Disrupting Gendered Mindsets

Capabilities Approach Program

Why do female students tend to become less vocal as they progress through school despite success? Why do girls often steer clear of certain areas and disciplines? While myriad factors are at work, the key question is: What can schools do to address this disparity and support girls to fulfill their great promise and potential? The answer is: reimagine girls’ education.

With the support of a prestigious Edward E. Ford Foundation Education Leadership Grant, Walker’s Capabilities Approach Program seeks to disrupt the gendered mindset into which girls are socialized. The Capabilities Approach represents the development of a constellation of skills, interwoven and foundational. The goal is functional mastery of each skill with the assumption that all girls can achieve proficiency through support and collaboration. Girls learn resilience, teamwork, and the understanding of the role of failure as an intermediate stage of the learning process.

Capabilities

• Fluencies: digital, financial, and rhetorical

• Discoveries: sustenance and sustainability

• Agencies: swimming, first aid, and self-defense

• Self-Selected Capability: a unique agency, fluency, discovery, or experience chosen by each student

• International experience and paid internship

Collectively, these capabilities allow for challenge and failure by encouraging girls to be confident and resilient, and to embrace a growth mindset.

Digital Fluency

Today, the acquisition of a wide range of digital skills is necessary across all disciplines. As early as 6th grade and up through advanced courses, students are immersed in projects that require coding. Our Dean of Academic Technology and Innovation explores with students a range of digital fluency topics including creating your digital footprint, digital citizenship, and differentiated learning styles. One group already well-established in these areas are Walker’s Wirecats, the first all-girls robotics team from New England to compete in the FIRST FRC World Championship.

Financial Fluency

Historically, women lag behind in the acquisition of financial fluency, resulting in women owning and managing fewer assets. One way our students gain an understanding of personal finances and investing is through our signature community partnership, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. In addition to providing a very important service to the community, our girls study for — and pass — an IRS training program which allows them to prepare personal income tax returns for low income families. This real-world activity is enhanced with classroom work, giving students a first-hand look at the complexities and understanding of personal finance and investment.

Rhetorical Fluency

Having the confidence and skill to speak eloquently and convincingly in front of an audience, and ensuring that your ideas are heard, are skills that all Walker’s students develop both inside and outside the classroom. Classroom work, community partnerships, and affinity groups are just a few of the many stages on which you can safely test — and hone — a wide range of rhetorical skills.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice

By using the Capabilities Approach Program to enable all Walker’s students to develop a variety of capabilities, we also address divergences in backgrounds and preparation, offering a foundation for all Walker’s students to flourish as well as develop their cultural competence as global citizens. You will learn, live, and grow with people of different ages, interests, nationalities, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, religious traditions, and political affiliations.

Multiple classes and activities are offered where girls improve their knowledge and develop their desire to shape a society that is more equitable for all. Walker’s is a member of SPHERE, a consortium of 13 independent schools who collaborate on becoming and remaining culturally diverse, inclusive, and responsive environments for teaching and learning.

Mission of The Ethel Walker School

The Ethel Walker School is an independent, college preparatory, boarding and day school for girls in grades 6 through 12 plus a postgraduate year. Since 1911, The Ethel Walker School has excelled at preparing students to make a difference in the world. Members of this diverse community are dedicated to scholarship, the arts, athletics, wellness, and service. The satisfaction of achievement and joy of friendship are fundamental principles as the School empowers girls to lead with respect, love of learning, confidence, courage, conviction, and integrity.

The mission of the English Department is to develop in every student, every year, in every lesson, the ability to read, write, and speak effectively with brilliance, authenticity, and passion. The curriculum begins with a foundation of developing students’ writing process through creative, personal, and analytical assignments, as well as a survey of literary genres. These skills and knowledge will be the springboard for students’ success in the 11th and 12th grade electives. Electives provide students with an opportunity to explore corners of literature that spark their interest and allow them to delve deeper into these topics and ideas. The Advanced electives are college-level courses that ask students to engage with challenging texts and literary criticism of those texts, as well as demonstrate their learning through a self-directed seminar paper.

Publishing

We encourage students to submit their work to contests and for publication. The best way to understand the power of one’s voice is to use it in the wider world. Our literary magazine, Daemon, regular participation in national and international writing contests, and our very own press, The Ethel Walker Every Woman Press, create an environment in which student voices are heard and celebrated.