn Podcast: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice This Equity Spotlight Podcast explores the meaning of culturally sustaining pedagogies, and its implications for classroom practice.
EquiLearn Virtual Roundtable: LGBTQ+ Black Youth in Schools and Communities In this EquiLearn Virtual Roundtable, facilitated by Joselyn Parker, we discuss problems LGBTQ Black students experience being marked as Black in a white supremacist society—and being marked as queer in a hetero/cisnormative society. Together, we talk about what queerness, homophobia, and transphobia look like among Black youth in schools, and reflect upon consequences. We offer recommendations for what teachers, administrators, and community stakeholders can do to disrupt homophobia and transphobia in their school communities.
Equity by Design Research Brief: An Intersectional Approach to Building Inclusive Schools In this Equity by Design Research Brief, Dr. Federico Waitoller critiques the traditional model of inclusion for students with disabilities in the U.S., providing a blueprint for inclusive education that dismantles intersecting forms of inequity that are part of the DNA of what we consider the general education classroom. Informed by this blueprint for inclusive education, Dr. Waitoller provides an inventory of promising inclusive practices.
Equity by Design Research Brief: The Effects of Homophobia and Transphobia on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Students This Equity by Design Research Brief illustrates the relationship between mental health and LGBTQ+ identities, paying particular attention to the effects of homophobia and transphobia in schools. Homophobia and transphobia can manifest in schools in multiple ways; this brief focuses on egregious actions, such as bullying, as well as more subtle ones, such as non-inclusive curricula. Ultimately, teachers and administrators will learn about this issue and how to eradicate it in their schools to positively impact the mental wellbeing of their LGBTQ+ students.
Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Learning Environments This edition of the Equity Dispatch explores how classroom practices are often rooted in and privilege dominant cultural practices and ways of knowing. Students who have identities, cultural practices, and beliefs that depart from the dominant culture are often viewed as deficient and do not enjoy the benefits of our education system. This in turn not only ignores the myriad of assets and skills that each student has to contribute to a culturally relevant and sustaining learning environment, but it is grounded in meritocracy, individualism and deficit thinking.

Learning Conditions

Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Attending to the Mental Health of Educators and Students: The Root Causes of Thriving This special edition of Equity Dispatch highlights the critical call-to-action presented by keynote speaker Dr. Christina Pate at the MAP Center’s 2022 Equity Leaders Institute (ELI), entitled Fortifying Ourselves and the Work Toward Education Justice: Attending to the Mental Health of Educators and Students. In her talk, Dr. Pate reflected the 2022 ELI’s purpose to facilitate participants’ understanding of key components and practices that support mind-body wellbeing of the people – both students and adults – within our educational systems.
Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Developing Authentic Socially-Just Spaces at the Systemic Level This edition of Equity Dispatch speaks to educational leaders within systems who, through policy and practice, pigeonhole K-12 educators into inauthentic social justice roles—which push educators to continually reproduce practices that historically marginalize. Provided within is a socio-cultural history of social justice education theories and their original aims, an interrogation of what systemic transformative change entails, as well as suggestions for how to move beyond a technical strategies-based approach.
Equity Tool: Assessing Bias in Standards and Curricular Materials This tool provides guidance in reviewing standards and curricular materials using equity-oriented domains. It also includes a scoring and analysis guide to assist with the evaluation process.
Equity Tool: A Teachers' Tool for Minimizing the Emotional Impact of Learning Disability Labeling on Students of Color This Equity Tool is meant to help teachers to critically think about their own beliefs, thoughts, feelings, language, and ideas regarding Latinx students with Learning Dis/abilities (LDs), and their students’ social and emotional well-being and sense of self.
Equity Tool: Centering Equity in Social Emotional Learning This Equity Tool is a rubric, enabling users to determine the extent to which developed standards reflect an equity-focused approach to Social Emotional Learning. Adapted from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning’s (CASEL) Framework for Systemic Social Emotional Learning, this Tool reframes each competency toward more equitable educational experiences for students who are members of historically marginalized groups by guiding users to consider the degree to which each competency implicates the role of the school in determining social norms, the politics and power imbalances embedded in emotional interactions, and the degree to which the standard promotes student agency.
Increasing Equity in Education through Stage-based Implementation of Universal Design for Learning in a Multi-Tiered System of Support In a collaboration between representatives of Great Lakes Equity Center, CAST, National Implementation Research Network, & SWIFT Education Center, this interactive tool explains how four important system design initiatives frequently promoted by state and local education agencies for school improvement, can be implemented through an intentional systematic approach for a powerful, positive impact on student outcomes.

Elevating Educators

Equity by Design Research Brief: Teaching and Learning as Cultural Endeavors In this Equity by Design brief, we bring a cultural lens to focus on the pernicious and persistent educational inequities in academic achievement that Students of Color continue to experience.
Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Centering Equity in Educator Professional Learning This newsletter discusses ways in which professional learning can be designed and carried out to promote educators’ deep understanding of educational equity and therefore, better situate educators to provide every learner with access to a high-quality education in an inclusive environment, regardless of educational content area.
Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Reframing the Achievement Gap: Ensuring All Students Benefit from Equitable Access to Learning In this issue of Equity Dispatch, we rethink how the “achievement gap” is conceptualized. We can begin moving away from describing the achievement gap as a persistent disparity of educational measures between groups of students defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES) and gender (Hidden Curriculum, 2014), to understanding it as the outcome of historical and intergenerational marginalization of students of Color and students living in disinvested communities.
Equity Tool: Asset-Based Approaches to Professional Learning Professional development is often oriented toward closing achievement gaps. However, attention to achievement gaps focuses on a symptom of a much deeper problem: systemic barriers to high quality learning opportunities for all students. One of those barriers is thinking about students as deficits—as problems to be fixed by educators. In this Equity Tool, we provide resources that problematize deficit-based frameworks and practices that are currently utilized in many schools, offer asset-based and restorative ways of thinking, and highlight texts for ideas on how to center equity and shift towards asset-based professional learning.

Additional Governance, Leadership, and Policy Resources

Equity by Design Research Brief: Engaging School Communities in Critical Reflection on Policy School communities that develop a process for engaging in careful consideration of both policies as written and policies as practiced will be better equipped to promote equity. This brief offers some considerations for the creation of such a process.
Equity Dispatch Newsletter: Considerations for Cultivating Equity-Centered School Boards In this issue of the Equity Dispatch we focus on the collective power of minoritized communities to positively impact the quality of education students receive within their districts through the selection of equity-focused, locally-elected school board members.
Equity Tool: Equity-Oriented Policy Review Process Guide The purpose of this Equity Tool is to support teams in engaging in an equity-oriented policy review process. This planning guide is intended to be used in partnership with the Policy Equity Analysis Toolkit, and provides guiding questions, prompts, and considerations related to planning for and conducting the policy review.
Policy Equity Analysis Toolkit The purpose of this Equity Toolkit is to provide a comprehensive set of resources, tools, and processes for engaging in an equity-oriented policy review and analysis. To optimize use of all interactive functionality of this toolkit, please download the PDF and view on your device

Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB): Equity Immersion Conference

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