Monthly Archives: November 2020

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Department Meeting Notes For Performing Arts

Submitted by: Joanne L Magee

DEI Departmental Meeting 11/11/20

Joan took notes, hosted as Joanne was in final rehearsals for the MS PLAY. 

In attendance:

Joan, Damon, Kristina, Susan, Carrie, Aedín, Peggy, Nick

 

Folks want to have a conversation over questions posed in DEI doc. 

  • There was a great deal of discussion about the arts, how to teach but not appropriate. How to cover material within a performance based class.

 

Members got through one question all affirming that having a discussion about the prompts (and taking notes) was a more organic way of processing the document that we’re required to fill out.

Members will prepare to come in January with an example of work( several works)  that demonstrate change, and if we have nothing to change, we can talk about how we already practice inclusivity and how we reach our students of color in our teaching. 

 

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Learning Support 11/11/20

Submitted by: Susannah Flicker

In preparation for our discussion during this meeting we read the first section of the book, Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad. I prepared a slideshow of some of the key terms and concepts and reflective prompts that stood out to me. At the end of our discussion of the slides, I posed the questions to the department:

How can we bring these ideas and questions to our work as individual learning specialists?

How can we affect change as a department and in the institution to better support and include BIPOC?

One topic that was brought up as a relevant area of focus for our department was to work on how we partner with families, particularly when students are struggling to be successful in our school and require additional support. We all feel a need to better understand why trust is often not established, and the ways in which race and class impact these relationships. We all feel that there is a need to explore this both as individual practitioners and from the institutional/structural perspective.

We will continue to read sections of the book, and in our next meeting, will work on identifying areas of change and inquiry we want to focus on. I will be following up with all members of the department before winter break to get specifics from them before our meeting in January.

 

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History Wed. 11/11

Submitted by: Thomas Murphy

Wed. 11/11

Tom, Ann, Peter, Charlene, Momi, Suzanne, Jessica, Amanda, Calvin, Michele

 

  • We started by asking everyone to spend a minute to write down all the things they loved about zoom teaching. Then we shared some stories about our successes.  
  • Next, we walked through the slides I had prepared for the article. 
  • Developing an Anti-racist Curriculum – Slide https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16aImFOP8yEa6WQmlphvEz7W6cp6pn02s2eRC0pNGCOI/edit#slide=id.ga9d275dd1c_0_53
  • Our discussion was on what element the department would decide as our focus. 
  • We quickly decided that we would spend our time Interegating our Curriculum.
  • Shared had already prepared a slide deck that gave us criteria for assessing how much progress we had made on developing a fully anti-racist curriculum.
  • Using this we went into breakout groups middle school in one high school in the other. We discussed our courses and shared some of the units we felt were most successful.
  • When we came back to the main room we talked about developing a common rubric for assessing our progress. 
  • Next, meeting we build on this start by looking at our work in more systematic ways. 

 

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Visual Arts Dept. Meeting 11/11/2020

Submitted by: james french

Our second full department meeting focused on advancing our agenda of finding a framework through which we could study our classroom practices and role within our institution with the guiding principle of creating the optimal situation for learning and attachment to the subject for all of our students.

We began by checking in and touching base with how everyone was doing/coping in light of the news of the last several weeks and the challenges that arise on a daily basis teaching in a time of Covid. While seemingly not directly related to the DEI conversation that was to come it greatly informs our teaching and what we are able to bring to bear as teaching tools and guiding principles in our current practices. After reviewing the notes from our last meeting we started to consider our future work through several guiding questions:

Where do we fit into the institution?

What does our roles in cross-curricular collaborations look like? Are they true collaborations?

Do we need to reevaluate the traditional projects / pageants that our students engage with each year?

Is this work in service to the institution or our students?

When – age appropriate – does this type of work best serve our students?

How is art being used as an access point to culture?

How much freedom as teachers at LREI do we have to craft our material? To allow for the process to be at the fore instead of product?

What do our classes look like in this moment to allow for our rooms to be safe/enjoyable/less rigorous spaces in light of the nature of the world and the restrictions of their school life in the time of Covid?

