Our Wildwood, Volume 51

FEATURE Where Social-Emotional Learning and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Meet

Deb spent three days on the Meta-Moment this year, asking students to talk and write about it with partners, then in small groups, and eventually with the whole class. “We build safety into those conversations,” she said. “Safety is really built into the pedagogy as well as the content of those lessons.” Middle School Counselor Matt Druyen has used RULER to help students experiencing stress due to school, conflict, or relationships. “We help to ground students so that they can consider a different state of being, see that they can get there themselves with some practice and adopt new ideas,” Matt said. Faculty and staff also benefit from RULER. “At the beginning of some of our middle school staff meetings, we check in using the Mood Meter, just to ground us, as administrators, in a RULER practice that’s happening at the student level,” Matt said. “I think it helps us to get a sense of where each other is and helps us to respond to one another’s needs, given where we are on the Mood Meter.” An integral part of SEL is diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). As director of equity and inclusion, Karen works with the K-12 community to create and implement policy, practices, and programming that help build a diverse and inclusive environment. She is a mentor, advocate, and resource who works on curriculum development, hiring, professional development, admissions, institutional goal setting, advising affinity groups, and more. “DEIB is part of every aspect of the school,” she said. “DEIB is an incredibly important factor of our lives, how we live and move in the world, what each student and community member brings to the table in creating a dynamic and multicultural community, and honoring people’s individual identities, backgrounds, and experiences.” “We live in a diverse world, where the people that we interact with are different from us, and that’s awesome,” Sam said. “Having students engage with tools that allow them to navigate that learning across difference, starting in Advisory but also in the classroom, is key to their success.” Wildwood’s formal DEIB program development began in 2008, when the school developed its DEIB FRAMEWORK AND EFFORTS

Multicultural Scope and Sequence for K-12, providing themes to guide curricular and Advisory programming on aspects of identity. Now called the DEIB Scope and Sequence, it offers an intentional path toward deepening understanding of identity, diversity, social justice, and action in developmentally appropriate ways for each grade level. For instance, the theme for kindergarteners focuses on family structure, while 5th grade covers race, a topic that comes up organically in the curriculum’s coverage of slavery in history and protagonists of color in literature. “The Scope and Sequence was built with intention, knowing that DEIB is not something that is separate from learning, but it’s something that needs to be integrated into the learning,” Sam said. “In 8th grade, when we are learning about the Civil War, understanding the ways in which racism still touches our lives today, it’s not a separate lesson. It’s part of the history. It’s part of the literature. In a math or science class, we think about honoring the diverse voices within that field and contributions from all over the world.” As another example, the 6th grade theme is geographic location. “One of the ways in which we touch on that theme is in learning about the history of Los Angeles, why our city looks the way it does, what measures have been put forward to make our city more equitable, and also how our city has been made less equitable,” Sam said. “We look at things like the destruction of the neighborhood in Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, and that is a world in which the kids go to Dodgers games and wear Dodgers caps. It’s looking at their city in a different way.” Deb has built lessons for her 11th graders around nationality and immigration, tackling topics such as Asian Americans as the “model minority” and how artists have depicted the immigrant experience. “Sometimes the DEIB work is around one of those very specific words, and other times we’re really trying to get at a variety of factors that all contribute to being an American in a pluralistic society,” Deb said. “Ultimately, that’s the goal. When Wildwood students graduate, they’re going out into a world that is very pluralistic, and we hope that no matter what their racial, socio-economic, ethnic, or gender backgrounds are, that they can identify the strength of what that identity has created in them as they go into that pluralistic world that’s much wider than the Wildwood.”

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