Submitted by: Luis Hernandez
DEIJ
We talked about how to align the template that was sent by Kalil. We continue to talk about inclusion and what it looks like in our classrooms. We will be celebrating Women’s History Month in March.
Monthly Archives: February 2022
English Department Retreat 2/16/22
Submitted by: Jane Belton
On Wednesday 2/16, the English Department held a half-day retreat at the Brooklyn Museum, facilitated by Museum Educator, Bix Archer.
The goals for the retreat were to reflect on racial blind spots:
- How does our positionality impact the ways in which we experience a text?
- How might we set up texts and experiences for students to examine their own positionality and racial blind spots?
- How can we set up texts and experiences to prevent experiences where our blind spots (and/or student blind spots) do harm to students.
We started the morning examining the poem “Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith. The discussion prompts included open-ended questions like, “What comes up for you when you read this?” which allowed us to first consider the individual contexts we bring to the piece based on our own experiences and positionality, and then to hear the other contexts and interpretations that colleagues bring to the text.
From 10-11:30 am, Bix led us through an inquiry-based workshop reflecting on several pieces of art. First, we spent time discussing Blossom, by Sanford Biggers. We explored open-ended questions like, “What do you notice?” and “What do you feel?”, sharing our responses and observations together. The museum educator then shared some further context on the art piece, which then allowed us to re-examine “Blossom,” and refine, reshape, and develop our initial ideas.
Next, we spent independent time in The Slipstream exhibit, reflecting on pieces of our choosing. Bix provided us with a zine to collect our responses, which we shared with a partner. Prompts included:
- Find a piece that resonates with you. Pair a song with this work
- What parts of your identity or experience does it connect with?
- Find a piece you would pair with Blossom. How would the pairing change how you look at the work?
- Find an artwork you would pair with the poem “Declaration”
- Find a work you would like to display in your home
- Find a world you would like to display in your classroom. How would you contextualize it for students?
When we returned to the conference room at 11:30, we pivoted toward our own classroom practices and units. The central questions were:
- How might this work translate into concrete classroom practices?
- How might we set up texts and experiences for students to examine their own positionality and racial blind spots?
- When and how do we provide context / frame the texts we teach?
Math Department Meeting #4, 2/15/22
Submitted by: Pat Higgiston
We began the meeting with a math problem to get the math mind working!
We heard from members of each division about the work that we had been doing severally, with an eye on equity in the realms of pedagogy and curriculum. The MS faculty are visiting one another’s classrooms and reflecting together on choices they make in classes. Chris shared with us a project his students have been working on for Black History Month, in which a student presents on a black mathematician each time the class meets. This is reminiscent of the Mathematician Project and might be a good model to elaborate on.
In the HS, we reported on the outcome of our daylong workshop, articulating and refining the content of a two-year core sequence in the high school that we envision as being detracked, picking up on the work the middle school program has been doing this year with the 8th grade. We anchored the content for this class in the progressive and inclusive values we have made explicit in previous meetings. In brief, we’ve determined the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. Our next move is to discuss the ‘how’ — work for the spring trimester.
We looked briefly at the draft of the curriculum assessment tool and wondered if it could be made more concrete somehow. We will revisit this at our next meeting.
World Language 2/15
Submitted by: Adele Pelz
We began the meeting by talking about the Summer Curriculum Working Committee and encouraging members to apply for this meaningful initiative and how it would build on our departmental work along with the questions we have been addressing about what equity and inclusion mean for our subject area and what they look like in our practice.
Building off of our discussion, we decided to begin to draft a list of guiding principles that we see driving our curricula in an effort to dismantle any areas of bias in our classes and create meaningful change in content and teaching.
In addition, at our next meeting we will be working on a template to document any examples of projects, texts, and resources that were launched this year.
This document along with the guiding principles should inform the work of the committee and will inform our end of year presentations.
Learning Support Dept Meeting 2/15/22
Submitted by: Susannah Flicker
Learning Support Department Meeting Notes, 2/15/22
We discussed the summer curriculum institute and the approach that our department specifically would take in terms of contributing to a curriculum assessment tool since, in our roles as learning specialists, we typically do not create/write a lot of curriculum.
Our discussion brought us to the conclusion that our approach to this is twofold:
- Examining ways in which disability and neurodiversity is or is not represented in the curriculum across subject areas, and looking for tools and resources to promote more inclusivity in terms of neurodiversity and disability.
- Gathering and documenting best practices for classroom teachers and learning specialists that promote equity and inclusion for different types of learners and that counteract the deficit model of ability and learning differences.
Performing Arts Department Meeting Notes 2/15/22
Submitted by: Aedín Larkin
Present: Nick, Susan, Damon, Carrie, Aedín, Joan, Deborah, Kalil, Kristina (remote), Katherine (remote)
We took some time to acknowledge the changes and their impact on our department.
We discussed how the meeting time for our department is not ideal as we can rarely all meet together after school due to rehearsals. Moving forward and thinking about next year we would like the administrative team to look at our schedules to see if there is a solution to this.
Individually we have been examining our curriculum for bias. Due to the lack of frequency in our meetings (the last time we met as a department was in October), it has not been possible to have a collaborative group discussion about the steps we are taking to de-bias our curriculum or the tools and resources that we use. We would like to think about how to have these discussions as a team in a more creative way.
For our next meeting, we will try to find a time that works so that the majority of us can attend. We will share what we have been working on individually and discuss the tools we have been using this year.
We spoke about the summer working group and we will begin to think about and gather information to share with this group.
History Department-Feb 15th
Submitted by: Tom Murphy
We started by discussing our DEI goals. We decided on three areas: What we teach? How inclusive are our classrooms? How do we assess what we teach? For each question, we would develop rubrics. Next, we talked about the different types of rubrics we could use. Most of the discussion focused on the example I posted on the DEI resources document. Next meeting we plan on breaking into working groups that would focus on one of the questions.
Science Mtg 2/15/22
Submitted by: Kelly
Present: Michael, Sherezada, Eliza, Daniel, Kara, Kelly
Absent: Jeanette
Our goal from our last meeting was to continue thinking about how our courses, classrooms, and curriculum can be designed for adjustability and variability (rather than “average”)—and how we can evaluate whether and how we are doing just that.
Building off of what we discussed after listening to the podcast last time, we started thinking about Universal Design by watching a video of a lecture by Sara Hendren, a professor at Olin college, that touched on many ideas about design and ability.
Here is the video that we watched: https://vimeo.com/134764010
We had a short discussion after the video, then spent a little time exploring the UDL Guidelines as one potential avenue for guiding our thinking in designing for adjustability—and a potential avenue (alongside tools more explicitly focused on race and other aspects of identity) for building a tool to evaluate our work.
In our next meeting, we plan to pull together different things that we’ve looked at this year to pass along to those in the summer work group.