DEI at SAS: Culturally Responsive Learning Communities

DEI at SAS:

CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE LEARNING COMMUNITIES

By

DR. DARNELL FINE

Middle School Instructional Coach

As a school, the diversity of our community is one of our greatest strengths. That diversity offers extraordinary learning opportunities for our students as well as opportunities to build lasting friendships and relationships across cultures, nationalities, and other aspects of identity.

For our diversity to reach its full potential as a strength, it is important that our commitment to equity and inclusion for all members of our community be as strong as it is to diversity. Every student at SAS should feel valued, cared for, and included.

Differences in culture, background, ability, identity, and perspective should be respected and celebrated; SAS has no place for racism or any other type of discrimination. It is only by creating a positive climate and inclusive culture that we will meet our vision to cultivate exceptional thinkers who are prepared for the future.

In the last few years at Singapore American School, we have had numerous thoughtful and reflective conversations with current students, alumni, parents, and educators. We continue to work towards making SAS a place where all community members feel safe, valued, welcome, and equitably treated. As DEI continues to be part of the fabric of SAS, below are some highlights from the culturally responsive learning communities that have been active in this work during this school year. Culturally responsive teaching means using students' customs, characteristics, experiences, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction. Culturally responsive environments are those in which diverse members of a community can all see themselves as belonging.

The Community Engagement Culturally Responsive Learning Community has explored ways to make connections among SAS employees, parents and guardians, students, and members of the wider SAS family. We recognize that there are significant opportunities to expand the scope of conversations and education in the DEI sphere, both during the school day and in all of our everyday lives. Our work has centered on the many possible steps we might take to meaningfully engage with community members beyond those that have already been employed over the course of the past several years. We have also investigated the feasibility of collecting data that will allow us to identify our community’s needs and wants surrounding DEI issues. Our goals are ultimately to share information, foster reflection, and promote dialogue, all within a safe space that will ensure inclusive engagement.

We have most recently begun to curate a list of speakers—both Singaporean and international—who might come to SAS to participate in lectures and workshops. We have also started to develop a list of DEI-related resources (including websites, books, articles, movies, and podcasts) that we will eventually make available to all members of the SAS community. We look forward to the ongoing nature of this work.

SAS has taken a deep dive into what is truly needed to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that work is often messy. It has to be messy to get to the point of being unapologetic about providing a safe environment for all members of our community. That messy work has meant uncomfortable conversations and educating all members of our community from faculty and staff, students and parents, and all those involved in the SAS experience. It will take time and courage to continue to build DEI as a norm but I believe we are ready to do it. It is truly messy, uncomfortable, and exhausting work but it's at the heart of what we need to be about if we are truly preparing our students for the future.

BARBARA HARVEY, HIGH SCHOOL VISUAL ARTS

In the continued interest of providing a safe learning environment for all students (straight from our child safeguarding policy), the Curricular Development Culturally Responsive Learning Community is working to create an anti-bias/anti-hate speech policy in collaboration with students. The words that we use at SAS in all of our community spaces and interactions should be safe. We will also continue to review our current policies around hate speech to make sure that there are explicit steps known to students, parents, teachers, and all stakeholders to address biased incidents at our school. We continue to support and celebrate students’ self-advocacy and student-driven learning regarding DEI-related topics, alongside continuing to review research-based content and practice to best support our students’ growth as culturally responsive learners. We want to further educate our entire community about anti-hate speech so that students and educators will know how to become upstanders who embody SAS’s core values, and react to these situations in the moment, through culturally-responsive curricula.

The Professional Learning Culturally Responsive Learning Community used the Panorama data from 2021-22 and feedback from faculty to inform our proposal to the SAS leadership team that K-12 professional learning communities (PLCs) set a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound (SMART) goal connected to DEI and culturally responsive teaching for the 2022-23 school year. We proposed that SMART goals are shared with DEI specialists in each division, worked towards in at least one meeting each month, and reflected on with DEI specialists each quarter. It is our hope that the existing PLC structures will provide a strong framework for sustained inquiry into how we can ensure our unit plans, practices, and the resources we use with students affirm and center our students’ identities.

The Recruitment and Retention Culturally Responsive Learning Community continues its exciting journey to help SAS examine and refine its hiring and retention practices. As a world leader in education that highly values diversity and inclusion, we strive to attract, retain, and sustain a diverse and highly qualified faculty and staff. After examining multiple sources of data, themes have been identified that guide the work of this committee. A list of recommendations has been generated based on newly published research and relevant data collected internally. The School Climate Culturally Responsive Learning Community identified the numerous data points we have access to already at SAS, such as the StepUpSAS, Panorama data, and Tripod data. These data points highlight the voices of our SAS community, which includes students, parents, employees, and alumni. We intend to consolidate and analyze all the data to gain a deeper, more comprehensive view of the school climate with our stakeholders, examining trends and gaps, and creating further questions that help us formulate next steps. With this information, we will be empowered to continue to work towards an inclusive school climate for all SAS community members, including students, families, and employees.

