Nurturing Pedagogies of Collective Healing

Welcome from the Conference Co-Chairs

We are excited to welcome you to the 31st Annual College of Education Multicultural Education (MCE) Conference. As new Co-Chairs, we are honored to serve and steward the legacy of the MCE conference, which centers transformative and socially just education for all.

The Multicultural Education Conference (MCE) has remained an important space for critical thought and gathering for the Sacramento State community of students, alumni, faculty, and community partners beyond the university. In the last four years, this gathering shifted to an online modality to accommodate our health and safety as we endured the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We are grateful to be able to host this year’s gathering in person.

Our fully place-based 2025 MCE is an invitation to come together to share our knowledges and to build our capacities to nurture healing pedagogies within our distinct contexts. We are excited that Dr. Stephanie Cariaga, a former English teacher, organizer, and CSU Professor, will serve as our Keynote, sharing lessons from her embodied wellness approach. MCE is also honored that Fenix Drum and Dance, children's book author Elsie Guerrero, and Sol Collective will provide workshops as part of the Sponsored Sessions component of our program. Additional workshops, presentations, and posters will also amplify the work happening at our campus and community, from submissions we received guided by this year’s theme, Nurturing Pedagogies of Collective Healing.

We will also honor our campus and community social justice awardees. Lunch will be provided, and we encourage you to build community at this gathering and to join alongside your colleagues to bring back the learnings to your work in schools, colleges, or in the community. We encourage you to share any access needs to support your participation.

We appreciate your commitment to making this conference a success.

May we continue to build together at MCE 2025!

Drs. Lorena Camargo-Gonzalez, Sheeva Sabati, and Sruthi Swami, Conference Co-Chairs

Conference Theme

Multicultural education is rooted in civil rights, racial justice, and liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As critical educators committed to expanding intersectional approaches to anti-racism and social justice, we know that struggles for culturally affirming curriculum and critical pedagogies are an ongoing struggle. This is because dominant educational institutions in the United States have been marked by interlocking systems of oppression, including settler colonialism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, nationalism, and racial capitalism (Arvin et al., 2013; Dumas, 2014; Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective, 2021, Ladson-Billings, 2006). Most recently, access to critical multicultural education has been at the center of heightened attacks through a record number of books bans in public libraries (ALA, 2023), policies that aim to dismantle Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) (Jayakumar, 2022, Gretzinger et al., 2024), and continued efforts to silence campus-community protests or strike actions (CFA, 2024; Cho, 2018; DiPierro & Burke, 2024).

The censoring of truth and representation in curricula is an attempt to erase our communities; it undermines and harms our continued activism to advance educational equity. These attacks also underscore the significance of nurturing our freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002), and forging possibilities for collective healing from these harmful systems (Cariaga, 2023). It is at this juncture of naming harm and continuing to imagine beyond the current system that we situate our call for the 2025 MCE, Nurturing Pedagogies of Collective Healing.

The 31st annual MCE conference is an invitation to collectively reflect on the ways in which we can heal from the violences reproduced through dominant educational institutions and to find respite and hope through community-rooted pedagogies (Serrano et al., 2022). We believe it is imperative to gather to learn from the rich wisdom of cultural knowledge, practices, pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal, 2001) and pedagogies that exist within our communities. We know that education can be a space a flourishing when we lean on culturally rooted and affirming practices that create belonging, relevance, and restorative educational spaces.

We invite you, current students, staff, faculty, alumni, community educators and organizers to consider how you are cultivating healing-spaces in your own educational contexts so that we may learn from one another. In envisioning this theme, we were inspired by the questions: How do we heal from the violences that are reproduced through dominant modes of schooling? How do we co-create and sustain our freedom dreams? What pedagogies support a praxis of healing and freedom dreaming?

