The Lurie College is launching its second K-12 Online Teaching Academy on Jan. 8.
San José State University’s Connie L. Lurie College of Education is launching its second K-12 Online Teaching Academy on Friday, January 8, from 3 – 4:30 p.m. PST. The five free sessions are designed to prepare educators to teach online. The webinar series originally launched in summer 2020 in response to the inequities in learning exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis and gained media attention for providing high-quality professional development for educators nationwide. The 23 Summer 2020 webinar recordings discussed how to build equity and employ emancipatory pedagogies in an online environment, how to utilize various online platforms, and more. More than 100 participants have already registered for each of the five sessions, which include presentations such as “Decolonizing STEM” and “Providing Students Choice: Engagement and Equity.”
“Initially, our goal was to create an initiative that would support our college’s teaching candidates and teachers in the field as we were all making the transition to remote teaching, learning, and working,” said Lurie College Dean Heather Lattimer. “Since our summer K-12 Academy was online, we decided to also make it available to anybody at no cost and we were amazed by the overall demand for the webinars—over 3,000 people attended our 23 summer webinars and the recordings have over 20,000 views on our YouTube channel. As the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbated the many social inequities within education and the movement for racial justice has gained momentum in recent months, we wanted to host another K-12 Academy at the midpoint of the academic year to provide further support to educators as we are navigating this landscape. The presenters for our upcoming webinars on January 8, 15, 22, 29, and February 5 will highlight the intersection of their topics with educational equity, social justice, anti-racism, and/or emancipatory education.”
In an EdSource article published in October, student teacher Erin Enguero, ’16 Kinesiology, stated that the webinars helped “contribute to this very important conversation about what it means to do distance learning.” Most recently, the California Governor’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery identified the webinar series as one of the most helpful distance learning resources for educators and highlighted it on the COVID-19 CA website.
There is still time for educators to register in the webinar series, which occur January 8, 15, 22, 29 and February 5 from 3 – 4:30 p.m. PST: sjsu.edu/education/community/k12-academy.