Monthly Archives: October 2020

Posted on by

History Department Meeting Notes

Submitted by: Tom Murphy

Wed. 10/21

Attendance

Tom, Ann, Peter, Charlene, Momi, Suzanne, Jessica

  • We started with brief introductions: name, how long at LREI, what you teach, and what you like most about teaching during a pandemic.

  • Next was a writing prompt (5 minutes): What do you consider an example of your best practices when it comes to DEI?

  • We followed with breakout rooms to discuss best practices (10 minutes paired high school middle school). As they shared they were to look for any common themes or issues.

  • We came back to the main room and shared. We discussed how to decenter the white narrative and include not just diverse voices in our curriculum but how to ensure all students felt represented. We shared examples from our curriculum. The need to look for sources written by POC’s was also highlighted.

  • The importance of student choice was emphasized as a way of getting student buy-in.

  • There was some sharing of teaching approaches. There was a consensus that allowing time for reflection through writing was essential.

  • Another challenge that was discussed was how to make it “safe” for POC’s to be fully involved in the class while not being responsible for educating or representing any particular community.

  • We ended with a conversation about to make sure that the voices we shared aren’t just those of the “oppressed” but that narratives also showed that the marginalized had agency. “Black joy” was a term used to counter the catalog of oppression that can drive an attempt to redress the traditional narrative.

  • As we looked ahead to our next meeting we examined the questions from the opening presentation.

  • We decided that we would bring our favorite resources and that someone would volunteer to share a particularly effective lesson.

Posted on by

Department Meeting Notes For Performing Arts

Submitted by: Joanne Magee

4:08 start

Peggy, Damon, Aedín, Carrie, Susan, Nick, Joan and Deborah and myself- Joanne attended.

Our department had an authentic, passionate conversation where we addressed challenges, feelings and attitudes around the DEI work in our subject areas. 

We agreed to create a document to answer the questions and to see which ones felt more connected to our line of work. We concluded that our focus includes: 

  • What material we can/ should teach? 
  • What material we can rehearse and perform? 
  • How best can we serve the population of our students from grade to grade and year to year with inclusivity and equity?
  • We addressed how over many years, awareness has evolved and that we have been and will continue to  focus on examining what we teach and how we teach it to better serve our students and our community.
  • We addressed how we need to move away from “White Centrism” and we will continue to examine the content of our curriculum and make changes.
Posted on by

World Language Dept. mtg. 10/21

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

Our department centered its conversation around some of the questions shared by the DEI Committee, recognizing that the World Language Department’s mission is by definition to include and reflect people, language, cultural diversity, and issues of immigration, social justice and human rights from a broad range of nations where the languages are spoken.

We described and shared the materials we are currently using to teach and reflect the cultural differences and contrasts in our respective languages and countries. The discussion ranged from the celebration of festivals and holidays in the lower school to a much deeper dive into the social, political, and racial issues reflected in the middle and high school  programs. We established from the start that one of our goals is to continue our move away from Eurocentric culture and to bring to the fore underrepresented people, cultures, and the inequity and bias reflected in our world today, taking every opportunity to remind our students of their privilege and their responsibility to engage, participate and effect the much needed change the world is poised to make.
Unable to separate our curriculum from the population and faces we are teaching, we recognize the integral perspective of our native and bilingual students, who are often hesitant to share their voices. We talked about how we are currently serving them and how we can involve them better by putting them in leadership roles and building their confidence and comfort in sharing their ethnic identities in an environment of whiteness.
Our department believes that respect for people, language, and cultural difference is at the center of the conversation on how to deconstruct bias. Exposing our students to the customs and people of varied cultures while acknowledging stereotypes and misperceptions can lead to greater cultural awareness, understanding and compassion.
Moving forward, we agreed to be more observant, sensitive, and open to trying something new in our classes, or doing something we already do differently. Learning a language is a life skill, so we will do it together, by being  open with our students, teaching them to ask for help and seeing vulnerability as a doorway to equality.
To be continued…..
Posted on by

Learning Support Dept Meeting Notes, 10/21/20

Submitted by: Susannah Flicker

-Discussion: embarking on DEI work as a department. How does this look for us as learning specialists? What are the ways in which we, as a department and as individual practitioners, are working to include and support students and families of color? What are the areas in which bias and exclusion may show up?

Some of the topics that came up in our discussion of these questions were:

-the need to diversify the clinicians/evaluators that we refer families to

-the need to explore the notion that smartness = whiteness and how this may be evident at LREI

-equity and the assumptions that are made about families’ ability to access support outside of school

-how the school can support families who don’t have the financial means to access tutoring, evaluations, and other outside supports

We decided that we would like to read the text Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad and use the exercises in the book to frame and structure our next few conversations.

