Intended Audience
This session is designed for educators, Project AWARE SEA and LEA teams, state and district leadership, student mental health staff on campus, and community mental health allies.
Learning Objectives
Participants who join this session will be able to:
Session overview
Now what? We know what our data indicate about disproportionality and disparity, so what do we do? How do we make changes to ensure our students experience equity and inclusion rather than trauma, bullying, and other harm of differential treatment? This topical learning forum is dedicated to building capacity for Project AWARE grant teams, district leadership, student mental health staff, and community mental health allies. doc Martha will lead us through causes of intentional and unintentional harm to our students. Together, we will discuss how to leverage school mental health initiatives as a means of addressing equity and inclusion on campus and in the classroom. Doc Martha will provide concrete recommendations for how each of us can use the tools and resources already in reach to shift individual practices and overall culture on campus towards repairing harms and/or prioritizing just engagement of all students and staff in education.
Speaker
Dr. Martha Merchant is a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked for the past 17 years with children, youth, and families who have experienced trauma. She is a half Korean, half white, cisgender woman and activist working to empower others and to change the systems of oppression we find all around us. doc Martha regularly works with people often viewed as being on the downside of power, including children, people of color, poly families, as well as LGBTQ folk. She is also committed to working with interns/postdocs and educators, who are systematically undervalued. She began her work with Dr. Joyce Dorado, Ph.D., co-founder of HEARTS (Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools), at the University of California, San Francisco in 2011. She continues with that work internationally, providing training and consultation to educators. doc Martha earned her M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy and her Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology at the Minnesota School of Professional Psychology.