WYTeacherCon25

The purpose of the Wyoming Resilience Youth Project is to create a community of practice for Wyoming educators to empower youth voices through curriculum and applied practice. As a response to Governor Gordon’s Reimagining and Innovating the Delivery of Education (RIDE) Initiative focused on youth life skills and community involvement, the project proposes to work with teachers to help their students to be engaged citizens. The goal is to partner with 25 teachers to collect youth perspectives about barriers and opportunities in educational attainment, employment, and community resilience that will be showcased locally and on a public interactive map. The project employs PhotoVoice – a research methodology designed to capture people’s perspectives of their lives through photography and narrative. By capturing Wyomingites’ experiences, in their voices, the project adds a rich context and texture to economic and behavioral data, which can be used in Wyoming college & K-12 classrooms, to inform community and state economic development priorities, and to develop a deeper understanding of what resilience means in different Wyoming communities. This session will provide information about the overall project, provide participants with an understanding of the PhotoVoice method, share curricular resources to support teacher participation, and discuss specifics about how teachers can partner with the UW Wallop Civic Engagement Program across 2025-26 in this project.