Amber O’Neal Johnston
2024 IAHE Parenting and Homeschool Conference Featured Speaker
Amber O’Neal Johnston
Heritage Mom
Amber O’Neal Johnston is an author, speaker, and homeschooling mother of four who speaks and writes about including diverse voices in traditional curricula and infusing ethnic and family culture into the home environment. She is the author of A Place to Belong: Raising Kids to Celebrate Their Heritage, Community, and the World and passionately shares diverse books, art, music, poetry, people, ideas, and things at HeritageMom.com. She regularly speaks at education and parenting conferences around the country and lives in Georgia, nestled among pine trees, hammocks, and zip lines with her family.
Workshops
A Place to Belong: Celebrating Diversity and Kinship in the Home and Beyond
Gone are the days when socially conscious parents feel comfortable teaching their children to merely tolerate others. Instead, they are looking for a way to authentically embrace the fullness of their diverse communities. In this session, families of all backgrounds will receive guidance on celebrating cultural heritage and embracing inclusivity in the home and beyond. We’ll discuss how to foster an environment where children feel secure in their own personhood and culture, enabling them to better understand and appreciate people who are racially and culturally different. Parents will walk away with tools to empower children to embrace their unique identities while feeling beautifully tethered to their global community.
Books as Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors
When children are unable to see themselves reflected in their schoolbooks, they fail to develop positive feelings of self-worth. And when they lack occasions to examine similarities and differences between themselves and others, they miss out on valuable opportunities for recognizing the shared humanity that binds all people together. A mirror is a story that reflects your own culture and helps build your identity, a window is a resource that offers you a view into someone else’s experience, and a sliding glass door invites you to enter another’s world. In this session, we will examine the use of all three types of books in our homes as we educate our children while embracing their individuality and honoring others.
Finding Freedom in Charlotte Mason
When parents and teachers rely on intuition, reflective practice, and common sense to revise their application of Mason’s principles based on the family or child at hand, they often walk away feeling as though these “departures” are separating them from the more legitimate world of CM purists. This session will reframe some of our thinking in this area as we discover that embracing freedom is not an educational or moral failure but an inherent aspect of a true Charlotte Mason education.
Diversifying the Feast: Finding Beauty Through Culturally Rich Learning
There are innumerable ways to integrate voices of color into our children’s lessons naturally and consistently through the years. Formal and informal opportunities for diversifying the feast exist within history, literature, music, art, poetry, and more. Some studies will lead our students to grapple with complex stories, tragedies, and trials. But we also have a unique opportunity to highlight the triumphs and joys rooted in every culture. This session will discuss specific ways to shape an inclusive home atmosphere that values people of color and the ideas that their stories and gifts convey to our children.