Category Archives: Departmental Focus

Posted on by

World Language Meeting 11/9

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

The World Language Department devoted this meeting to discussing the abstract entitled: Diversity and Inclusion in World Language Instruction by Sheri Dion. The article talked about four main topics :

-Cultural Diversity
-Student Diversity in Assessment
-Student Interest
-Teacher experience
Our conversation focused on the area of integrating Critical Cultural Awareness (CCA) into our curriculum with the goal of preparing our students for intercultural relationships with greater diversity.
The role and inclusion of both student and teachers’ identities, monolingual classrooms, and multilingual students were also discussed and used to highlight the importance of personal experience and student diversity and interests, which are considered resources in teaching WL and empower students to reflect on their impact in a global world.
As a department, we navigated  beyond our cultural projects towards creating an environment of balance through culture and content which provides a safer space for our language learners.
We came away with enrichment activities to bring to the fore our students’ personal history and narrative by conducting interviews, making oral presentations and writing personal reflections.
El Dia de los Muertos celebration at the LS was discussed and we talked about putting together an interconnected cultural event in the Spring through a festival of languages throughout the dvisions.
Posted on by

World Language Department

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

5/26

We used this meeting to summarize and reflect on the curricular changes and additions to our program to better include a broader range of diverse authors and topics that reflect anti-racism, equity and a wider array of countries, cultures, people and families around the world.
Some examples:
L.S. : – Creating families “different” from your own
          – Poetry by pablo Neruda
M.S. : – Researching countries that reflect the personal history of or connection with the students.
H.S. : –  In Spanish and French, researching, creating websites, writing blog posts and reading stories and texts about hispanic and francophone speaking nations, people and culture.
           –  In Mandarin, comparing Chinese and American school systems and learning about and exploring the geography, history, and hardships of life in the provinces.
6/2
At this end of year meeting we reflected on and discussed the questions provided to us to further support the DEIJ work along with our department.
1. Some positive movement for us would be expanding our curriculum to include issues of diversity, responding to the needs and identities of our students, and creating safe spaces for our students.
– Gender equity : We will continue to examine with each other and our students any biases in language, gender, pronouns, accent, vocabulary, speech and expression.
– Inclusion : We will continue to give our students a voice in choosing what it is they would personally like to pursue, study and explore, albeit that those choices do not always align with our goals for anti-racism. And we will attempt to create a safe space for our students of color to share their voices with confidence, support and respect.
– Survey : At the beginning of the year, we will give the students an opportunity to share information about themselves, their background, the languages they speak at home, how they identify, what they hope to achieve, and why they chose to study the language of choice.
2. An ongoing challenge is always contact time, which  requires prioritizing and flexibility. However, it is often  native speakers who do not get enough contact time and are also students of color.
-We need to address ways in which we can educate and raise the awareness and accountability of our white students in ways that will move them towards making more informed curricular choices and being better listeners and agents of transformative change.
– We need to keep these discussions going, they have only just begun.
– We need to keep evaluating our content, assessing our practice, and searching for ongoing sources, materials, and P.D.that represent diversity. With so many expectations put on educators, it is critical to know and discuss as a faculty the needs of the students.
3. Our department can be supported by recognizing that World Language is by definition a model for diversity. To study language and culture is to understand the existence of people authentically in the surroundings in which they live. We cannot be fair to people from other cultures and countries who live in the US when we put labels on them. In our classes it is more important to represent the culture of the language we teach.
4. We are dedicated to bringing people together through globalization and multiculturalism. Learning a language other than your own is becoming culturally competent and can open doors without which you would not have access and this needs to be acknowledged.
In conclusion, our goal and challenge is to highlight the diversity within the countries about which we are teaching. At the same time, we live in a society that tends to label, group and all too often separate rather than include. So trying to bring our students to a place of understanding through a cultural lens is our World Language mission.

Posted on by

Department Meeting Notes For Performing Arts

Submitted by: Joanne Magee

In the final meetings we made final comments and reviewed our narrative responses for the DEI work we covered this year.

Performing Arts report 2020/21 Academic Year 

 

Members of our Department: 

Music: Susan Glass, Nick Wight, Damon DueWhite, Carrie Nichols, Aedin Larkin. 

Drama: Joan Jubett, Joanne Magee

Dance: Kristina Walton, Deborah Damast, Peggy Peloquin. 

This year was particularly challenging for the performing arts department as our programs were understandably compromised and re-imagined in several ways in order to meet the needs of our students during the global pandemic. Many of us taught very different classes. In the LS, specialists were extremely limited . We all were unable to provide our usual programs so it was very hard to change the actual curriculum if it was not being taught. As we had a priority to revolutionize our programs as we adapted to the spaces, the remote times and the constraints, we also worked as best we could on the following process. We hope to continue with more time and focus in the years to come as this year was especially herculean for the performing arts.

DEI Narrative responses and work throughout the year. 