All of this was a way of examining if the work we are doing best serves our student’s art education and the way they identify as – and how their identities are reflected through their work – as young artists. While planning for what ideas/discussion topics we hoped to bring to our next meeting we decided to reemphasize curriculum and to instead examine the values we hope to bring into our rooms and examine how they are seen/felt through our practices. From there we hope to do e critical examination of what this looks like in practice, what changes can be made to better serve our students and what institutional challenges hamper our abilities to achieve these goals.

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World Language Dept. mtg. 11/11

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

As a department we talked about centering our existing focus on diversity and inclusion by bringing into focus with greater clarity our students of color and native speakers, the roles they play, and the potential they hold in our classes.

We are committed to making a small change in some area of our practice albeit, curriculum content, pedagogy, by reinventing a project, assignment, or even the way we structure a class and empower the students to engage.

We began our meeting by reviewing our notes from last meeting and raising the question of our native speakers and the role they play in our classes. We debated the merits of using them as leaders and how this more often than not oculd have an adverse affect on their own identity and relationships with their peers. As teachers with whom our native speakers can convese and identify, we have the responsibiity to help them feel confident and proud of their bilingualism.

With the end of the trimester soon upon us, we discussed our end of trimeter projects and agreed to have those projects reflect some issue of social justice, or area of equity and inclusion, either through current events, research, oral presenetions, or group discussions.

In our next meeting, we will discuss the topic of “gender” in teaching a langauge and  how we are addressing it with our students who are often confused and ourtraged by it. And in the upper grades we will work to expand our reading list to include a wider range of author, more representative of our studens and world.

It is our hope that through these changes at first, we will bring about significant change by bringing to the fore issues of equity across the languages, cultures and student that we teach.
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Library Department Meeting , 11/11

Submitted by: Jennifer Hubert Swan

One major goal for this year is to look closely at the collections. While we have been working to increase the diversity of the collections for several years, the work has focused on purchasing new materials, rather than examining the collections as a whole; because the publishing industry has long skewed largely white-default, even dedicated purchasing hasn’t balanced our holdings to the extent we would like. We discussed strategies for conducting DEI audits with limited collection access (due to the hybrid model and library spaces currently functioning as classrooms), which makes some audit forms more difficult to undertake. DEI audits are a way of scientifically analyzing a collection, looking at various markers (authorial race, religion, gender, and sexuality; character race, religion, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, geographic location, and more). This year, we will focus on auditing, to varying degrees of formality, promoted titles (booktalks, readalouds, Instagram posts, displays if those should happen). The HS will also begin auditing genre collections, specifically romance and horror, two smaller genres that are notably less diverse than the collection as a whole. We also discussed ordering, and examining even more closely the diversity of new materials. 

 

Programmatically, one initiative is that Early Childhood readalouds this year will contain at least 50% books featuring overtly diverse characters; in beginning to compile books Jesse found that the picture book collection may be statistically diverse but many of the books with BIPOC child characters are either lackluster or stereotypical and in need of replacement with better materials, so the picture book purchasing for 2020-21 will focus on replacing those titles. In research at the MS and HS levels, we will work to note and call out bias in the historical record more explicitly, making it clear that while bias is not inherently bad, it tends to reflect systems, including systems of oppression. Karyn recently worked with 10th grade history on a runaway slave ad project and, as a first pass at this, discussed how historians need to be detectives when it comes to BIPOC stories as white power structures make those stories harder to find. We are also looking at our databases and considering what additional or alternative databases we can provide to make sure BIPOC voices and perspectives are more represented in the digital research materials we provide to students.

 

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English Department Meeting 11/11/20

Submitted by: Jane Belton

The goal of this meeting was to decide on a particular focus for our work together this year and actions steps for undertaking that work.

