Friday, April 24, 2026
Leadership Day Keynote
10:30am-11:45am
About
Debbie LeeKeenan is Co-Director and Co-Founder of Anti-Bias Leaders ECE and a lecturer, consultant, author, and filmmaker, currently residing in Seattle, Washington. She was director of the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School at Tufts University in Medford, MA from 1996 to 2013. In addition to teaching in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, she has been a member of the early childhood faculty at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and she is a former preschool, special education and elementary school teacher. She consults and lectures locally, nationally and internationally. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of New Mexico. With professional experience spanning 50 years in diverse university, public school, and early childhood settings in Massachusetts, New York City, New Mexico, Philadelphia and Taiwan, her areas of expertise include anti-bias education, early childhood education, teacher preparation, inclusive special education, curriculum development, project based learning, teacher inquiry, family engagement, professional learning communities and public school partnerships. Debbie was awarded the 2022 National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Asian Interest Forum Leadership Award for demonstrating professional excellence, integrity and social responsibility to better the lives of many children, families, the ECE workforce of Asian descent and the ECE field as a whole. Debbie is Chinese-American, the child of first-generation immigrant working-class parents who grew up in New York City, and is part of a multi-racial family.
Saturday, April 25, 2026
General Session Keynote
10:30am-11:30am
About
Tom “Teacher Tom” Hobson is an early childhood educator, international speaker, education consultant, teacher of teachers, parent educator, and author. He is best known, however, for his namesake blog Teacher Tom's Blog, where he has posted daily since 2009, chronicling the life and times of his little preschool in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest corner of the USA.
For nearly two decades, Teacher Tom was the sole employee of the Woodland Park Cooperative School, a parent-owned and operated school, knit together by Teacher Tom's democratic, progressive play-based pedagogy. Teacher Tom came into teaching through the backdoor, so to speak, having enrolled his own child in a cooperative preschool, where he began working daily in his daughter's classroom as an assistant teacher under the tutelage of veteran educators, although he'll be the first to tell you that most of what he learned came from the children themselves. When it was time for his daughter to move on, he “stayed behind.”
Today, Teacher Tom shares his play-based pedagogy through online courses for early childhood educators; produces online early childhood conferences; consults with organizations about his "Family Schools" program; and inspires early years audiences around the world (Greece, UK, Iceland, Australia, China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Canada, and across the US) both virtually and in-person with his engaging views on early childhood education, play, and pedagogy; hosts Teacher Tom's Podcast.