An Accountable Community

Creating an actionable framework of tools and practices

When Janae Peters, M.S.W. ’15, was a Sotomayor Fellow—a role that offers confidential mediation for ruptures in SSW’s learning community—she helped write the fellows’ annual report highlighting themes that arose on campus. The role gave her frontline knowledge about what was, and was not, working in the diverse community’s commitment to anti-racism.

In summer 2020, she said—as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted persistent societal disparities and the country saw a spate of police killings of Black Americans—the report’s theme centered around the need for some kind of process giving clarity to all community members on how to address relational harms.

Now, as the coordinator of the expanded version of the Sotomayor Fellowship, called the Sotomayor Collective, and a member of SSW’s Anti-Racism Planning Group (ARPG), Peters, along with Professor JaLisa Williams, facilitated the creation of the School’s new Classroom-Based Accountability Process. It debuted this summer term and seeks to give students and faculty a roadmap to follow when community ruptures occur.

“It’s a call to create the type of classroom community that can withstand conflict and ruptures,” Peters said. “What happens when we encounter harms in our spaces, particularly given we are in a field that is often dealing in tension and conflict and power dynamics?”

The ARPG, led by Peters and Williams M.S.W., and consisting of faculty, staff and students, used SSW Professor Peggy O’Neill’s concept of taking a pause during “courageous conversations” as well as Smith College Associate Professor Loretta J. Ross’s notion of “calling in” as foundations for their work building SSW’s Classroom-Based Accountability Process.

They also drew on their own committee practices, which prioritized community building prior to moving on to any other work.

“We were really intentional about a nice chunk of our agenda being connection and rapport building, which I think really made the work better,” Williams said. Similarly, at the broader institutional level, “how do you work to create a community of care in your classroom prior to your class even starting?”

The ARPG ultimately created a framework delineating five “levels of harm,” from microaggressions up to physical violence, with suggested processes of who is responsible for stepping up and how those individuals might work toward healing.

The Classroom-Based Accountability Process is both a vital part of SSW’s five Core Principles of racial justice and a useful set of guidelines in response to needs expressed by the teaching and learning community.

“Over the years we’ve gotten feedback from students and instructors that when we do have ruptures in the classroom—they can feel really impactful and there was an ask to create something that instructors can use to guide these experiences,” said Megan Harding, M.S.W. ’07, associate dean for academic affairs. “Students have wished that instructors had new ways of addressing those ruptures in the classroom. Instructors have sometimes felt at an impasse addressing those ruptures and have been eager to get more support around it.”

Though Peters and Williams note that the process will be modified depending on community response, it’s a vitally important starting place.

“I think it’ll make folks feel safer and that’s a huge piece,” Williams said. “Whether that be the student or the faculty, they know that if things go left they have something to look at to process it going forward.”

Alongside the Classroom-Based Accountability Process, SSW’s Strategic Visioning Group debuted a Community Agreement to build a passionate, accountable community. It includes that individuals be responsible for self learning, that they uphold the same standards in community that they extend to clients, that they are mindful of the amount of rhetorical space they occupy and that they remain open to community feedback.

“There is a real desire to take our five principles and factually make them actionable. The community agreement is one way to begin imagining how to do that,” Harding said. ◆