National Series on Leadership for Antiracist Education: Inaugural Event at University of Illinois Chicago

Energizing and Enhancing the Spirit of Our Community

On October 5, 2026, Becoming Leadership Group, Teachers College Press, and the Center for Urban Education Leadership at University of Illinois Chicago invite you to the inaugural event of the National Series on Leadership for Antiracist Education. This student summit will convene scholars, educators, students, and community leaders to explore the ideas shaping antiracist leadership in education today. Through dialogue, scholarship, and community engagement, the Series creates spaces where theory and practice meet—strengthening democratic learning communities and amplifying the work of authors and practitioners committed to equity and belonging.

This event will bring together Teachers College Press authors, university faculty, local authors and artists, students, K–12 educators, and community leaders for a day of dialogue designed to foster learning, reflection, and collaborative action.

Agenda

4:00–4:30 PM: Registration & Welcome

4:30–5:30 PM: Moderated Author Panel with Chezare A. Warren, Patrick A. Duffy, Yvette Jackson, and William Ayers

5:40–6:35 PM: Concurrent Breakout Sessions

• Empathy in Black: Race & the Spectacle of Human Suffering | Led by Chezare A. Warren
  Dr. Warren will engage with participants on ideas from his forthcoming book of the same title that grapples with the potential of empathy to disrupt anti-Black racialized suffering in education and beyond.
• Stop Running from White Supremacy and Fight!: Understanding the Work Needed to Build Something Else | Led by David Stovall
  The session seeks to directly address the notion that things will automatically get better with a new presidential administration. Because they won't, the session will address what educators and school leaders can do in the current moment to build power and support learning.
• Igniting the Brilliant Mind Within: Transcendent Thinking as the Pathway to Confidence, Strength, and Self-Actualization | Led by Yvette Jackson
  When students are inspired to think transcendentally, through equitable pedagogy that cultivates belief in and recognition of their innate potential for genius, they discover a brilliance within themselves that no uncertainty can extinguish. Experience how the Pedagogy of Confidence leverages the neuroscience of transcendent thinking as the cognitive and emotional catalyst to nurture expansive, purpose-driven thinking, personal strengths, unshakeable confidence, and determination to contribute, igniting their journey toward self-actualization.
• Awakening and Energizing the Spirit | Led by William Ayers
  In the dark times will there be singing? Brecht asks. Yes, there will be singing, singing about the dark times. We will sing here about hope, not hope as an idle wish but as a dynamic and muscular practice. We resist despair as we choose hope, making a lovely future closer and more imaginable as well as our work and life today bearable, purposeful, even exciting. Hope demands attention; hope wants action.

6:45–8:00 PM: Reception, Book Signing, & Closing—Refreshments Provided

About the Panelists

Chezare A. Warren is an associate professor of equity and inclusion in education policy at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. He received the 2024 Society of Professors of Education (SPE) Charles DeGarmo Award. He is the author of about Centering Possibility in Black Education.

David Stovall is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. 

Yvette Jackson is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, founded at the College Board and Teachers College, Columbia University. She is internationally recognized for her work in assessing the learning potential of disenfranchised urban students. She is the author of The Pedagogy of Confidence.

William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois Chicago (retired). His books include To Teach, Fourth Edition, about Becoming a Teacher, and Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World.

About the Moderator

Patrick A. Duffy is Executive Director of Students United, an adjunct professor of educational leadership at the University of Minnesota, and founder and principal consultant of Becoming Leadership Group. As an educator, researcher, and author of Becoming an Antiracist School Leader, his work explores student leadership, democracy, identity, and the conditions that help schools and communities thrive.