As we return for our first fully in-person MCE gathering since the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we invite members from both our Sacramento State and broader community to join us in co-creating a space of learning, solidarity, and knowledge-sharing. Please consider submitting a poster, presentation, or workshop proposal that connects research, theory, and/or practice at all levels of education (Pre-K through University and the community) and that illuminates the criticality of multicultural education to nurture collective healing, equitable, and liberated, educational futures. If you are a current Sacramento State student, we also invite you to submit a creative piece of work illustrating your interpretation of what it means to Nurture Pedagogies of Collective Healing. Review the guidelines for proposals and student creative works. The call to participate as well as registration will be opened soon; please mark your calendars and stay tuned!

Conference Schedule

Saturday (April 12th)	Event (Student Union Ballroom)
8:00 a.m. –8:30 a.m.	Registration
8:30 a.m. –9:00 a.m.	Opening
9:00 a.m. –10:30 a.m.	Keynote and Q & A
10:30 a.m. –11:00 a.m.	Break/transition time
11:00 a.m. –12:00 p.m.	Workshop sessions #1
12:00 p.m. –1:15 p.m.	Lunch
12:30 p.m.	Social Justice Awards
1:30 p.m. –2:30 p.m.	MCE Sponsored Sessions
2:30 p.m. –3:00 p.m.	Break/transition time
3:00 p.m. –4:00 p.m.	Workshop sessions # 2
4:00 p.m. –5:00 p.m.	Closing and social

Keynote and Sponsored Sessions

Dr. Stephanie Cariaga (Keynote Speaker)

Stephanie Cariaga, Ph.D., has served the wider Los Angeles community
for over eighteen years as an English teacher, founding member of the People’s Education Movement, and now an associate professor in teacher education at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Her teaching and research reintegrate the mind, body, and spirit into classrooms and beyond to honor and meet the holistic needs of marginalized students and the educators who serve them. She has published widely in academic journals, including The Urban Review and Race Ethnicity & Education, in books like A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back (UA Press), and co-edited a special issue for The Journal of Trauma Studies in Education titled "Grief as an Invitation to Heal: Extending Trauma-Informed Pedagogies, Research, and Praxis." She has spoken nationally and internationally at conferences, podcasts, and various educational communities, and continues to co-organize liberatory wellness programming for critical educators through spaces like Critical Embodied Wellness for Educators (CrEW) and the People’s Education Conference. She is inspired by her best teachers, her children Laila and Catalino.

Drum and Dance for Joy. A workshop with Fenix Drum and Dance

Fenix Drum and Dance was founded in 2004 by the mother- daughter team of Angela J. James and Olivia Yasmin to give families the opportunity to participate creatively in the music and dance of Africa fenix drum dance and the Diaspora. Since then, it has evolved into a recognized performance and education agency in the Sacramento area and beyond. In addition to conducting regular classes in African and Afro Caribbean music and dance, Fenix has developed a strong Educational Outreach arm with Certified Teaching Artists, serving all ages from preschool to university.

In the “Drum and Dance for Joy” workshop, participants will have the opportunity to learn and experience the embodied practices of drumming and dance. These cultural practices trace the history of African Americans across the Diaspora and are also ways of reclaiming physical and mental health across many indigenous cultures. Through engagement with musical instruments and traditional dance movements, participants will get to showcase their creativity, while learning about the historical significance of these cultural practices.

website

Embracing uniqueness through children's books to create a more inclusive environment A workshop with Elsie Guerrero

Elsie Guerrero's mission of advocacy is to write books promoting inclusion in the area of childhood disability and social justice. Elsie has published over ten books about children with disabilities and three books about social justice within the Latinx community. Elsie Guerrero is well known for her advocacy efforts in bringing awareness about children with special needs and the Latinx community. She was recently recognized as a 2020 Honoree with the Hispanic Lifestyle Magazine. Elsie has also been featured in many reputable news outlets, such as NBC Latino and Telemundo.

