Starting the conversation early

Middle School students are having the first in a series of four racial literacy workshops this week.

 

Assistant Head of School Alethea Dunham-Carson set the tone for seventh and eighth grade’s workshop today by talking about her work consulting for schools and institutions who wanted help talking about race in the workplace.
 

“Most of the time, I was doing this work because something painful had happened in the community, and they wanted help repairing that harm. And I had to ask myself: ‘what would it be like if communities did this work around race before something painful happens?’”
 

The conversations around race at Gordon, happening in age-appropriate ways in every grade, are this community’s take on what that might look like. 
 

For these four Middle School racial literacy workshops, students will meet in large and small groups, led by the faculty advisors they meet with every day.
 

The goals are to:

• practice talking about race

• understand the relationship between someone’s beliefs and systems of power and how they impact bias and discrimination 

• understand the history of stereotypes and their impact on us.
 

The first workshops in the series included video of recent Gordon graduates prepared them for conversations about race in high school and college, and conversation about the prompts in these photos.