After Tarana Burke spoke to the entire school, upperclassmen split up into breakout groups to discuss topics relating to diversity.
This year’s Diversity Day, which, as always, took place on the holiday commemorating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., included a variety of activities designed around a single theme: “Everyone can be an activist.” The day required a great deal of planning, both from student and faculty groups, as well as participation from all members of the Choate community. Faculty members also engaged in Diversity Day activities, completing a workshop on cultural competence.
This year’s planning committee was expanded to include cabinet members from CALSA, Spectrum, Muslim Student Association, and several other equity and inclusion groups on campus. Many students who had attended the Student Diversity Leadership Conference, in Anaheim, Calif., also helped plan Diversity Day. In the past, the only student voice in the day’s organizing was the Choate Student Diversity Association. The planning committee was not the only aspect of Diversity Day that underwent significant change this year. “We revamped third and fourth form activities,” said Melody Li ’18, a member of the planning committee.
The committee implemented these changes after looking more closely at individual forms. Shamari Harrington ’18 explained, , “Third formers are just getting into talking about identity, whereas fourth formers are using the identifiers to formulate their own thoughts about identity. It’s not just getting introduced to what the identifiers are, but how they apply in people’s daily lives, and how they apply on Choate’s campus and beyond.”
The fifth and sixth form discussions were very similar to those of last year, but the planning committee decided not to create the groups from English class lists, as had been done before. This was an effort to make the experience effective for all, as the varying comfort levels of the English classes had a great impact on the productiveness of the conversations.
The 2018 Diversity Day also differed from those of previous years in that Dr. Hinderlie and his team chose the speaker. “In the past, students have been in charge of the keynote speaker. This year, I wanted to raise the bar a little bit, so I needed to start that planning earlier,” explained Dr. Hinderlie.
Dr. Hinderlie began his search for a speaker in early summer, and was able to bring activist and founder of the #MeToo Movement, Tarana Burke, to campus. Students came to highly anticipate Ms. Burke’s appearance. Harrington said, “The #MeToo movement has been such a catalyst, especially in 2017, so I feel like hearing her voice is going to be amazing.”
Burke engaged the audience during her speech, having them repeat the motto for the venerable activist organization 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, which inspired Ms. Burke as a young woman. Many students found Burke’s illustration of the statistic that one in six young men will become a victim of sexual assualt. Samuel Kaplan ’19 said that this demonstration “gave us a visual representation of the statistic, and because she actually talked about sexual assault on males, which isn’t really talked about.”
Though Diversity Day was a success for many students and faculty members, it was not without its challenges. This year’s vacation calendar made it especially difficult to coordinate facilitator training sessions. When asked, Harrington said, “The biggest challenge for us was time.” Dr. Hinderlie agreed. “Last year, we had four different Sundays to do training,” he said. “This year we had two.”
Despite the limitations of time, the planning committee was very thorough in training facilitators. During the three-hour training session, fifth and sixth form facilitators were assigned discussion questions, and worked together to determine the major points of the conversation. Erica Chang ’19 described how the experience impacted her perspective of the day. “As a facilitator, I saw how much work is put into Diversity Day and how much effort all the students put in,” she said.
Much praise was given to the influence of the speaker, the breadth of the discussions, and the impact of the identifier activities, but some students said that they wished there could have been a greater number of workshops for fifth and sixth formers. Others thought that some students remained uncomfortable with speaking up in front their peers.
Although students were sometimes apprehensive about sharing their ideas, both the planning committee members and the “Community Norms” document emphasized leaning into discomfort. Melody Li explained, “I have seen what went on last year during the election, and it was distressing for me to see the divisions. I think there is such a great need for open discourse, and I am interested in pushing for open discourse on a respectful level.”
The day appeared effective in encouraging students to think more about its theme. “The speaker really empowered me to be more of an activist,” said Chang.
Despite the initial time crunch, Dr. Hinderlie felt that the work done by the planning committee paid off. “They did an excellent job and worked really hard to identify facilitators, line up the training, and deliver quality training so that the facilitator felt prepared,” he said. Dr. Hinderlie also hoped that Burke’s words would inspire students to contribute their own forms of activism to big and small causes alike.
