Thank you for your interested in leading a breakout session at the 2019 Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice!

Before you get started on your application, please read through these guidelines:

Breakout sessions should be:

• Engaging: Build interaction, role-playing, discussion, or other creative tools into your breakout session to keep your attendees engaged and thinking. Try to avoid a dry lecture or panel presentation with very little participation from the audience.
  

• Include “Real-World” Aspects: Think through how you might build bridges between the lived experiences of attendees and your work. Tell a powerful story. Allow participants to practice a skill you’re teaching. Provide practical discussion questions and allow ample time for attendees to apply your message to their own work for justice. Don’t rely on a lecture to connect attendees in a personal way to your topic!

• Identify a goal for your breakout session: Of the five following areas, what is your primary goal for your session? Think through these options to help you frame your session content. (Have another goal in mind? Choose “other” on the application and let us know what that goal is!)

• • • Issue/Topic Education: Your primary goal is to educate on a specific justice issue or topic, to build awareness. (Ex: farmworkers rights, just labor practice, divestment, etc.)
    • Advocacy/organizing training: Your session primarily provides specific skills needed for effective advocacy (on the legislative, local, institution, or campaign level) and/or organizing around a specific justice issue. (Ex: best practices for legislative advocacy visits, organizing a sustainability campaign at your school, etc.)
    • Professional Development: Your session is primarily geared toward enhancing the work of professionals in the Ignatian network, particularly including high school and/or university faculty and staff. (Ex: Integrating justice issues in the classroom, exploring pedagogy and practice from a justice educator perspective, etc.)
    • Spirituality and discernment: Your session is focused on personal or community spiritual practice, including, but not limited to, the Ignatian tradition, or discernment. (Ex: praying with the Examen, post-college discernment, etc.)
    • Engaging Issues Through Art: Utilizing the creative process in justice work (Ex: poetry, song, visual, literature)

ADDITIONAL USEFUL INFORMATION

1. Be sure to have all of your information ready to go! Unfortunately, you can’t come back to your application once you submit, so make sure you’d considered all questions.
2. Consider your title! Many people choose their breakout sessions based on the title. 
3. Choose your audience. The best breakout sessions are geared toward a specific audience in topic and delivery. The largest demographics at IFTJ will include high school students, high school faculty and staff, college students, university faculty and staff, members of Catholic parishes, and current and former Jesuit volunteers.
4. Delivery Matters! Breakouts should be participant-centered and include opportunities for engagement, interaction, and/or networking through discussion.
5. Please strongly consider your word count and word choice for your session descriptions. We’ll edit everything before it is published, but we want to be sure that we understand your goals, topic, and ideas!

Thank you for your interest in being an Ignatian Network Speaker at the 2019 Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice!

Before you get started on your application, please read through these guidelines:

• Animate the Theme: Radical Hope. Prophetic Action. How does the 2019 Teach-In theme connect to your experience? Use the theme as a starting point to discern the story and message you wish you to share – don’t pick a story and try to force the theme to work with it. Think about your message and try to summarize it in one sentence.   Use that sentence as a roadmap. All of the details you share should support your main point.
• Consider the Audience: What do you want the audience to feel? What do you want the audience to learn and know? How might your message inspire the audience to act?
• Communicate your message through storytelling: Be sure to tell your story.  Honor and empower others by allowing them to tell their own story. Rhetoric is less important than lived human experiences.
• Asset-Based Message: Applying an asset-based approach to language is crucial when engaging in justice work as it honors the dignity and strengths of individuals and communities. Language used should focus on positive outcomes and personal strengths, rather than problems and barriers. It does not mean negating the injustices present, though it leads to a shift of the problem being related to not the individual or community but rather the systems and structures of power that maintain the inequity. Language is powerful and can have a direct impact on the story that you are shaping for others to hear.

ADDITIONAL USEFUL INFORMATION

1. Be sure to have all of your information ready to go! Unfortunately, you can’t come back to your application once you submit, so make sure you’ve considered all questions.
2. Consider your title! This should connect with your main point.
3. Delivery Matters!  You want to not only capture the audience’s attention, but to hold it.  A dynamic delivery engages the audience.
4. Please strongly consider your word count and word choice for your session descriptions. We’ll edit everything before it is published, but we want to be sure that we understand your ideas and message as it relates to the theme.