Everything is relational
in a school and in the teaching
process, the learning process.
Everything is about relationships.
The relationship that we have with each other with ourselves
with what we're learning with
the families.
It's the work with the policies. It's
worth it to build those relationships because it
impacts
how teachers teach how leaders lead. And when
relationships are not strong learning doesn't
happen.
When I was in this doctoral program at teacher's
college, we had to really think about our earliest
experiences with race. We also
learned about like the correlation between your earliest
experience with race and how you
interact with people today. We then had
to write an autobiography about our
racial cultural and ethnic identity.
And I thought that this would be really powerful to do in a
school. I had the staff do their own racial
autobiographies. I shared
a racial and ethnic identity statement that
I wrote about who I was. I wanted to
model it for them. I wanted to model the vulnerability.
Because I didn't want to ask them to do something that
I was unwilling to do.
What I found was that there were some of us who have
worked together for more than 20 years and had
no idea where we were
from.
You can look at someone and make many assumptions about
what you think where they're from what their
background is and be entirely incorrect.
And if you don't open opportunities for people to
share in this way, you have to create the space for this
to be done. Sometimes it just doesn't happen naturally.
And it was not easy for everyone. There were
some people that were uncomfortable with
that and that is okay and we
felt like this was, you know a process and
that we wanted to meet people where they were but at
the same time have everybody understand that this
is something that we're doing we're going to
do it together. And so the teachers then share
these autobiographies with the students. We hung them
up on the walls of the school and the students
were absolutely mesmerized. They think that
we live at the school. They don't realize that we have lives
and we have children and we you know that we're humans. And
then the students created theirs.
It was beautiful to learn about
the students. The families got involved because the
students needed to find about the upper bringing so they needed to include
their families. They did their presentations and
we've done it every year since then.
and I did share it with a couple of other principles and
one in particular was able to
do the same thing and absolutely transformed her
school culture from one
that they didn't feel embraced the cultures
of the students to one that feels so much
love and pride that it's a
beautiful thing to see.