Posted on by

Lib-Tech Department Notes 6/1

Submitted by: Karyn Silverman

The following notes are from the joint Library and Educational Technology Departments. We work closely and will have only five faculty between the two departments across all three divisions next year, all of whom were present at this meeting.

Positive movement regarding DEI initiatives:

Although this has been a complex year to navigate, true for all but specifically for Library and Technology complicated by lack of access to our spaces (both libraries and the Tech Commons at 6th Ave were repurposed to accommodate distancing and space requirements as dictated by the DOH), we are happy to report that we did manage to move forward in several target areas.

From a content access perspective, the librarians continued their work building  a more inclusive, diverse collection; publishing has centered specific stories (generally focused on white, American, cis-het characters) and our collections have reflected that bias in available material. The recent explosion of greater diversity in the authors and experiences being published allowed us to significantly overhaul areas of concern. Specific areas of focus this year were picture books at the 6th Ave campus and the romance collection at the Charlton campus. Focal areas in picture books were greater representation of POC and female characters and authors. In romance, focal areas were greater POC rep and less heteronormative focus.

The librarians also significantly expanded our digital holdings, particularly recreational reading material in e and audio formats. This has been an on-going initiative, but was particularly critical this year to support fully remote students. There was some overlap between fully remote students and race and fully remote students and socioeconomic status, and increasing these collections meant those students were not further disenfranchised by lack of access to school resources. Expanding the audio collection is also a boon to neurodiverse students. Digital literature also allows students who may be working through questions of sexuality or gender to read freely without fear of anyone being aware of what they are reading, although we don’t know how significant an issue that is for members of our community.

Finally, we examined what books we promote passively and actively, and we began the process of auditing the books selected for readalouds (6th Ave) and promotion on the library Instagram (Charlton) and increasingly expanding the representation in the books we center. As part of this process, for the 2nd year running, our HS summer reading list focuses on generally underrepresented voices (works in translation, works set in other countries, works by and about authors and characters of color across all genres, greater representation of LGBTQ+ authors and stories, and almost all books available in audio as well as print and e-print).

From an equipment access perspective, this year marked a hige increase of getting devices into the hands of lower and middle school students. We hope to be able to continue this level of access and support even as the pandemic draws to a close.

When it comes to information access and awareness, the HS digital and information curriculum for grades 9 & 10 has continued work on finding sources that show women and POC in the fields of information science and digital studies. Our focus on teaching media literacy continues to use current and topical case studies that reflect an issue of social justice (e.g.: connecting cultural appropriation in TikTok to copyright; studying algorithms through the lens of human biases and social inequity). 

 Challenges:

The biggest challenge has been working within patriarchal systems of communication. We are a predominantly female department (whether considered jointly or separately) and our work is often complicated or stopped by a lack of communication from male administrators. Regardless of intent, the impact is that we feel left out of important conversations, and that our expertise in our content and pedagogy is neither respected nor included in policy and decision making.

Lack of materials: we continue to be frustrated that we cannot always find research materials that center experiences other than white, cis-het, usually male perspectives; this is a particular issue with databases.

Looking forward, the lack of staff will be a challenge. Fewer staff means a lack of equity for our students. The libraries (which at 6th Ave encompasses the Tech Commons) have long been spaces that allow students to stay at school until 5 or 6 pm. For students who may not have printing or robust internet connections, or a quiet workspace at home, this access is crucial to their academic success. Looking beyond the academic, the long hours have also allowed students who live far from the school and far from one another to spend social time together. With the staffing reductions in our library faculty and staff next year, we will not be able to provide this level of access.

Ways we would like to be supported: 

  • More training in facilitating DEI conversations
  • Regular meetings to talk through what it means to de-colonize research materials, something we know needs to happen but is hard to do when the easily available resources are not always what we want
  • Regular conversations about equity and access in materials (tech, research materials, books) and access (facilities, equipment)
  • Help in identifying other ways that we can advance schoolwide DEI initiatives through our information and digital literacy curriculum, and technology integration in general.

What to know about our department:

We are thrilled Kalil will be joining LREI and looking forward to working with him!

We work well together and prefer to work collaboratively, whether with each other or with our divisional colleagues. Our focus is on learning — our own and that of others — and our modality is support and connection.

We are in the midst of a massive reorganization; this is a moment of flux and we are struggling to navigate the balance between growth and function. This reorganization has left us understaffed to a degree that will slow our forward momentum on DEI work. We are eager to do the work, but we feel limited by external institutional factors (staffing and money; structures that disempower our department). We are deeply embedded in the pedagogical and progressive mission of the school and responsible for many services that support students and faculty across all divisions, which means that if we cannot keep our momentum, we risk stagnation or backwards movement that will effect many other departments, particularly in as regards entrenched dominant and supremacist voices in research and reading material and as regards access to technology that can be used to support mission-drive, project-based progressive teaching in the classrooms.

