TAS JEDI Committee Continues to Expand its Work

By Amanda Jacob, Interim Academic Dean

For the last two school years, the TAS community has committed itself to fostering “a culture of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion that embodies anti-bias action and accountability” and to doing “the work necessary to maintain an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment for all.” The school-wide JEDI committee, divisional JEDI committees, and the TAS Cultural Connection (TASCC) parent group are working hard to make this commitment a reality. 

In addition to the work that is happening with faculty, our parent and alumni community, and children, the school has recently hired E-chieh Lin as Director of Inclusion and Wellbeing for the 2022-2023 school year to help lead our JEDI work. It is an exciting time for our community as we continue this important work and learn new ways to integrate it into our community's daily experience.

Faculty and Staff 

 

Helping the adults in our building learn to recognize bias and privilege and develop a vocabulary for talking thoughtfully about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion is a critical first and ongoing phase in helping TAS become “an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment for all.” 

This year, several of our treasured professional development days have been used to lead cross-divisional PD that focused on different aspects of identity, privilege, and implicit bias. 

• Weston Cooper and Anthony Kelley presented to the faculty, explaining the intersection of Black Lives Matter and Taiwanese history. 

• Faculty have attended conferences throughout the year, including the Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice, The Equity Institute hosted by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Street Data Fundamentals: A Path to Equity and Antiracism, and Becoming a Warm Demander: Addressing Microaggressions in Schools. 

• KA-12 teaching faculty have also had access to Global Online Academy’s extensive professional development catalog, which includes three different online courses for professionals to learn more about designing for equity. 

• On the September 3rd PD day, the school held an all-employee JEDI activity for several hours in the morning, focusing on helping school employees better understand their own complicated identity webs. Connie Ma and Sophie Tsai held a small-group discussion for interested staff members to receive similar training on the following PD day. 

• The Middle School has planned two upcoming PD sessions for its faculty: “Turning the Lens on Ourselves” and “Turning the Lens on Taiwan” to help their faculty focus on events that have impacted who they are today and develop a better understanding of Taiwan’s history around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. 

But this work is not limited only to professional development days. Quite the contrary!

• The Upper School has begun hosting a series of recurring events for faculty called “Coffee and Conversations,” a space where colleagues read articles and gather to discuss topics related to the school’s JEDI work. So far, conversations have focused on affinity groups and building anti-bias learning environments. Their experiences with and enthusiasm for the affinity group model have led to a group of faculty offering optional affinity groups on upcoming PD days to KA-12 school employees. The initial facilitators of these affinity groups will be Erika Soublet and Ryan Haynes (Black Affinity Group), Maneesha Maingot and Chase Williams (Queer Affinity Group), Sophie Tsai (Taiwanese 台灣人/Ethnic Chinese 華人), Beth Clarke and Darby Sinclair (White Anti-Bias Educators). As our understanding of and work with affinity groups evolve, the JEDI committee envisions that additional affinity groups will be added. 

• The Lower School and Middle School are both leading faculty book clubs. The kindergarten and kindergarten A teachers and administrators read Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, meeting regularly to discuss the topics addressed and to think about how the topics impact the programs offered to our youngest learners. The entire faculty of the Lower School and the Communications Office will be reading Blindspot during the fourth quarter. The Middle School is offering its teachers a selection of eight different JEDI titles to read and discuss in small groups this semester including Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, So You Want to Talk About Race, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. 

Parent and Alumni Community

Ensuring a consistent message between school and home will help children develop a deeper understanding of their own identities, biases, privileges, and choices; therefore, the Alumni Office, the TASCC parent group, the Head of School office, and the counseling department have teamed up to offer learning opportunities to parents and alumni. Connie Ma and Darby Sinclair offered two parent workshops on "Understanding Our Identities "in October 2021. Nine of those parents who attended volunteered to become trainers who would lead workshops for other parents and participated in a “Train the Trainer” session facilitated by Connie Ma and the Lower School librarian in February 2022.

TASCC also offered a community event titled, “Parallels between the History of Taiwan and the Black Lives Matter Movement,” utilizing the experience and expertise of Weston Cooper and Anthony Kelley. Another workshop offered this year to parents focused on resilience and inclusion. So far, these four TASCC parent events have generated both high attendance and strong engagement.

TASCC and the Alumni Office brought in Shawna Yang Ryan to discuss her book Green Island. She talked about her experiences in Taiwan as a Taiwanese American. The Alumni Office also brought in author Abigail Hing Wen to discuss Asian American Identity with the parent and alumni community. She also spoke with middle and upper school children.  

The Alumni Office and TASCC teamed up for a viewing of the recent film “American Girl” with a follow-up question and answer session. This event was shown to a full house with more than 200 parents, students, employees, and alumni attending to watch the film and Q&A. The film, featuring a current TAS student and alumni director, is a coming-of-age story that focuses on third-culture identity and its effect on adolescents.  

The TAS Communications Office has also begun a new JEDI-themed initiative to tell more diverse stories from within our community. This initiative, called “TAS Voices,” is a recurring article series in which the school invites readers to find out more about the diverse individuals that make TAS the vibrant learning community we know and love.  

Several TAS alumni have banded together to create a DEI-themed podcast to discuss topics including how aspects of our identity intersect to impact discrimination, mental health, microaggressions, and more. Victoria Yeh (‘16) and Brendan Wong (‘17), created “Taipei Tiger Talk” in collaboration with the school’s JEDI organization and have met with both the Communications and Alumni Offices along with the TASCC to broaden its reach. 

It's exciting to see such a strong commitment from our children's first and most important educator: their parents -- and it's equally exciting to see our historical base as fired up about this work as we are here on campus.

