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Leslie has been an elementary educator in central Virginia since 2008. As both a fourth-grade teacher and diversity resource teacher, she collaboratively designs and co-facilitates a variety of professional developments on multicultural education and culturally responsive instructional strategies. Wills-Taylor also organizes diversity awareness events that build sustainable home-school partnerships. She is one of the recipients of the 2016 Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching. She can be reached via Twitter @LeslieWillsTay1.

Matthew Swoveland is an educator at Roca, an organization that works with very high risk young people in Chelsea, Mass. He is passionate about education as a key element in the reintegration of young people after gang involvement and incarceration. He has taught everything from classical Greek tragedy to a history of cheese in the western world. Above all, he believes in the power of relationships to transform the ways we process information, build meaning, and relate with others.

Breeanna is a Massachusetts history teacher who currently works as the outreach specialist at Boston University’s African Studies Center. She is an educator with a global focus whose work meets at the crossroads of equity in educational opportunities and African studies. Elliott has taught internationally and domestically, and she advocates for rigorous, interdisciplinary education approaches as a means to encourage intercommunal understanding, empathy and global citizenship. She has spent much of her adult life traveling in East Africa and working in African studies.

Sherry has been an educator for 39 years and currently serves as the student support leader at Iles School in Springfield, Illinois. Frachey became passionate about stress reduction and restorative justice practices in schools and now partners with the Memorial Medical Center Foundation and the Harvard School of Medicine’s Benson-Henry Mind/Body Institute to teach The Relaxation Response, a stress-reduction program that uses developmentally appropriate exercises for school-age children. Her work has been featured on Yoko Ono’s website IMAGINE PEACE, Everyone Matters and Free the Children.