Our Mission and Story

Educators moving toward collective liberation

Mission statements, oh mission statements. We’ve sat with what’s “true” about what we commit to as the mission of this Institute and here’s where we are right now. The mission of the EIEJ is to support educators and youth serving adults to engage in critical self-reflection, dialogue, and practice around critical, queer, and anti-oppressive learning and practice. It’s to support and learn alongside one another as we “take stock” of and disrupt what counts as normal in our schools and classrooms when it comes to the relationship between identity and power and collective trauma. It’s about building intersectional networks of solidarity and community, because we are all implicated in historical oppression and we believe that we have to work together to heal. 

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Who We Are

A Queer Endeavor’s EIEJ team is a collective of CU Boulder School of Education faculty, staff, and graduate students who represent diverse lived experiences in relation to race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, culture, history, dis/ability, socioeconomic status, and language and who bring expertise and interest in critical, queer, and anti-oppressive educational practices.  

Learn more about the larger EIEJ team here!

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Institute Story

For two years, A Queer Endeavor hosted  2-day summer Institutes focused on supporting K12 educators and youth serving adults to enact affirming practices for LGBTQ+ students and to disrupt cis-heteronormative structures, policies, and practices that are pervasive in schools. To date, this Institute has brought 400 educators, school leaders, and youth-serving adults together for professional learning. As an organization committed to anti-oppressive practices and intersectional movement building, this summer, 2021, we will launch “A Queer Endeavor’s Annual Educator Institute for Equity and Justice in Education.” The new name reflects a necessary (re)vision: Educators moving toward collective liberation. ​Working toward liberation requires always looking through an intersectional lens, questioning how our practices reinforce harmful norms along lines of race, social class, language, dis/ability other identifiers and their intersections, and taking action to disrupt those norms. We are committed to doing that work. Sessions at the Institute will focus on anti-racism, abolitionist teaching, gender, family, and sexual diversity, bi/multilingualism, equity in rural communities, supporting first-generation and undocumented students, critical dis/ability studies, trauma, and healing-- among others and their intersections. ​

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A Queer Endeavor 

Brittni Laura Hernandez, Bethy Leonardi, & Sara Staley

Meet the AQE team.

Brittni Laura is a Secondary Language Arts educator in Greeley, Evans District 6. Learn more about Brittni Laura here.

Bethy is an assistant professor in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Learn more about Bethy here.

Sara is an assistant professor in Teacher Learning, Research, and Practice in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Learn more about Sara here.

Sara and Bethy are co-founders and co-directors of A Queer Endeavor.

​Learn more about the larger EIEJ team here!
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