Habla Teacher Institutes are highly interactive and participatory, introducing a variety of readily accessible tools and arts-based approaches for deep and rich engagement with academic content. This year’s Chicago institute will focus on the idea of students imagining their own “positive social futures” through an exploration of futurism.  The concept of Latinfuturism has grown out of and built upon the legacy of Afrofuturism in popular and literary cultures. We will explore how bringing futurism from different cultures into the classroom allows us to imagine future possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and our earth.

This institute will dive deeply into “geek culture” and how we can connect to the popular cultures that often captivate our students from video games, to anime, to comic books, to science fiction, to fantasy. Our core texts reframe and reappropriate the dominant narrative and place female protagonists of color at the center of their stories.

This year’s Chicago Teacher Institute will help teachers to build classroom experiences around the following core principles as well as offering concrete, multimodal strategies for teaching all academic content. 

Although all teacher grade-levels are welcome this particular institute will be aimed at teachers of grades K-8.