Working with Students
Building Equity Teams
Addressing inequities in schools requires that adults and young people work together to explore, assess, and transform school culture. We work closely with an equity-focused point person in the district and provide support materials for recruiting and structuring the equity team. Teams are stakeholders that include students, caregivers/parents, educators, and administrators. This kind of equity work:
- supports each participant to learn and reflect on their own role in maintaining the current school culture;
- considers academic and policy issues that contribute to inequity;
- examines the issues that contribute to a sense of belonging and exclusion in the school; and
- fosters the skills and commitment needed to build joyful, relational, inclusive, and academically rigorous learning spaces.
Intergroup Dialogues
Intergroup Dialogues are a series of small group, co-facilitated, carefully structured experiences that encourage relational dialogue rather than debate while exploring social group identity, difference, conflict, community, and equity. Intergroup dialogue centers students’ experiences, relationships, and capacity for collective beneficial change. The program is also rooted in the values of teamwork and intercultural, intergroup engagement.
Students participate in intergroup dialogue that is co-facilitated by experienced dialogue facilitators, and are trained to co-facilitate sustained peer-led dialogues at their school. We then support student peer-facilitators to co-facilitate dialogue for their peers. Through this work, students acquire skills that help them to develop self-awareness, engage tools for self-regulation when stressed in a group, deepen their ability to listen, develop the ability to ask questions and suspend judgment when in conflict, voice one’s thoughts and feelings in a way that creates mutual understanding, successfully surface conflict or tension in a group and moving through that conflict together, and identify equity issues and actions through multi-partial and complex lenses.