Culturally responsive learning communities increase cultural competence and reduce biases to better serve our diverse school community. Forming these requires an inclusive and equity-based leadership approach that invites diverse stakeholders at every level of SAS to share in collaborative learning, decision-making, and change. It further entails culturally responsive learning and leading, in addition to rejecting actions that fuel racism and all other forms of discrimination. It is our hope that our proposed strategies and steps will help SAS-community members to not only form new knowledge but also use that knowledge to implement culturally responsive practices and policies that promote diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice.

DEI is an integral part of SAS. Understanding the importance of our faculty and staff’s identities, while honoring differences, lifts our morale and overall attitudes in our respective roles to support and help one another. SAS provides a robust DEI program that engages every member of our community with professional development allowing for open and honest discussions. We are currently learning from one another through insightful stories and varying degrees of perspective. As we challenge ourselves along this new journey, we continue to learn.

JULIE ZHANG, THIRD GRADE CHINESE IMMERSION TEACHER

Stereotypes and the labels we attach to people carry the power to influence how we perceive them in terms of their competence, their behavior, and capability. These stereotypes are growing stronger and choking the global community spirit. DEI initiatives are imperative to create a welcoming community where everyone can be successful, where people feel valued for who they are. The DEI initiative at SAS is encouraging conversations about topics that we may have previously taken for granted. The community is curious to recognize and understand the effects of conscious (and unconscious) biases and that is a great start!

SHRUTHI RAMESH, LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

REIMAGINING

EXCELLENCE. EXTRAORDINARY CARE. POSSIBILITIES.

By

KINJAL SHAH

Communications Writer

SAS Reimagined is the culmination of years of research, community engagement, and collaboration with learning design specialists. Students, parents, and educators took part in our engagement sessions, and the community banded together to help conceptualize this project through design advisory groups. Our aspiration is to create the best possible experiences for all our students, and the project will result in a significant increase in learning and play space, development of first-class technology, science, arts and athletics spaces, and a much greener, more environmentally sustainable campus. As we engage in the design work, there are two high-level lenses we use as guides:

• Every space is a learning space. Whether you are on a playground, in a classroom, in a design lab, or grabbing lunch in the cafeteria, you are in a learning space. • A variety of learning environments are essential to support all learners. Learning environments must support learning that is active and collaborative, quiet and personal, and the variety of other learning experiences important for each individual student.

FROM 2021-22

As we shared last fall, ensuring safety and minimizing disruption are important priorities throughout this entire project. The SAS Reimagined team has worked closely with local construction specialists to ensure safety and security during construction, and we are grateful that our students and educators have had very few concerns about disruption over the past year.

High School

One of our objectives has been to bring benefits as early as possible during the construction process to our high school students. This year we opened Cafe Shiok!, a new bakery and dining area linked to the high school library, and it has quickly become a popular collaboration space for students. Our completely remodeled Khoo Teck Puat library was unveiled and provides students with open and private study areas, collaborative rooms of various sizes, and significantly more natural light. We also opened our new west fields for our athletes and high school PE classes to use. These fields gave our athletes the opportunity to train and participate in games as we began to hold more competitions during the second semester.

Middle School

In the middle school, several donors brought new playspaces to life for our students to enjoy during their breaks. These have become great community-building spaces.

Elementary School

We kicked off the year with a fun groundbreaking ceremony for the new building currently under construction. While it remains our goal to open the new elementary school in August of 2023, the severe manpower shortages and supply chain disruptions in Singapore’s construction industry continue to pose challenges to this schedule.

The team will continue to update the community on the status of this opening. Should the move-in to the new elementary school not be possible until later in the year, we will continue to operate in our present elementary school. The benefits of the new building will be delayed, but our children will continue to be well-provided for in their current environments.

One of our key findings regarding the development of classrooms in recent years is our need to ensure that students can have fully enclosed classroom spaces that are quiet and separated and also can utilize collaborative, shared spaces that are flexible enough to meet the specific demands of the lesson. Some of our past designs did not have this flexibility or did not provide for each class to have its own separate, fully enclosed, quieter space. We have sought to incorporate these conclusions in this new design.

One more fun highlight was the launch of our community garden. This garden offers both SAS and local Woodlands community members an opportunity to come together as they tend small garden plots. We were fortunate to have our local Member of Parliament, Ms. Hany Soh join us for a launch event in the spring.

WHAT TO EXPECT

IN 2022-23

Our facilities and construction teams have a big summer ahead as we plan to complete construction on several large projects.

Our high school stadium field grandstands will come online next year and we are excited to have our athletes competing with fans in the stands once again! The new 50 meter pool and aquatics center will be an incredible gift to our athletes for years to come. We will also welcome a new high school dining space overlooking the pools called the Eagle's Perch. Our APEx fitness and wellness center will also open next year and will be the center of wellness for our entire community with weight rooms, a running track, yoga studios, and more. We are looking forward to welcoming all community members to this space. This summer, we will complete the last of our seventh grade learning communities and our new ninth grade humanities classrooms. These spaces include separate, individual spaces that may be used for quiet, reflective work, and space for shared learning opportunities.

We look forward to seeing these new spaces come alive next year and to continuing our partnership with parents in the work ahead.