SPOTLIGHT ON DEIB

In the 2021-2022 school year, Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB) Jessica Christian, along with fellow administrators, created the School’s first DEIB Strategic Plan. One of the goals articulated in the plan is to bring Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) to Brimmer to advance the School’s DEIB work. SEED is a national organization that is highly regarded for its high-level DEIB training for school and community leaders. Last summer, Jessica Christian and Lower School Drama Teacher & Lower School DEIB Facilitator Rachel Wolf Heyman attended SEED’s New Leaders Training for one week in Northern California. They have brought their training back to Brimmer and have been leading a SEED seminar with a group of dedicated Brimmer faculty and staff this year. We sat down with them to discuss SEED and the impact it has had on the Brimmer community.

Why bring SEED to Brimmer?

We are equipping educators and staff on campus with the skills to put into practice the goals that we articulated in our DEIB Strategic Plan and in our DEIB programming, which makes Brimmer a safer and more equitable place for our students and families. Over the last several years, Brimmer has committed to DEIB work in all corners of its community, from our Board of Trustees, which now has a DEIB Committee that meets regularly, to our professional development for faculty and staff, to our books in the library and the conversations we have with our students. To do all that work well, we need to have excellent training, and SEED is highly regarded among schools as one of the best DEIB programs available. We are not checking DEIB boxes at Brimmer. We are doing the work every day with thought and intention.

How do you decide who joins the SEED Seminar?

At the beginning of this school year, we presented to the full faculty and staff about our SEED training, which included leading our colleagues through a few of the SEED activities that we learned in California. Our presentation’s purpose was to introduce the idea of SEED to the community and to invite those interested to consider joining the yearlong seminar we offered. The seminar was entirely opt-in for our faculty and staff, and we were pleased with how many colleagues expressed interest in participating. We have developed a series of 2- and 3-hour meetings that began last October and will run through the middle of June 2024.

How will SEED benefit the faculty and staff?

Our SEED seminar meetings, modeled after our summer training, focus on systems of power and oppression and our individual participation in and experience of them. The systems approach helps us understand the origins of our experiences within our different identities and allows us to share with each other and listen. Most of our conversations include a discussion of “windows and mirrors,” the concept of looking at a situation (sometimes a video, sometimes a story, sometimes art) and identifying what you can relate to in that situation as well as how you are gaining insight into another person’s perspective. That insight is one of the most impactful benefits of SEED. Spending time with identities different from your own and just listening is invaluable. With a student community as diverse as Brimmer’s, in all ways that a community can be diverse, it is essential that our teachers and staff spend time trying to connect with all aspects of that diversity.

How will SEED benefit the students?

One thing that educational research has shown is that when teachers take the time to truly embrace and connect with their students, not only as learners but as people, students are happier and perform better in school. In our SEED seminar, we have a group of educators and staff who are fully committed to welcoming in the diversity that our students bring to school each day. That “welcoming” extends beyond a student’s race, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality, for example. It also includes the impact and experiences that come with those students’ identities. It comes with cultural norms and home life values. It comes with neurodiversity and mental health nuances. When you truly welcome an entire person into your classroom or your work environment, you must be prepared to expand your sense of “standard” or “normal” to include something that is different from what your “standard” or “normal” may be. This is what SEED teaches. And when our students share fully about themselves, they feel safe, happy, and free to learn. The differences still exist, but they get to exist freely and without fear of being judged.

What will be the overall impact on the community of having SEED at Brimmer?

When a program like SEED, which examines systems of power and oppression, is brought into a community like Brimmer, one of two things can happen: the knowledge gained can be used to shame people, or it can be used to gain clarity and to celebrate and enhance a community. We are doing the latter. In our seminar, we are doing self-reflective work that is helping us identify our own personal norms and biases so that we understand how we are impacting our community. At the same time, we are doing the “windows” work of learning about others’ lived experiences, and we are doing it with enthusiasm and eagerness to make shifts in our own professional practices that help create a more equitable environment at Brimmer. What this means is that we have a growing number of educators and staff who want to see human differences, celebrate them, and raise the bar for what is needed to make an environment safe for each of us to bring our authentic selves to Brimmer every day. This will not happen all day, every day, or 100% of the time. We are human, and we will make mistakes. But SEED teaches us how to make mistakes, clean them up, learn from them, and move forward. Over time, the positive impact will be tremendous for our community. We are seeing the shifts already.

What will SEED look like beyond this school year?

We currently have three SEED-trained faculty and staff and many others who have participated in a SEED seminar in their professional careers. Ideally, we will have 2–3 more people trained over the next few years so that we can offer a SEED seminar every year at Brimmer. As we move forward, we may have different types of SEED groups, including one for parents/guardians or ones that include Board members. We would love to see SEED become part of the fabric of who we are.

As educators, what were your takeaways from SEED?

One of the wonderful things about SEED is that in addition to focusing on embracing others’ lived experiences, it requires introspective work so that you emerge from the training with an enhanced understanding of yourself and your place within different systems of power and oppression. That higher level of understanding has been an amazing gift because it has made us far more capable of leading a range of DEIB efforts at Brimmer, and we do it now with stronger skills of empathy, listening, connecting, and the ability to shift our thinking when necessary. More practically speaking, we know that some of the topics we need to pay more attention to as a community are indigeneity, socioeconomic diversity, and ability, to name a few. SEED has made the tasks ahead clearer and provided a roadmap for this critical work. ■

We are not checking DEIB boxes at Brimmer. We are doing the work every day with thought and intention.