Liz Dempsey Lee
Company: Liz Dempsey Lee
Education: Bates College B.A. - Lesley University, Ph.D., Bank Street College of Education, M.Ed.
Boston, MA, USA
Biography
Liz Dempsey Lee is an educator, consultant, writer, and avid coffee drinker whose questions about the interactions among families, schools, communities, and equity landed her in Lesley University's Individually Designed Ph.D. program. She graduated in May 2020 with an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic above.
Shortly after, she launched LizDempseyLee Consulting with the goal of reframing equity as central to creating just schools, organizations, and communities. She runs a variety of workshops for parents, schools, and organizations including, Parenting for Equity and All Together for Equity: Building Community Support for Equity Initiatives in Schools. She also runs small discussion groups for parents interested in exploring their privilege.
In her spare time, Liz teaches active and engaging graduate and undergraduate courses as adjunct faculty at Lesley University, develops engineering challenges for children PreK-8, and listens to podcasts while playing Scrabble (and drinking coffee - of course!)
Passion
I'm passionate about my work - and love talking with parents, educators and leaders to hear what's working, what's not working, and what's on their minds. I also adore hanging with my kids, drinking coffee and eating really good chocolate cake!
I am willing to travel
More than 100 miles
When it comes to payments
Everything is negotiable
Topics
Origin Story
I was a literacy teacher in a Title 1 classroom and worked with kindergartens needing literacy support. Part of my role was to help parents learn to support early literacy at home - but - I discovered that some of my student's parents could not read. That left me with some fundamental questions:
* What obstacles do families face when interacting with schools?
* What is missed? Do school expectations hide unrealistic assumptions which families cannot overcome?
* How might we work better with families?
* in which areas do these assumptions exist?
That led me to Lesley University and a PhD focused on these issues.
Example talks
All Together for Equity: Building Community Support for Equity Initiatives in Schools
Too often, community responses to societal inequities see schools as the primary drivers of societal change. This presentation addresses a critical dilemma – is it possible for schools to achieve equity without the engagement of the greater community?
We can’t. Schools cannot create anti-racist, equitable environments without also addressing racism and privilege in the broader community. This presentation will focus on why and how to build community-based approaches to anti-racist, equitable education, including attention to how educators can and should engage everyone from families, to businesses, to local government in this work.
In fact, parents have different ideas about the purpose of schooling and varying ability to be heard within a school system. Creating equitable education requires educators to acknowledge the intersectional role of socioeconomic status and race (and more) within communities. In particular, this work asks school staff to maintain awareness of the ways in which dominant parenting expectations reflect a white and middle-class approach – to the detriment of BIPOC families.
Attendees will be introduced to basic concepts including Parenting for Equity, Privilege Footprints and Communities as Ecosystems in an interactive presentation. This introduction to including community in the work of anti-racist, equitable education also includes concrete examples and ideas so that participants can implement these tools in their own practice.
Calling in vs. Calling out: The Art of Having Hard Conversations
In this talk, we will explore "calling in" an approach difficult conversations. Loretta Ross (Smith College) defines Calling In as relationship building. Her work sets us up to "have uncomfortable discussions—with the aim of respecting the humanity of everyone involved"*, and is useful for those who are uninformed rather than malicious. Calling In is aligned with “radical mom-ness” (mom is defined here as caring - for children, nieces, nephews, niblings, parents, neighbors and more). It is a way to have difficult conversations which allow others the space to hear different ideas.