What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do: Teaching for Equity & Justice on Days After Tragedy

Full title: What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do: Teaching for Equity & Justice on Days After Tragedy & Trauma What do teachers do in their classrooms the day after a tragic or traumatic event? How do they attend to their students’ needs while teaching for equity and justice? Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at UCONN NEAG School of Education has made this a focus of her work as a teacher and a scholar. In her book Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice, Dr. Dunn examines examples of days after that teachers remember, including 9/11, elections, natural disasters, gun violence, police brutality, social uprisings, Supreme Court decisions, immigration policies, and more. She also shares examples of days after that K–12 and college-aged students remember, including what their teachers did and didn’t do and how they experienced these moments. Dr. Dunn is a graduate of LSEHD’s undergraduate teacher preparation program in Secondary Education. Her talk will highlight equity and justice-focused pedagogical approaches that can be used to support current classroom teachers and to to help preservice teachers think ahead to their future classrooms. Dr. Dunn’s talk will provide useful and thought-provoking guidance for teachers and educational personnel in a variety of educational contexts at all levels who navigate these very difficult and all-too-frequent days after.