2023-2024 Community Education Series

Learn, Explore, Be Inspired

The Epiphany School Community Education Series offers an annual slate of diverse educational opportunities for the adults in our school community—parents/guardians, grandparents, friends, and neighbors.

In keeping with our strategic plan, the Epiphany School Community Education Series enhances our authentic and inclusive community by welcoming diverse thought, sharing our expanded vision and mission, and providing creative and engaging educational opportunities for our community. We welcome ideas for future programming and we will continue to collaborate with neighboring schools and the Epiphany Parent Council to develop and offer events that meet our community’s interests and needs.

As in past years, our programming includes virtual talks from the People of Color in Independent Schools' (POCIS) "Equity and Inclusion Virtual Speaker Series." Epiphany School is a member of POCIS, a consortium of NWAIS independent schools that exists to help people of color thrive in independent schools.

2023/2024 Series:

Presented in partnership with:

October 5, 2023, 6 - 7:15 pm (Virtual Event)

"Storytelling as Resistance: Experience at Predominantly White Institutions and Generational Trauma"

In this talk, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez will name what it means to attend a predominantly white institution, PWI, as a non-white person. She will also address generational trauma, telling stories about her own experiences with therapy, the stigmas around therapy, being first-generation, and what the experience of being from a war-torn country has meant for her and her family. She will also explore ways to reclaim traditions while healing from generation trauma.

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez was born in Managua, Nicaragua, but calls Nashville, Tennessee, home. She is a feminist, theologian, storyteller, advocate founder of Latina Rebels, and author of For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color. Mojica Rodríguez merges storytelling with pedagogy to help folks understand the larger forces at play, also known as systemic oppression.

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Presented in partnership with:

February 8, 2024, 5 - 6:15 pm (Virtual Event)

"A Conversation with Dr. Bernice A. King"

Dr. Bernice A. King is a global thought leader, strategist, solutionist, orator, peace advocate, and CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center For Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), which was founded by her mother as the official living memorial to the life, work, and legacy of her father. In this position, Bernice continues to advance her parents’ legacy of nonviolent social change through policy, advocacy, research, as well as education and training through the Kingian philosophy of nonviolence, which she re-branded Nonviolence365TM️ (NV365). Read her complete bio here.

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Presented in partnership with:

March 13, 2024, 6 - 7:15 pm (Virtual Event)

"Beyond the Model Minority: Asian American Histories of Resistance and Renewal in the Pacific Northwest and Beyond"

In this talk, Dr. Megan Asaka will examine how Asian Americans have responded to, challenged, and resisted anti-Asian racism and injustice. Though often portrayed as passive “model minorities,” Asian Americans have a rich legacy of resistance and militant action that has long been overlooked. Focusing on historical accounts from in and beyond the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Asaka will offer a new understanding of the Asian American past as a pathway for future action.

Award-winning scholar, writer, and teacher of Asian American history, urban history, and public humanities, she is the author of Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City, which examines the erased histories of the communities that built Seattle. The book was inspired by her own family history in Seattle as well as her work as an oral historian and archivist for Densho, a community-based organization that seeks to preserve and share the stories of the Japanese American incarceration. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside and lives in Pasadena.

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Presented in partnership with:

May 23, 2024, 6 - 7:15 pm (Virtual Event)

"Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Setting of Technology and Society"

From automated decision systems in healthcare, policing, education, and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination—while appearing neutral and even benevolent as compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight. When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. Whereas dystopias are the stuff of nightmares, and utopias the stuff of dreams… ustopias are what we create together when we are wide awake.

Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab and author of three books, Viral Justice (2022), Race After Technology (2019), and People’s Science (2013), and editor of Captivating Technology (2019). Ruha Benjamin speaks widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice.

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