Reimers/Asia

I will start by piggybacking on Margaret Hardy's musing about what we are doing to teach tolerance.   It is more than a four-part task: a) In the classroom--and I'll write here particularly about my English classroom--we want students listening to and understanding each other as well as the voices in the fiction and non-fiction we read in depth (not in ephemeral and distracting texts and tweets),  to create a small community of minds each day and throughout each year  b) In the shared spaces of the school we want understanding of, encouragement of good citizenship.  (If Upper School students can't keep The Commons clean, what does that predict about their global citizenship?  How do we get them to recognize that they must take more responsibility there, that the responsibility is symbolic of their global citizenship?)  c) In the local community we want active engagement--through field trips, community service, science and statistics projects, the Profile. etc.   d) In international arenas we want students confident in second (and third) languages, traveling/studying/contributing abroad, designing projects such as the irrigation system Ryan Simpson is working on for the Sahel, first as part of his Senior Spring Project and later as an investigation he will carry on in university.  

We are already doing a lot of what the two documents call for--the English Department, for instance, is always revising courses: to add even more variety of texts within an existing course, to juxtapose voices, to expand the range of course offerings.   We emphasize "multiple perspectives," comparison and synthesis, and effective, compelling communication. 

But what will take us further to create "good persons, good workers, and good citizens," in Gardner's words?

Do we have full administrative support for those assignments/activities that take the students out into the community (Petropolous Scholars, Profile, to name two) and for cross-disciplinary courses and positions? (The number of faculty members who teach in two departments has shrunk over the past few years.)  Will the Senior Spring Project Committee emphasize the importance of global competencies in that culminating experience for students? Might faculty meetings be used less for presenting information that could be summarized in an email and more for substantive and on-going conversations among faculty members on some of the subjects raised in these articles, getting past brainstorming into specific plans and collaborations?  Are administrative decisions about courses made in terms of numbers and popularity or with an eye to teachers' curricular designs that promote the competencies discussed in the faculty summer reading?    Can communications about field trips be less about how soon to sign up and what blocks will be missed and more about the substance of the trips?  Can we find more ways to share and promote students'  local/global projects in economics or statistics or science?  (Leah Cataldo's "Current Topics" presentations are an exemplar.) 

I look forward to conversations on these articles and matters.

Althea Cranston

Upper School English