  1. We reviewed our notes from the October 21 meeting
  2. We brainstormed ideas about the direction we wanted to take, deciding to focus our attention on classroom practices. The following is a set of guiding questions for that work:
    • How do power & white supremacy show up in our classrooms & practices, in peer & teacher-student interactions. How might we disrupt harmful dynamics/power systems?
    • We also acknowledged the intersection between this area of focus and other areas, including text selection and communication/transparency with students and families.
  3. We then generated ideas about what examining classroom practices might look like through a shared jamboard.
  4. First Step: 
    • Our first step will be to examine several Black@LREI instagram posts for thematic threads. What are BIPOC students, alums, and faculty communicating to us about what they need and are experiencing in the classroom? How can looking at the posts hold up a mirror to our work in the classroom?
  5. Subsequent Steps:
    • Making a list of “common” classroom practices and language that we want to investigate, trouble, or rethink from an anti-racist stance.  
    • Examining discussion protocols, norms, and habits.
    • Engaging in readings that help us examine classroom practices.
    • Auditing student groupings and student-student dynamics within our classrooms
    • Working with white students on greater self-awareness and self-reflection around ways they perpetuate harmful systems of white supremacy.
    • Inviting students to engage in naming the values that the class seems to hold; connecting these values to anti-racist practices, or troubleshooting if the values students identify do not align with the values we hope are clear.
    • Examining our physical spaces through an anti-racist lens.
    • Workshopping lesson-plans
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Science mtg 11/11/20

Submitted by: Kelly O’Shea

We continued our work using the math equity toolkit and workbook.

We completed the 5th step of the cycle that we started in October by reflecting on our plans from last month and how we have begun to implement them.

Then we started on the November work. The theme for November is “How am I authentically including Black, Latinx, and multilingual students?”

The Engage prompts for this month started with:

  • White supremacy culture shows up in classrooms when… “Good” teaching is considered an antidote for inequity for Black, Latinx, multilingual students.
  • White supremacy culture shows up in classrooms when… Superficial curriculum changes are offered to address culturally relevant pedagogy and practice.

We spent time writing in response to the reflection prompts for these topics, and then had another good discussion about what we had written and what it had raised for us. We talked about the tensions between competing goals of our work and the steps toward progress in equity work in science.  For example, important steps (like “good” progressive teaching practices that help all students or incorporating scientific role models of diverse backgrounds into our curriculum) on their own are not enough to achieve equity in our classes or to view the work of science itself differently. For another example, we talked about how making moves toward anti-racist science teaching might mean eliminating some content to open up time for different kinds of discussions, but also might leave students less prepared for eventual college work in the subject (which would obviously have its own negative equity effects). (I’m not sure if I’m capturing everything about this discussion well enough, but this is a taste of some things that came up!)

Then we worked on updating our personal plans and action steps to incorporate what we thought about and discussed this week.

Here is the slide deck that we used: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156qpEbmxa-fTieSZtZsZxQxHvJqz8YZy0mfV1HJ-9mQ/edit?usp=sharing

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ED Tech Department Meeting

Submitted by: Clair Segal

Ed Tech: 

We discussed: 

  1. Our work in the past through a DEI lens
    1. A one to one program versus BYOD and the role equity plays in that
    2. Our tech efforts during the pandemic in working alongside Jacob to make sure all students have adequate wifi and tech access during LREI@home
    3. Discussions with students around
      1. Big Data and how it uses grouping to artificially perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions about groups (recommended reading: Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks)
      2. Photoshop ethics and how whiteness is perpetuated as a beauty standard around the world and how that’s problematic
      3. How there are few people of color in programming and why that’s a problem (Google and Apple not being able to recognize faces of color; facial recognition as a whole being biased; police facial recognitions having false-positives.) 
      4. Yearbook and representation– what do we do/what does it mean when the cover has all white superheros
  2. Our plan going forward into this year: 
    1. Joy- Being scheduled in departmental meetings in the HS has been great and a big help to understanding their curricular projects as they unroll and being able to have a hand in them from the beginning. Additionally, finding videos and making a conscious effort to show how-to and explanation videos that represent non-cis, non-white experts explaining a topic.
    2. Clair- Using access to other classes as an integrator to support and work towards debiasing our capstone projects. This work is also being supported by Ana and the MS plan to have smaller groups that focus on including restorative justice and debiasing the curriculum.
    3. Celeste- Examining the texts used in class for things like copy and pasting, typing practice, etc; in the past it’s been Dr. Seuss– what other authors and non-white, non-cisgendered examples can we use? 
  3. Ongoing DEI concerns
    1. Joy- it seems our students of colors are disproportionately represented in the remote contingent of students. What does that mean? And are we best serving their needs at home? 
    2. Would it be possible to get two additional copies of Automating Inequality purchased by the school?