Spring 2025 Series
In recognition of the current climate regarding equity in education, the Social Justice Academy will host Cornelius Minor, a well renowned Brooklyn-eased educator to discuss:
What Does it Mean to Teach Right Now!!
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025
4 p.m.–5 p.m.
Virtual
Spring Distinguished Speaker
“My job as a teacher is not to merely teach the curriculum or even to just teach the students; it is to seek to understand my kids as completely as possible so that I can purposefully bend and remix curriculum to meet them.”
Cornelius Minor is a Brooklyn-based educator and part-time Pokemon trainer. He works with teachers, school leaders, and leaders of community-based organizations to support equitable literacy reform in cities (and sometimes villages) across the globe. His latest book, “We Got This”, explores how the work of creating more equitable school spaces is embedded in our everyday choices—specifically in the choice to really listen to kids.
Minor has been featured in Education Week, Brooklyn Magazine, and Teaching Tolerance magazine. He has partnered with the New York City Department of Education, the International Literacy Association, Scholastic, and Lesley University’s Center for Reading Recovery & Literacy Collaborative. Minor was featured in the documentary “Out of Print”, which made its way around the film festival circuit, and he has been a featured speaker at conferences all over the world. He is a dedicated hip-hop fan, and on some evenings, you can find him online saving the universe with his PlayStation or on paper saving the realm in Dungeons & Dragons.
Most recently, along with his partner and wife, Kass Minor, he has established The Minor Collective, a community-based movement designed to foster sustainable change in schools. Whether working with educators and kids in Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York City, Minor uses his love for technology, literature, and social media to bring communities together. As a teacher, Minor draws not only on his years teaching middle school in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but also on time spent skateboarding, shooting hoops, and working with young people.
These days, Minor is learning how to bake from his two young children, searching for an elusive pair of Jordan IVs, and is ritually re-reading all of the 1990s era comic books that he can find.