Blair Welsh
Blair Welsh began her work with children in 2004 at camps for kids with chronic and terminal illnesses where she began to understand children’s boundless capabilities and their incredible emotional depth. During this work, she was also exposed to the gross inequities that occur in our neighborhoods, schools, and healthcare systems. Her early experiences lead her to pursue a career in education. She views classrooms and schools as precious opportunities to build community, grow awareness and activism, and to slowly but surely build a new and better world. She has been an early childhood educator since 2009 in New Jersey and New York. Blair has been with Community Roots, Roots ConnectEDs’ learning site, since 2013, teaching 2nd grade. In that time, she has implemented changes throughout the curriculum to deepen the work around representation, critical literacy, and social action and further align it with the goals of Anti-Bias Education. She has designed and revised units that guide students to explore issues of identity, power, perspective,and access. Blair also served as a member of the Anti-Bias Education Collective, a staff leadership initiative focused on anti-bias curriculum and staff development and she has led a number of workshops with families on understanding and unpacking white privilege on a personal and institutional level. She has been a workshop facilitator with Roots ConnectED since 2016 and believes that sharing practices of inclusion and anti-bias education is an essential component of teaching for social justice.