In this workshop, Elsie Guerrero will share her own journey of authoring children’s books as a vehicle to raise awareness about students with disabilities. Participants will be guided to write their own stories, drawing from their experiences and whatever comes from their hearts. Participants will also have the space to share their own stories with one another and learn about key steps in the publishing process.

Elsie’s website

Elise Guerrero

Your Story in an Accordion-Folded Book. A workshop with Sol Collective

Join Sol Collective for an introduction to accordion books and create an accordion book to tell an empowering story. Mexica, Maya, and other peoples recorded their stories, beliefs, science, history, and everyday life in books that we know as codices. In this workshop, you will utilize different materials and techniques to create an accordion book while using art to explore, connect to yourself, and make a unique personalized accordion book.

Sol Collective is a community-based 501(c)(3) partnership whose mission is to provide artistic, cultural, and educational programming, promote social justice, and empower youth through art, activism, music, and media experience. Started in 2005, Sol Collective provides a space for youth training, development, and education in the artistic and media disciplines in an effort to address the issues that face historically underserved and marginalized communities. The center has provided accessible, multicultural, multigenerational programming for the Sacramento community and beyond for almost 20 years and is dedicated to creating and facilitating accessible art, media, technology, and self-care education, resources, a platform, and safe space for youth and communities of color.

Stay tuned for more information about Sol Collective’s workshop!

Sol Collective Website

MCE Community & Alumni Awards

The Multicultural Education Conference (MCE) recognizes the exceptional achievements of two members who advance equity and inclusion. These award recipients have an outstanding track record of fostering inclusive environments and addressing equity throughout their professional endeavors. The award recipients will receive a plaque and a $150 gift card.

Please use the link below to make a nomination(s) for the following awards:

Community Award

This honor is awarded to an individual or an organization in the Sacramento or greater Sacramento region who does the daily hard/heart-work of leaving this world better than they found it. This person is a warrior of love and justice and is unapologetic in their quest to improve the world through their commitment to community work. This person may be engaged in scholar activism but can also be someone outside the academy who aligns with our conference theme: Living Legacies and Freedom Dreaming of Critical Multicultural Education.

Alumni Award

This honor is awarded to a Sacramento State alumnus for their recognized achievements in the areas of equity and inclusion by championing policies and practices to make environments just and accessible. This person consistently and courageously demonstrates leadership, activism, organizing, and self-determination for themselves and their communities.

Any questions can be directed to the Awards and Fundraising committee leads:

Sheeva Sabati s.sabati@csus.edu

The deadline to submit nominations is March 1, 2025. (closed)

Committee

Committee Grid

The MCE Committee, pictured left to right:
Kenya Burton, Lorena Camargo Gonzalez, Alejandro Carrion, Trina Chang, Eric Claravall, Debbie Dennick, Alma Flores, Ravin Pan, Sheeva Sabati, Sruthi Swami, MJ Vincent

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all that contribute to advancing multicultural education, here at the university and beyond. Without your tireless work, the goals of our anchor university initiatives would not come to fruition. Thank you to our sponsors who keep this work going!

Want to support the Multicultural Education Conference?

In keeping with our social justice principles, the Multicultural Education Conference is a completely free event. If you have the means, please consider providing a donation via the Sacramento State Giving Page. Your donation allows us to cover all programming costs to make this event free and accessible to the entire campus and broader community. To donate go to: “How to Give, Sac State”, look for “Make a Secure Gift Online” select the link for the secure form. Next, select the option to “View all giving opportunities” and search for the “Multicultural Education Conference, College of Education”. Any amount is appreciated!

Thank you also to our sponsors for their generous support who keep this work going!”.

Disclaimer

All images, presentations and materials are the property of their respective creators, owners or its third party. Sacramento State University hosts the content submitted by conference participants, but does not provide copyright enforcement or protection services.

Accommodations

If you need accommodation services to access this event, please email michele.vincent@csus.edu with your request, no later than 5 days prior to the event. Thanks for your support and we look forward to serving you.

California State University, Sacramento

Anchor University College of Education

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