Posted on by

EdTech Department Meeting 3/4/21

Submitted by: Clair

Ordering for Next year

  1. Celeste
    1. I’d love to turn the tech lab back into a lab for things like Yearbook, tech lessons, etc. 
      1. Having just a few students in there would be great (so socially distanced)
      2. Is this a possibility with the CDC saying things don’t really spread on surfaces
    2. If not
      1. Can we get laptops– we’re down to like 4 out of what was 20+
      2. Everytime a device breaks or we have a coverage person, we give them a device from the circulation cart– we need more here if we can’t use the Tech Lab for tech 
    3. Printer
      1. Can we get a new color printer for the tech lab? 
        1. Or an in-between model that would offer both scanning and color printing that’s a bit more robust than lab scanner
  2. Clair
    1. Is there one single inventory of all of the devices that went out last year, this year, and where they are now? 
      1. Candace’s laptop is a perfect example– did we know that was outstanding? 
      2. If we do this for next year, we need to get everything back, cleaned, inventoried, and accounted for
      3. Hotspots? Other devices? 
    2. I’d like to collect them all for summer. They need to be wiped, cleaned, and prepared; 5-8th grade. 8th grade devices can be retired for the most part, or put in backup 
  3. Joy
    1. The status of minis? 
      1. Do we have any for the HS/can we get the ones that are having issues in the LS/MS wiped and reset? That would help bolster the circulation numbers up again 
      2. Can we get them wiped and upgraded?
    2. If we continue to use the library as a classroom next year
      1. Printing needs to be thoughtfully examined
        1. Right now printing is happening in the faculty lab for the kids
        2. Are we going to move those printers to a different space? If we have them in public space they need to be in a place that’s not a classroom and won’t be a traffic issue
      2. We don’t really have a way to circulate equipment right now
        1. Matt has kids drop/pick off devices in a red basket behind Adria’s desk– this is a pretty big security issue
        2. We don’t lend chargers, we don’t lend mice, keyboards, etc.– is it even necessary?
      3. Matt is handling laptop distribution and management
    3. Summer agreement in the HS for devices– if someone breaks it over the summer, they have to pay for it
      1. How will we manage summer devices this year? 
    4. We need a master document of all of the equipment that is being handed out and what’s in every room
      1. When were certain minis installed? How old are they? What are their serial #s and specs? 
  4. Cross-Divisionally
    1. We would like an inventory system that’s a database: we need one centralized system where what we know what everyone has, where things are, and what their information is
    2. Can we plan for what the summer will look like? Can the young alum be hired for the summer to check on, maintain, upgrade and provision devices?
    3. What does the classroom sound look like for next year? With the idea for next year being no remote teachers but still possibly stome remote students, what might that set up look like? 
    4. Can we design some sort of cross-divisionally remote survey– what has your experience been like? What are the issues you’ve had and how are they now? What is your emotional experience like too? 
      1. If the audio isn’t making them feel more connected, what would? 
      2. Remote only pods? 
  5. ECFS Conversation with Joy
    1. Surveyed students about cameras on or off
      1. Mixed bag– wide range of feelings 
      2. Some students felt like they didn’t want people in their homes, body image or gender dysmorphia
    2. Opt In policy allows students to decide today we’ll have it on, and they don’t have to ask to turn it off
      1. Some resistance from the teachers you’d expect
      2. They had some resistance from families at first 
        1. Had a series of meetings to explain why we’re doing this, and what it means for their education, how you can support them
        2. Working with teachers who are used to lecturing that they need to do something different
      3. We might be in a good position to try this
        1. Most HS teachers are teaching in models that aren’t purely lecture based
      4. They’re meeting with their faculty next week to hear about how it’s going and talk about it with them all. We are welcome to go/invited
        1. Joy is talking with Alison and Margaret about it as well 
        2. I brought it up with Susannah as well as part of her support team role and learning specialist expertise
        3. LS– the norms here are cameras on; ECFS has it for all three divisions
          1. If a kid has their camera off and aren’t doing the work, there needs to be another way to assess that they’re not doing it other that “their camera is off” 
      5. They are planning on there being some remote learning next year

Posted on by

World Language Dept. mtg. 3/3/21

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

The World Language department used this time to begin creating a document of questions and ideas around cultivating meaningful information about our students to better serve their needs, interests, struggles and well being.

Ultimately this would take the form of a survey for both incoming and current students by giving them prompts to indicate and reflect on a wide range of issues:
-their interest in and exposure to the  language
-their reasons for studying the language and their goals
-their language spoken at home
-their cultural background and identity
-their previous knowledge of the language
-their preferred learning style
-their interest in specific topics, projects, current events, people and places they would like to explore and learn about.
We will continue our discussion and work in our next meeting.

 

Posted on by

World Language 4/28

Submitted by: Adele de Biasi Pelz

This was the first time our full school department met together after moving to online teaching. We used the time to catch up, discuss our challenges, and share best practices, websites, and resources.

It was anecdotal and uplifting and most of us left feeling better about our experiences and how we could incorporate new ideas into our practice.