Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

MA launched its Identity and Equity (IDEQ) program in 2004. These IDEQ groups center around shared identities (including racial, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and others), and while the number and configurations of groups have changed over time in response to our student body, all groups consistently maintain goals around social justice. Some groups provide affinity spaces, where people with a common identity can come together to build community and talk openly about their experiences and concerns, while open groups focus on community building, outreach, and activism within or beyond the MA community. 

We currently have 36 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade student leaders at the helm of 17 student-led organizations in our IDEQ cohort. Student leaders are selected through an application and interview process, and they receive training in facilitation, leadership, and social justice; every group is supported by at least one adult in the community. Leadership training includes an annual day-long IDEQ leadership retreat prior to the start of the school year. During the retreat, students learn about and reflect upon the long and rich history of the IDEQ program, and they articulate the current and future vision for their organizations and the leadership cohort. Adult advisors join them to develop or refine mission statements for their groups, for community building fun, and for event planning for the upcoming year. 

The IDEQ leaders meet as a cohort throughout the school year through leadership lunches organized by the Director of Student Inclusion and Belonging. In addition, they host lunch meetings for celebrations, guest speakers, working on current events, or simply connecting. The goal of the program is for students to build and demonstrate leadership capacity through their particular IDEQ organization and their engagement with the leadership cohort.

In the math department, assessments go beyond traditional quizzes and tests. Students in MA math classes can demonstrate their understanding by completing unit projects that offer students choice and the opportunity to apply their understanding to novel problems or to create something mathematical. There are multiple ways to approach problems and many correct solutions.

Geometry students studying area and perimeter learned about Gerrymandering and how to measure the compactness of congressional districts, then created projects drawing their own Gerrymandered districts. Precalculus students studying the graphs of trigonometric functions put their graphing skills into action on Desmos creating animated designs. In Applied Math, students held debates at the end of each unit where they developed arguments for or against a position related to personal finance. Culminating projects, rather than exams, at the end of the semester incorporate opportunities for students to create their own tests, examine their growth, and reflect on the competencies and the skills they developed.

Many of the math department teachers use rubrics for assessing student understanding of different standards or single-point rubrics for projects and debates. They do grading on teams, using common assessments, and regularly use the data to inform the planning for the next unit. All assessments have some kind of retake opportunity, so students can continue to learn from feedback and show improved understanding of a concept or skill on a retake.

Amidst the pandemic, social unrest, shifting schedules, and remote and hybrid teaching, many of the science faculty have had the opportunity to reflect on everything they do as educators. In the spring of 2020, emergency remote teaching forced many of them to reframe and shift their lessons due to distance learning.

The faculty provided kits for many science courses so students could continue doing hands-on science labs at home. At the same time, they all dug into current events and built their curriculum around the pandemic. Activities in the classroom included responding to racism associated with the coronavirus, exploring long-standing systemic health and social inequities that have put a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on communities of color, and allowing students to analyze publicly available real-time COVID-19 sequence data.  At the same time, students studied the coronavirus and explored the physics of COVID transmission. They examined the way decisions in medical ethics are embedded in our social and cultural fabric. COVID-19 has made social inequities and ethical concerns more visible and urgent than ever.

Science historically has been framed as objective. Yet, scientists are people, and science isn't done in a vacuum. Over the last year, in particular, the MA science department has explored what's not working in science education around representation and racism and how they can teach science more inclusively. Science is not culture-free. The pandemic and social unrest brought to the forefront how important it is to contextualize science and engage students in meaningful conversations about social inequities and institutionalized racism.

While the science faculty had to reinvent themselves to teach remotely in the face of all the 2020-2021 school year's challenges, they also needed to adjust the curriculum to include less teaching time.  As educators, they make choices about what to include and what to omit with their teaching lessons. Techniques that have lent themselves well to remote and hybrid learning to optimize student participation and engagement also foster inclusivity.  For example, when designing lesson plans they ask—who is left out and behind? They chose to grow as remote and online teachers and actively work to prioritize equity, inclusion, and justice in their curriculum. They are committed to continuing to grow as both science and anti-racist educators.  

In English III as part of their study of Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (2017), members of the junior class discussed the rise in violence toward people of Asian descent that has been taking place, connecting it to the broader history of racial oppression faced by Asian Americans, and specifically to the dangers of the Model Minority Myth.  

In an effort to confront anti-Asian violence, students in Nicole Stanton’s English III section also read an article entitled “For Asian American Women, Misogyny and Racism are Inseparable,” and then discussed how fetishization leads to dehumanization, which then leads to violence—and how this takes place on multiple levels (personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural). Nicole’s goal was for students to see how oppression is intersectional and to educate students about the history and context that led to this horrible act of gendered violence. She felt that taking some time to address this issue in her class was critical, because fighting racial oppression starts with knowledge about how it works and where it comes from, and this is knowledge our students need, especially given the silence that has surrounded racism against Asian American and Pacific Islander people.

Students participate in exercises that give them the opportunity to think about their identity, how it correlates with those around them, and how to visualize it in new ways. In addition to discussing individual identity, the class focuses on identity within a social and historical context.

As they are encouraged to recognize how identity plays a role in the choices they make and how their social experiences shape how they live their lives, students can begin to appreciate how some identity groups have been historically included and others historically excluded, which has created privilege and oppression. This increased knowledge of and awareness about identity, privilege, and oppression results in an enhanced ability to discuss the inequities between identity groups. A major objective of the course is to provide students with an opportunity to engage across difference and still appreciate and respect each others perspectives.

English Teacher, Marisa Gomez

For example, this year the English 3 course, “American Dreams & Realities” opened with a new unit designed to support students in their conversations about race in America. Students read excerpts from Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race as well as other contemporary shorter works by writers such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ken Liu. Students placed these works in conversation with poetry from the "New Negro Movement" of the 20th century and discussed in class the levels of oppression and how we can create change at personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Other recent additions to the English curriculum include Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream and Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine (English 1); Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (English 2); and Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (English 3).

• How do we create learning opportunities for students to develop our MA competencies? 
• How do we model these skills or competencies for our students? 

This group’s work so far includes surveying both faculty and 9th grade students on their use and experience of MA and course competencies as well as the gradeless first semester for 9th grade core classes (English 1, Biology, and Modern World History 1), and beginning to articulate a competencies "road map" for the student experience.

MA World Language Teacher Abby French is applying her experience from two workshops with the California Teachers Collaborative to her work as an IDEQ advisor and her role in the adult white anti-racism affinity group. She attended a Restorative Justice Practices workshop for independent schools, as well as a workshop about facilitating courageous conversations visually, called "Do You See What I Mean?"  She is also a former advisor for the student-led Rethinking Whiteness group, where she supported students with planning and facilitating meetings. It takes a skilled facilitator to effectively lead conversations that are centered on identity, equity, and inclusion. 

While Abby continues to build her own skills in this area, it has been exciting for her to share her workshop learnings with students and offer them some guidance. Although she is not directly involved at the moment with formal restorative practices at MA, she reflects on things she has learned about restorative justice to guide her work in resolving conflicts that arise between advisees or students she works with. When something someone says or does causes harm to another member of the community, she sees restorative practices as powerful ways to address and repair the harm.