Keynote speaker, April Andry Rah’man, is the Assistant Director for Education Research at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, where she helps colleagues transform research and teaching environments into spaces of belonging for students and instructors. She credits her children and students for teaching her what it means to be a responsive educator, and her mother for apprenticing her to design thinking and community care from an early age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her emerging scholarship focuses on how communities of educators and learners within the African diaspora organize homeplaces–self-determined spaces of Black healing and self-love, consciousness-raising, and resistance and liberation–within educational institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n