Welcome to
Peer Leader Training (PLT)
A skills and development training conference for peer student leaders.
Peer Leader Training is designed to help student leaders in paid and volunteer positions gain knowledge about core training topics that will help them perform their best throughout the year. Students will also network with other peer leaders and professional staff from across the university. Attendance at PLT is added to the Co-Curricular Record.
PLT is hosted annually in the Spring. Please see below for an example schedule and session breakdown.
Registration is currently closed.
Schedule
9:30 am: Registration
10:00 am: Welcome and Land Acknowledgement
10:15 am: Introduction of Keynote
10:20 am: “Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations With Race, Identity, and Belonging” by Matthew R. Morris: Selected Readings by the Author
10:50 am: Belonging to What? – A Dialogue with the Author by April J. Walker
11:30 am: Tying it Together: Implications for Peer Leadership
12:30 pm: Lunch and Learn
01:30 pm: Breakout Session Block: Foundational (New to PLT) and Deeper Dive (Returning to PLT)
- Foundational: Introduction to Equity in Leadership (Mannix Chan)
- Deeper Dive: Values-Based Leadership
2:20 pm: Transition to Full Group
2:30 pm: Closing Reflection, Next Steps and Program Evaluation
3:00 pm: End
2024 Keynote Speaker:
Matthew R. Morris
Matthew R. Morris is a writer, speaker, and elementary educator in Toronto. He has an M.A. in Social Justice Education from OISE at the University of Toronto and is the author of the forthcoming book, Black Boys Like Me.
More about Matthew R. Morris:
Matthew R. Morris is an educator and writer, born and raised in Toronto. His writing focuses on the intersection of race, Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and education. He currently teaches middle school in Toronto and believes that the more credentials behind his name only equate to the more tattoos down his forearms. He holds a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto. Matthew is the author of the instant national bestseller, “Black Boys Like Me: Ontario Race, Identity and Belonging” published in January this year by Penguin Random House Canada. Morris has written with TVO, Huffington Post, ETFO’s “The Voice” magazine, and Education Canada magazine. Matthew’s TEDx talk, “The Fresh Prince Syndrome,” speaks to the perils and promises urban Black male students are presented with in public schooling in today’s ever evolving world. He has spoken at numerous postsecondary institutions and conferences across North America and has been featured in the Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, CBC Radio, and CityNews Toronto.
About the book:
Startlingly honest, bracing personal essays from a perceptive educator that bring us into the world of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and learning.
This is an examination of the parts that construct my Black character; from how public schooling shapes our ideas about ourselves to how hip-hop and sports are simultaneously the conduit for both Black abundance and Black boundaries. This book is a meditation on the influences that have shaped Black boys like me.
What does it mean to be a young Black man with an immigrant father and a white mother, teaching in a school system that historically has held an exclusionary definition of success?
In eight illuminating essays, Matthew R. Morris grapples with this question, and others related to identity and perception. After graduating high school in Scarborough, Morris spent four years in the U.S. on multiple football scholarships and, having spent that time in the States experiencing “the Mecca of hip hop and Black culture,” returned home with a newfound perspective.
Now an elementary school teacher himself in Toronto, Morris explores the tension between his consumption of Black culture as a child, his teenage performances of the ideas and values of the culture that often betrayed his identity, and the ways society and the people guiding him—his parents, coaches, and teachers—received those performances. What emerges is a painful journey toward transcending performance altogether, toward true knowledge of the self.
With the wide-reaching scope of Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In and the introspective snapshot of life in Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Boys Like Me is an unflinching debut that invites readers to create braver spaces and engage in crucial conversations around race and belonging.