
Lift Every Voice
A Cross-Cultural Learning Experience
The Lift Every Voice Teaching Institute provides participants with an approach for introducing culture as the catalyst for a more inclusive teaching practice. Our journey gives context to culture through a series of texts, artworks, stories, and media. Participants learn how to create a curricular weave honoring past, present, and future traditions reflecting the diverse voices in the 21st century classroom. The institute focuses on illuminating cross cultural narratives that make up history in addition to honoring the stories in our world today. Lift Every Voice offers culturally relevant institutional frameworks for redesigning supportive schools and classrooms for all students. A series of “provocations” spark meaningful discussions around issues of identity and culture. All presentations, workshops, and conversations are rooted in a deep sense of joy and celebration leaving teachers excited to return to their students inspired with new teaching practices.

The 6 Cultural Tenets
Each institute is shaped around 6 cultural tenets which also provide a framework for
building classrooms, schools, and organizations that lift every voice.
Global Awareness
Learning Strengths
Student Identities
Agile Learning Environments
Diverse Perspectives
A Listening Stance

Donald King
Donald King is a seasoned producer, cultural practitioner and community engagement specialist who is
skilled in connecting people, places and perspectives. He develops successful cultural organizations,
venues, and events nationally and internationally. He has twenty years of notable accomplishments and
extensive expertise in the arts, arts education and literacy. King was the founder and Artistic Director of
Providence Black Repertory Company where he produced thirteen seasons of award-winning theatre,
education and public programs including Providence Sound Session, a genre-defying, multi-stage music
festival and parade that hailed national and international audiences. He has served as a visiting professor at
his alma mater, Brown University, where he concentrated in Africana, Modern Culture Media and Theatre.
King’s facilitation skills, creativity, leadership abilities, and engagement practices are sharpened through his
work with The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University, The Habla Teacher Institute and his current work
with The Learning Alliance (Moonshot Academy) in Vero Beach Florida, along with his ongoing role as an
active alum of Leadership Rhode Island and previous LRI Program Co-Chair, wherein he received the “2018
Leader As Host” award for his work with The Providence Cultural Equity Initiative (PCEI) and Providence
Sound Session. King divides his time between Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon and Providence, RI, where he
advises as a creative consultant for PCEI and Eco Arts, where he helps to facilitate local, regional, national
and international cultural exchange and tourism initiatives. He continues to produce, present and advise on
large scale, multi-stage festivals and place-making events and institutes.

Kurt Wootton
Kurt Wootton is a co-founder and director of Habla: The Center for Language and Culture and is one of the
founding directors of the ArtsLiteracy Project in the Education Department at BrownUniversity. He has piloted
several lab schools in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico and has worked with Boston, Hartford, St. Paul,
Providence, and Central Falls on multi-year, district-wide initiatives. He is the coauthor of A Reason to Read:
Linking Literacy and the Arts published by Harvard Education Press. The New York Times writes, “Mr. Wootton
remains every bit as convinced of education’s power to transform lives. He has changed his tool of choice,
however, from a mirror in which students see only reflections of themselves to a window that opens onto the
rest of the world.”

A bridge that stretched from the realm of dreams to the highways and byways and thoroughfares and back roads of action. - Stanley Crouch