EDTalks: Understanding the Experiences of Students with Unique Needs

Join us for an engaging evening as we explore the unique needs and strengths of two student populations - students with disabilities and homeless and highly mobile students. Our presenters will discuss the specific challenges faced by these students, how we can leverage their strengths, and share how schools, classrooms and communities can better support them. 

$5 tickets available at the door (cash or check only) 

Light appetizers are included with your ticket and are served on a first-come, first-served basis.

A Three Hour Drive: Disability as Diversity
Bryan Boyce is the founder and Executive Director of Cow Tipping Press, which cultivates writers with developmental disabilities and gives readers a new way to think about this rich form of human diversity.  As the sibling of a brother with developmental disabilities, Bryan knows firsthand the value and richness of exchange across neurological difference. He seeks to give others this opportunity—an alternative to presuming deficit and pity—through the often inventive, radically self-representative writing of Cow Tipping authors. A graduate of Grinnell College, Bryan has taught high school English in Lesotho and on the Rosebud Lakota Reservation and served as Assistant Director of Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano in California.

Bryan will be joined by Cow Tipping author Shinoa Makinen, who started writing 2008. Shinoa enjoys knitting, singing in a choir, playing her flute and writing songs from her heart. 

Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Students Experiencing Homelessness
Dr. Ann Masten is a Regents Professor of Child Development and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Masten has studied resilience in children and families experiencing homelessness for more than 25 years in collaboration with shelter providers and school districts in the Twin Cities. Her research focuses on risk and resilience in human development with the goal of informing and fostering practices and policies that support success for young people who have experienced trauma. She is the author of Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development, among many other publications, and regularly offers a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on resilience which draws participants from around the world.