Region IV-E Conference: Pre-Conference Special

We are excited to offer some enticing full and half day pre-conference for our 2018 regional conference in Milwaukee. Registration is still open and even if you already registered for the conference, you can still get registered for a pre-conference.

Full Day Pre-Conference

Resilience: A New LeaderShape Program
Taking care of yourself is crucial to being a successful leader yet it is often the last thing we think about doing. Resiliency is a key attribute of today’s successful leaders. Resilience has been designed to help individuals spend time thinking about how they can face adversity and come back stronger than before.

The skills learned during Resilience will allow professionals to approach their daily work with increased focus and will help build stronger relationships with co-workers, colleagues, and clients. Most importantly, doing this personal work will role model the importance of taking care of yourself and show how essential that is to being an effective community member regardless of your occupation.

Resilience is a day that is designed to meet participants where they are and develop their understanding of stress and its impact on their lives and how that impacts their relationships and leadership. Our objectives are to help participants:

• Understand stress
• Define resilience
• Explore how the brain works
• Examine how our mind interprets and how that impacts our stress levels
• Improve our “paying attention” skills
• Examine timeless principles for resilience
• Become resilient leaders
• Create resilient communities

Half Day Pre-Conferences

This is America.  Social Justice Work in Higher Education in 2018
In our climate of exclusion, resurgence of hate and hate groups, continued discrimination based upon identities, and extreme political divides, the need for focused and intentional social justice work is critical to all of our campuses and seems to be more difficult than ever. 

This workshop will utilize frameworks to discuss how we arrived at this point, where we need to focus our time strategically, and allow participants to engage in dialogue with colleagues to develop a plan to address a social justice concern within their scope of influence.  An intentional focus will be placed on the individual participant and how they can influence transformative change within their campus role.

Not at odds: Free speech, equity, and inclusion on today's college campuses
Recent portrayals of the so-called crisis of free speech on college campuses are often framed as pitting free speech in opposition to equity and diversity. Rather than impose external conditions and restrictions on institutions and students as we work to establish both meaningful protections for those who have experienced past trauma and create spaces for open and honest discourse on fraught topics, our institutions of higher education should be allowed the freedom to establish guidelines and rules for deliberation appropriate for their communities within our already established free speech case law.

An overview of recently proposed and enacted state legislation pertaining to free speech on college campuses, specifically laws and court cases that might restrict the use of free speech zones on college campuses, will set the stage for this interactive workshop. Drawing examples from campuses that have hosted controversial speakers in the past two years, participants will explore proactive steps institutions can take to anticipate or possibly prevent discord, balancing strong respect for equity and inclusion while still protecting free speech.