Children

The four goals of anti-bias education that anchor the work around the world are: 

• Identity – Each child will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social/group identities. 

• Diversity – Each child will express comfort and joy with human diversity, accurate language for human differences, and deep, caring human connections. 

• Justice – Each child will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have the language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts. 

• Activism -Each child will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions. 

Across the three divisions, faculty are finding ways to infuse this work into children’s days through advisory, integrated work within the curriculum, and opportunities outside of class.  

• During the first day of Middle School, children met with their homeroom advisors to learn about and discuss the school’s JEDI goals. They built charters for their homerooms to help make the goals a reality. The Middle School also planned five extended advisory lessons across the year with pre- and post-discussions during regular advisory sessions. The extended lessons have focused on the language we use to talk about identity, diversity, empathy, gender, advocacy, and privilege.  

• Middle school librarian Carol Yousif has joined Project LIT and hosts monthly book club talks when she shares books around a monthly diversity theme (for example, physical, gender, ability, socio-economic differences). There is a lucky draw, and one child walks away with one title. Carol continues to research, purchase, and promote diverse books within the library and with English teachers. 

• Upper school librarian Cassy Lee has been working with her student group, The Archivists, to display and recommend diverse books. The group asked English and history teachers for book recommendations for Black History Month and have been featuring the books that have had an impact on them on Instagram and the Upper School Information Commons website. The Archivists are also planning a Human Library event for May when they will invite in people from marginalized groups to serve as “human books,” sharing their experiences with small groups of students.  

• All children in the Upper School read the graphic novel American Born Chinese over the summer. Follow-up sessions during advisory helped children explore their own identities and those of the characters in the book. The author, Gene Luen Yang, spoke with the children about writing the book and his experiences moving to the US. 

• Motivational speaker Anthony Kelley met with our Grade 9 children to watch and discuss his documentary, “A Journey Through Conflict and Identity.” As the children asked questions about his life, Anthony shared tools for managing emotions, stress, and anger. 

Knowing the importance of children reading literature that provides them with mirrors in which they see themselves and windows in which they come to understand people with different identities and experiences, the lower school language arts representatives for each grade level researched new own-voice titles and books with more diverse characters to add to the classroom libraries for read-aloud and independent reading. The representatives have also been studying and piloting effective ways to use read aloud to help children explore identity, diversity, and fairness. During the next school year, they will share the effective practices they have learned with the rest of their grade level team. 

In all divisions, faculty are finding ways to weave JEDI goals into the existing curriculum. 

• In the Lower School, Grade 2 children study how needs and wants are met within a community. This year, the teachers helped the children focus on the unmet needs of less privileged members of the community. 

• Grade 5 students and the upper school students in the International Relations course partnered up for a multi-part learning exchange involving research projects and podcasts about Taiwan and what it means to be Taiwanese. 

• In the Middle School, many JEDI related goals have been woven into the history curriculum through discussions of how different people have been treated by governments and cultures over the years, including one especially poignant example in Grade 7, where students learned about the industrial age’s racist immigration policies through an interactive game. 

• Another example includes offering diverse choral selections representing different cultures and languages for the winter concert, which has historically focused on music from Christian cultures. This year’s offerings included songs in English, Hebrew, Latin, and Scottish Gaelic, among others.

Upper school curricular offerings, in particular, continue to abound and expand. 

• The Grade 10 English classes read a collection of essays, novels, poems, and articles about identity and privilege to support in-depth conversations and analytical writing. 

• Anthony Kelley and Tobie Openshaw worked with 50 IB Global Politics and International Relations students for 6 class periods on the question of reconciliation within a human rights context. They evaluated three case studies: South Africa Apartheid, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Taiwan. They compared the processes of reconciliations within the framework of each human rights violation.  Fish Tung led an additional lesson to this class on Indigenous Culture focusing on her own affiliation with the Amis tribe of Taiwan. She has been asked to assist with lessons in both the Lower and Middle Schools later this spring.

• Since SY2016-17, the Upper School has continued to offer Dr. Erika Soublet’s Honors Seminar: History of Minorities in America with strong enrollment and interest (with the exception of one school year). The class was originally created because of a lack of diversity in the history curriculum, something which the JEDI task force will continue to help examine and address over time. This class, which is open to juniors and seniors, examines the history of minorities - women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community - from their perspective as opposed to other perspectives. Students explore how current events have been impacted by history to develop a deeper understanding of the interconnected histories of marginalized communities and explore solutions. 

Students are also getting involved in JEDI-related activities outside of the curriculum through extracurricular and club activities. 

• The Middle School continues to offer two important clubs for students interested in DEI topics: Rainbow Tigers and Project LIT. 

• The Upper School, with almost 80 clubs, has multiple offerings for students including the DEI group, Rise Up leadership summit, ChildAware Club, Girls in STEM, Indigenous Impact club, Initiative Formosa, International Culture Club, LGBTQ Alliance, Neurodiversity Club, Walk for Refugees, World Vision and others. The DEI group was started by a group of upper school students interested in creating a safe space that welcomes all upper school students to discuss social issues within the TAS community and the greater world. Already this year, they have discussed identity, privilege, neurodiversity, and calling/calling out. Upper school sponsors Ryan Haynes, Erika Soublet, Kendra Ing, and Chase Williams help the group accomplish their goals. 

Our work toward making the goals of the JEDI Community Commitment a reality is just beginning. This is something we freely admit because it will take time and ongoing commitment to making sure that TAS is “an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming environment for all.” We are committed to the work ahead because we believe that it will make the world a more just place and help our children succeed wherever their future takes them.