FIN Commons

Umoja VI is unlike any professional development conference you have ever attended. It was crafted as a deep, holistic, and engaged learning experience where we share practices and pedagogy that will help us succeed, as well as, create a new vision and new learning strategies. As students of African descent, we vow to help each other be bigger than ourselves, by partnering with faculty, staff, and administrators to articulate learning that matters, transforms, and works. A unique professional development opportunity created by students for faculty, staff, administrators, and fellow students.

Excerpt from Umoja VI Student Workshop Program:

The amazing students producing and presenting the Umoja VI conference have been hard at work for 9 months. The conference you are experiencing went through any number of iterations, with the students’ principle focus being how best to honor, engage and inspire the teachers and students who would be attending.

At one of the planning sessions, students became involved in a rich discussion about Learning Styles and student engagement. The point was made that sometimes students can feel passive and uninvolved in the classroom. The contrast was then made to how the very same students may in fact feel very passionate and involved with other facets of their lives: job, friends, pop culture, etc.  From those two contrasting mindsets, the students had the idea to bridge the classroom and the “real world” by creating something they dubbed “Hip-Hop Learning Styles Inventory.” They analyzed the different elements that constitute a typical Hip-Hop song, and then brainstormed how these elements might be adapted to be of value in the community college classroom.

The workshops in which you are participating are the product of that beginning brainstorm and a whole lot of subsequent work designing, adapting and implementing conceptual elements for use in the classroom. In these workshops we invite you to play, create, and throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care!

Click here to download the conference program

Click here for the Student Workshop Program

Click here to visit the Umoja VI Fair and it’s various Student ran booths

Click here for Student Ran Workshops

Click here for The Umoja VI Best Practices Workshops

Click here to see the other Umoja VI Workshops