Finding Community within the Worry: Reflections from the 2025 KATE Conference

As we look ahead to the 2026 KATE Conference, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the impact of the 2025 gathering. The KATE Conference continues to be a powerful space for emerging educators to discover their voices and engage with the profession during a time of growth, change, and inspiration.

We invite you to read this thoughtful reflection by Alice Huelskamp, a pre-service teacher at Wichita State. To learn more about registering for the 2026 conference or submitting a presentation proposal, visit our homepage at kansasenglish.org.


The descriptor ‘teaching conference’ doesn’t exactly draw up the most exciting image. For me, in the weeks leading up to the 2025 KATE Conference, the name mostly brought me a lot of worry. I’m still just a student myself, and I felt quite a bit like I didn’t really belong at a two-day event designed specifically for teachers. It was hard to imagine how I could have a role at this metaphorical table. I struggled to understand how my perspective could fit into the mix. By the end of the conference, though, I could imagine the kind of seat I might have.

Across both days, many of the sessions provided perspectives that helped me feel more motivated and prepared to teach than I was beforehand. The opening session with Dr. Latasha Eley Kelly, owner of the Left on Read bookstore, gave a lot of insight into the ways people find their paths into education. Dr. Kelly didn’t first start out her adult life by running her bookstore; it took her time and many other steps to find this particular pathway into supporting education in her community. No matter how and when she came to this point, the only thing that matters is that she is supporting education in the most authentic way to herself now. That opening keynote session immediately set up the rest of the conference, and made it clear that everyone in that room might have their own unique path, but they all lead to one place--education.
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Through the rest of the first day, I attended several other sessions, though one in particular stuck with me. Jennifer Sayahnejad presented teaching materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection. She showed us how to find videos, informative videos, suggested activities, and the USHMM’s tenets of teaching the Holocaust. Most shockingly to me, she explained that she herself had reached out to the USHMM for questions about her teaching before, and that they always responded within just a day or two with specific, personalized answers and discussion. I myself can attest to just how important responsible teaching of the Holocaust can be— especially in rural communities where kids are distanced from the Holocaust not just by time, but also by many communities’ avoidance of the topic. I’ve worried a lot about how I might build that important piece of instruction responsibly. This session, though, showed me that there are people out there who are willing to help me and any other educator with this task, and I feel much more prepared with this knowledge of support and community.

The second day brought fewer sessions, but the impact of them landed just as strong. The second session I attended—Aligning KSDE Standards—actually left a much bigger impact than I’d anticipated. Based on the name, I assumed that the session would be a bit boring with all the technical information about standards and assessments, yet I left feeling enthusiastic about the topic. The KSDE members presenting the session shared tools from the department to communicate with teachers and administration from your own district, strategies for strengthening students’ reading comprehension with grade-level understandings, and tips for collaborating with KSDE members themselves. Like the USHMM session, the expanse of resources and supports from KSDE made me feel more capable of teaching. When I got home, I even shared the new standards alignment chart from KSDE with my mom who also teaches ELA, and discussed with her the ideas behind its design. Meeting state standards is something I have also worried about often heading into teaching. By the end of this session, however, I felt excited about the possibilities of strengthening student reading through it, and the ways I can do this in my future classroom next year.

I keep running through countless worries as I get closer and closer to running my own classroom, and teaching my own students. Teaching comes with a large amount of responsibility, and I keep worrying that I might not be able to take that much on by myself. But after this first teaching conference, I realize just how much support there is in the community of education.

In every presentation, every technical session, every casual conversation across the entire conference—community was the one throughline. While KSDE members spoke about new programs for tracking ELA standards and test results, they mentioned reaching out to their state team or district-level coworkers to strengthen teaching. When undergraduate students talked about building classroom libraries or vocabulary instruction, they also talked about seeking advice from fellow librarians and educators. As I talked to various educators in the hallway or the lines for lunch, everyone always brought up some way that they reach out to the people around them for help, no matter if the person I was talking to had been teaching for two years or twenty.

It was clear just how wide the support system was for educators across the state, including the KATE committee and team itself. The way that the KATE committee so eagerly welcomed in teachers of all kinds for their unique, authentic journey with education made me feel like I had a seat at the table of Kansas educators. And, while I’m certainly not prepared to do so just yet, I absolutely am considering the prospect of what presentations or discussions I could offer to KATE events in the future. I think I need to take some time to settle in to whatever space I have in education during my first year or two of teaching to understand it a little better, but I want to share that space with other educators somehow. The KATE team showed a table of voices that felt welcoming and supportive during the conference, and I’d like to hear those voices if that’s where my education path takes me in the future.

Teaching students and leading them to learning is a huge, daunting task— but it’s not one that I or anyone else needs to take on alone. Every single person at the KATE Conference cared about helping students learn, and there are hundreds of other people across the state—across the country, across the world—that care about this mission, too.
We know that an important part of students’ learning is whether or not they have a community within their classroom. It’s no different for teachers. A good teacher learns every day and is on a constant journey of self-reflection and inquiry. So if we want to learn, we have to build ourselves the same community in our schools that our students need to build in their classes. No teacher is alone in their care for education, and no teacher is alone in their desire to both give and receive support. I came out of the KATE Conference knowing that the community of Kansas educators care—care about students, care about learning, and care about the educators tying those two together. No matter how many worries or challenges arise as I take this next step into teaching, I know that there will always be someone else in this community who cares to help me through it.

"There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals."
- Idowu Koyenikan

"A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert."
- Andrew Carnegie


Works Cited:

"Community Quotes." Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/community. Accessed 27 October 2025.
Alice Huelskamp is a pre-service teacher in the Wichita State University teaching program. She can be contacted at [email protected].



This post was originally published at https://heartlandlearning.blogspot.com/2025/10/finding-community-within-worry.html