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Yearlong conference will ‘celebrate intersectionality of multilingual, multicultural, LGBTQ+ communities’
The University of Colorado-Boulder awarded a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Impact Grant” to a teaching conference focused on intersectionality.
The grant went to the “Chords of Esperanza Learning Collective” for what would originally be a two-day conference. However, in the past several weeks the school decided to turn the conference into a series of virtual modules spread out over the next year to make it more accessible to attendees.
The conference seeks to train educators on how to fight back against what the organizers see as “attacks on bilingual education, inclusive curriculum, restrictions on queer and trans visibility, and policies that criminalize trans, genderqueer, immigrant and newcomer students and families.”
The organizers say that “schools remain powerful sites where, everyday, educators cultivate esperanza, build solidarities, center cariño, craft futures, and honor all students for who they are.”
To that end, some of the topics include “queer justice, identity, and community in education” and “practical tools for advocacy, policy navigation, and educator agency,” while presenters may also discuss how “queering biliteracy [could] help us challenge rigid binaries (of language, identity, belonging, or family) that marginalize our students and ourselves.”
Presenters also thought about questions such as “what ways can schools become spaces that honor the fluidity of language, culture, and gender/sexuality, resisting pressures to conform to monolingual, cisnormative, and heteronormative norms,” according to the event website.
The Fix reached out to the university’s media relations, as well as A Queer Endeavor and the BUENO Center, the two organizations hosting the Chords of Esperanza conference, for comment via email. None responded in the past several weeks.
The Fix asked about the goals and expected outcomes of the Chords of Esperanza Educator Institute and responses to potential criticms.
A higher education expert criticized the conference for promoting wokeness.
“CU Boulder’s ‘Chords of Esperanza’ conference targets educators,” Corey DeAngelis told The Fix via a text message. He said “that makes the woke mind virus even more dangerous.”
By encouraging educators to explore intersectionality in the classroom, “the indoctrination that starts in college,” as the Heritage Foundation expert put it, “flows directly into K-12 classrooms where young minds soak it up.”
DeAngelis’s message about CU Boulder’s program was simple: “Left-wing brainwashing plays no role in academic excellence.”
“Universities must purge this garbage entirely and we need to pull taxpayer funding from places infected by it before America drifts further into socialist decay,” he said.
The Independence Institute’s Pamela Benigno expressed similar concerns with the conference via an email to The Fix.
“CU’s Chords of Esperanza Educator Institute attempts to indoctrinate bilingual children without parental consent,” Benigno said, “training teachers to promote the Queer Theory political agenda in the classroom.”
The Chords of Esperanza Educator Institute is one of three new recipients of CU Boulder’s Impact Grant. The university will also be funding “Assessing the GOAT (Graduate Outcomes and Thriving): A Qualitative Evaluation of Doctoral Retention Practices” and “Emergency Alert Systems: Exploring the Perspectives and Behavior of Multilingual Speakers and International Students.” These three events join four others with renewed grants for the summer of 2026.
The latter project focuses on “how multilingual populations—specifically Chinese and Vietnamese speakers and international students—receive, perceive, and respond to emergency weather information.”
