Equitable Leadership

While I hold marginalized identities, I also carry privileges with me that are elicited in a multitude of forms between and within different spaces. In 473, there was a group project called the "Deep Dive" where we focused on the students of Color in Franklin High School and theoretically came up with a plan to address the achievement gap/disparities between BIPOC individuals and their white counterparts.

Seeking educational equity and diversity was the first class where I learned how to put my experiences through the lens of my social identities to systems of power, privilege, and oppression. The concepts of nests and cages and the intersectionality of identities (both privileged and marginalized) really taught me about how I personally navigate spaces that may support me or marginalize me.

When working with Kerry Savage, my internship advisor, we always talk about enacting equitable processes. Compared to in-person instruction, Zoom presents new challenges that the ‘traditional’ classroom did not encompass. She always asks/bounces off ideas with me. I would speak from personal experiences (if I could relate to the question at hand), painting pictures of the impacts that can theoretically occur on an individual, community, population, and societal level. I would then sustain space for her ideas to circulate around. inviting her thoughts and lived experiences to come to light and help her enact these pedagogical theories in practice within our Zoom classroom.

Depending on my schedule on the quarter, I meet with Savage in the morning about my goals as an individual and what I hope to gain from this internship. We open the space to talk about everything and anything. It's helpful that I have a previous relationship with her as she was my former AP Bio teacher. We talk about the impacts of social identities and how we can utilize our privilege to sustain space for others while we all learn together.

- When grading exams or labs since they impact grades the most, we talk about how we can grade them in an equitable way, but also keeping the students accountable
- Students can turn in any assignment within the unit for full credit until the day of their Unit Exam
- Students who are behind, we ask them to stay during student support, so that I, or Mrs. Savage can individually help the students catch up on old assignments, while also keeping them on track with their current assignments. She coined the term accountability partners in which they would turn in late assignments and we would be kept accountable by submitting their grades into the grade book at that moment.
- Most recently we talked about how to go about an equitable & accountable way of keeping the students engaged with the material/reading assignments, especially now that we are heading towards a flipped classroom
I talked about assigning the reading as an assignment, but that it is worth 0 points → When the students enter class, we will put them into breakout rooms to produce questions so that we can discuss them, or create a google doc where everyone is anonymous, and anyone can type a question that we can answer.