It all starts here

Each Nursery student gives an All About Me presentation.
 

They each brainstorm all of the things that make them special.
 

Then, they present their findings to their classmates.
 

The audience listens carefully, and gently note which things they resonate with.
 

They also respectfully point out things that don’t connect with their experience.
 

It’s the start of something big.
 

In Kindergarten, their first assignment of the year translates the Nursery About Me lesson into written form, as students draw and annotate portraits of their families, each wildly different, which hang on the classroom wall all year.
 

First graders are ending their year by making differences explicit with their first persuasive essays: having mastered the spelling of “because,” they are writing out opinions with supporting evidence. They don’t know it yet, but they’ll end the lesson by acknowledging other points of view.
 

Second grade identity flowers loop back on the All About Me lesson and dig deeper, with individual petals representing culture, family structure and other social identifiers.
 

In third grade, students learn to disagree and argue in mathematical terms. In class today, they saw four sets of shapes and argued about which of the four does not belong. Between the colors, sizes, shapes and symmetries in each set, there were no right or wrong answers. The challenge, then, was explain your own point of view while understanding someone else’s.
 

At the sixth grade Model UN, students step out of themselves and advocate for populations around the world, as students draw on in-depth research about the nations they represent to connect across differences and form alliances that will save the planet.
 

For the service learning presentations that end eighth grade, students give extended presentations to parents about the work they did at local nonprofits over the month of May. An essential part of the assignment is to talk about that work in personal terms: how the work connected with their own identities, the discomfort they might have experienced, the challenges they may have had working together as a group, and the growth the experience inspired.
 

At Commencement, the faculty puts it all together for the graduates, presenting them each with photos from the first year at Gordon and their last one, delivering heartfelt and handcrafted tributes to each student, and honoring the challenges and successes they experienced as a group over the past eleven years.
 

And it all starts here in Nursery, identifying and speaking one’s own truth, listening carefully to others, finding points of connection and learning from the differences.