The Teacher-Researcher: Imagination, Beauty, and What Children Reveal with Jessica Boritz

Mentorship is not a hierarchy - it’s a relationship. Kerry Drake joins the conversation to explore what genuine mentorship looks like in early childhood education, from the reciprocity and vulnerability that both mentor and mentee bring, to what it means to step into a formal mentoring role with intention, capacity, and the right support in place. A rich and honest conversation that includes peer-to-peer mentorship, reflective practice, and what it really means to help someone find their voice.

What if professional learning looked less like a workshop everyone sits through, and more like the way we hope children learn: hands-on, relational, and full of questions? In this panel conversation, Rosalba Bortolotti, Paola Lopez, and Heather Jackson explore who the educator really is, with their own history, their own ideas about teaching, and their own need to belong before they can take risks. They talk about what it takes to learn alongside educators rather than direct them, from a ladybug inquiry that turned into map making to the leadership that protects time for thinking together. It’s an invitation to see educators as complex, diverse learners, and to build a culture where they have the trust and agency to thrive.

Childhood isn't a waiting room for adulthood. It's a valid place on the life cycle, with its own perspectives, ideas, and theories. Through a story of moss, a spray bottle, and a fairy town built on the carpet, we explore curiosity as a disposition rather than a strategy, and what becomes visible when developmental milestones move out of the foreground: the nonlinear, joyful, whole child in front of us. Inspired by my workshop, Children are Capable & Whole. The Intentional Educator

What would it mean to create a learning environment that children don't have to recover from? Kisa Marx - educator, author, and Liberation Architect - invites us to look through a kaleidoscope rather than a binary lens, shifting our perspective until we can truly see the child in front of us. A powerful conversation about cultural humility, child-affirming spaces, universal truths, and what it means to free the children in our care.

The most important readiness isn't academic - it's social, emotional, and human. Norline Wild joins the conversation to explore what it means to prepare future educators to truly see children, know their students, and bring intentionality and joy to their practice. From picture books and play to developmentalism and systemic change, this is a conversation about what teacher education can be when relationships and curiosity are at the heart of it.