Dr. Django Paris & Dr. Chelsea Craig (Sqətalkw)
2025 Keynote Presenters
Culturally Sustaining Education
Join. Center. Sustain.
In this impactful joint keynote, Dr. Django Paris and Dr. Chelsea Craig (Sqətalkw) will explore how educators, leaders, communities, and institutions can join together to center, and sustain the strength, wisdom, and histories of Indigenous, Black, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, and global majority youth, families, and Elders. Drawing on the intersections of gender, disability, language, land, migration, and class, they will discuss how we can prepare educators to serve as advocates and collaborators in schools, universities, and beyond.
Grounded in the principles of racial and intersectional justice, this session will highlight how educational spaces can foster community-led efforts of decolonization, liberation, and abolition, and how these movements can inform educational practice, leadership, and research. This keynote will empower attendees to think about how to approach teaching and learning through a justice-focused lens, while growing alongside their students and communities.
Dr. Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington on Coast Salish homelands. His teaching and research focus on centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander youth and communities in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools. Paris is author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools (2011), and co-editor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (2014), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (2017), and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (2020). He is also the editor of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies series with Teachers College Press and hosts the conversation series An Educational Otherwise. He has published in many academic journals, including the Harvard Educational Review and Educational Researcher.
Dr. Chelsea Craig (Sqətalkw) is a member of the Tulalip Tribes and has spent her life learning from her elders, ancestors and community. She is a graduate of the University of Washington, earning her Education Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies through the Leadership for Learning Program. Chelsea has been serving her community as an educator for 30 years. Chelsea is currently the Assistant Principal at Quil Ceda Tulalip Elementary and is committed to interrupting systems that do not work for her community and centering Indigenous knowledge that leads to healing and justice for her people.