 

Posted on by

English Department Meeting 10/21

Submitted by: Jane Belton

In our meeting on October 21, we discussed some of the DEI work that has already been done, focusing in particular on changes we have individually made to our curriculum and practices in response to the BLM movement. We then identified several potential strands for our focus this year:

Ideas / opportunities / questions / next steps:

  1. Reframing texts by white authors — How might we reframe certain texts to decenter whiteness?
    • Jekyll and Hyde in 9th grade reframed by Titus Kaphar Ted Talk and subsequent discussions of how Stevenson constructs whiteness through erasure.  Additional framing texts could highlight the experiences of Black people in Victorian times. Final project could involve some purposeful re-imagining or adaptation of the text. 
  2. Text selection: What are we choosing to include or omit and how are we teaching the texts we do include by white authors?
    • Questions about “problematic” texts/authors or genres that have been historically male-dominated. Do we bail on texts or help students reread/re-see them?
  3. Practices:  How do power and white supremacy show up in our classrooms and in our in teaching practices. How does white supremacy manifest itself in peer-to-peer interactions and teacher-student interactions? How might we disrupt/shift that?
    • Questions about biases in assessing participation
  1. Writing: When and how do our writing assignments expect our students to code-switch?  How can we encourage students to do deep and authentic writing where their own voices are welcome and celebrated?
  2. Communication: How can we be more transparent and clear with students (and families) about choices that are being made to disrupt systems of oppression and white supremacy.

Click to see the full meeting notes!

Posted on by

Library Department DEI Faculty Meeting, 10/21/20

Submitted by: Jennifer Hubert Swan

What are we doing well?

  • Collection development
  • Book promotion (readaloud choices, booktalk titles, summer reading titles)

The Library Department is mindful of diversity, equity and inclusion when choosing books for the 4s-12th grade collection and when choosing titles to share with students through readalouds, booktalks and summer reading lists. We stay current in our DEI practice by reading reviews and articles that reflect this work in our professional journals and by participating in committee and roundtable discussions in our professional organizations. The journals we write for and the organizations we belong to (The American Library Association, The Hudson Valley Library Association, School Library Journal, Booklist, The Horn Book) are all actively engaged in this work and their standards and guidelines keep us accountable. 

Where are the gaps?

  • Despite our best intentions, we know our collection does not reflect every possible identity and/or viewpoint. We are looking at conducting a diversity audit of our collection in targeted areas this year as the schedule and space allow, and a more thorough audit in future school years. 
  • Programming, specifically in bias education: the Library Department is poised and ready to collaboratively teach bias in research and the media and are currently being underutilized by the institution. We could partner with and/or provide resources for any curricular topic in terms of identifying and developing critical thinking skills around bias, fake news, disinformation, misinformation, and other forms of media manipulation. 
Posted on by

Visual Arts Dept. Meeting 10/21/2020

Submitted by: james french

Following Phil and the DEI coordinators remarks the Visual Arts Department convened to reflect upon and discuss the questions that had been laid out for us. We free wrote and did silent reflections on each of the questions posed for half of the time. Periodically through the process we would talk about a question to assist each other in putting it into the context of our unique subject lens and practice. After addressing each of the questions we came together to talk about them with a goal of identifying common ground, difference and space to create a larger cohesive goal for our work moving forward this year. As is always the case when we meet as a full department the conversation was excellent. We each bring a different perspective to bear on the topics at hand and relish the opportunity to help each other navigate the challenges within our divisions/course structures/material needs/desire to craft age appropriate curriculum. To no one’s surprise – even after going a half hour over time – we do not have a totally clear defined agenda/set of goals. We do however have a solid foundation to build off of in our individual studies/self-reflective practices and have defined some critical lenses we hope to examine the department’s role within and relationship to the larger school institution and the outward facing nature of the work our student’s produce.

Posted on by

Science Mtg 10/21/20

Submitted by: Kelly O’Shea

Science met and followed the plan outlined in this slide deck (which we used as a Pear Deck): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RVB6Wq7J-obBuJnImRim4-9ZskgEHlV1CBjctzJoEec/edit?usp=sharing

The workbook we are using in our meetings focuses on identifying ways that white supremacy culture shows up in our classrooms and helping us make changes to counteract/subvert/move away from that.

For this meeting, we focused on the October theme of “What am I teaching?
Procedural fluency is preferred over conceptual knowledge.”

There was a lot of great quiet reflection and thinking, and then we had a good discussion that landed on thinking about how many of our students seem to see procedural fluency as the hallmark of being successful and do not value conceptual knowledge in the same way. Although we feel we value it in our classes and thought about many ways that it shows up, we were thinking about how to help students shift that belief—and where we can act to reinforce that shift in values. (Personally, I was thinking about examining whether my assessments do a good enough job of testing for and showing the value of conceptual thinking.)

Then, we used the tools from the workbook we are using (see slides) to make plans and list steps for how we will act with accountability to work toward our goals. Some of the goals include: allowing more room for students discussing how they feel about areas in science that are inequitable, introducing scientific role models of diverse backgrounds, not rushing/compromising/cutting corners due to the current situation, working on assessments for concepts and not only skills.

We will work on our plans over the next month and reflect on our progress in the next meeting… as well as moving on to the next activity in the workbook as we continue to examine our classrooms and curriculum!

Posted on by

Math Department Meeting #1 2020

Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

The Math Department talked about centering our work in the math program on both the mission statement and the diversity statement; holding the tension between “regular” math and critical math, teaching math as a mirror and a window, and teaching the kids so they can “play the game and change the game”. Here’s a pdf of the Jamboard that we shared for the meeting.
For next time, members of the math department will make a small material change to the structure of their class that addresses equity. It could be a routine of looking at a graph or data to start class (thanks Michelle!). It could be an election night assignment. It could be a project or a journal on math history for kids to work on.
We will endeavor to keep it simple, understanding that this is a “draft” change that will develop further with one another’s support. No reason to do this challenging and long work alone.