Photo by Tobi Oyinloye/The Choate News
Last Monday, January 18, the School hosted Diversity Day virtually for the first time. Choate’s longstanding catchphrase, “A Place of Many Paths,” inspired this year’s theme: “A Place of Many Voices.” Through 53 Zoom workshops, students and faculty came together on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Associate Director of Equity and Inclusion Mr. Filipe Camarotti, who helped plan the day of events, said, “We wanted to make it accessible to everybody — people are all over the globe, in many different time zones.” Each of the 23 different workshop options occurred during one of four time slots, which spanned twelve hours, between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., Wallingford time.
To cap the discussion group sizes at around 20 participants, some workshops occurred during two or three time slots. In addition, this year’s keynote speaker, Dr. Kyle Mays, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at UCLA, gave a recorded presentation titled “The King We Love to Hate: Reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Radical Dreams.”
Apart from scheduling challenges, facilitators had to reimagine aspects of these workshops for a virtual format. In past years, third-form workshops had participants on their feet, moving around a room to answer questions posed by facilitators. Claire Hong ’22, a member of the student planning committee, said, “We had to come up with a lot of different small solutions to replace previous physical activities.” For example, the committee considered having participants turn off their cameras to answer Yes / No questions and join breakout rooms for smaller group discussions.
Beyond pandemic-related adjustments, the Equity and Inclusion Office also worked with students to update the workshops’ content. While introductory third-form workshops remained echoed previous years, this year, fourth, fifth, and sixth-formers could choose among workshops focused on specific topics such as racism in Wallingford, unconscious bias, and the history of white supremacy. Additionally, in a new workshop format, students watched and discussed a movie that spoke to Diversity Day’s themes. Nearly 250 students signed up for one of the three movie workshops, which included viewings of “Rising Phoenix” and “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson.”
This year’s biggest change, however, was the inclusion of faculty as some of the “many voices” in Diversity Day’s workshops. In the past, students and faculty were separated to create comfortable spaces for discussion, but this year, faculty members joined students in certain fourth, fifth, and sixth-form workshops. Mr. Camarotti said, “We’ve gotten feedback in the past from students [saying] that they’d appreciate having adults involved, so that faculty and students’ conversations aren’t so separated.”
Rachael Lin Wheeler ’21, a member of the student planning committee, added, “These topics impact the entire community, not just students, [and] I think it’s important that Diversity Day reflect this.”
In addition to participating in workshops, faculty also had the opportunity to design and facilitate their own diversity-oriented workshops on topics of personal interest. Director of Curricular Initiatives Mr. Deron Chang, for example, hosted a workshop on potential changes to the curriculum. Students were encouraged to propose suggestions for shifts in Choate’s course offerings and diploma requirements, particularly regarding diversity and inclusion. Mr. Chang, whose curricular role typically has him working only with the faculty, said, “I realized that this would be a great opportunity for me to be able to collect information from students.”
As adults took on new roles in Monday’s workshops, the Diversity Day student planning committee also played a significant role in developing workshop content. The committee, composed of leaders from several diversity-oriented clubs and organizations, worked with the Equity and Inclusion Office to create engaging workshops aligned with student interests. Hong, a member of the Choate Diversity Student Association (CDSA), said, “We felt that, over the years, Diversity Day had become more distant [from students] and felt so obviously planned by adults, adding, “We wanted to bring in more of the student voice.”
If Diversity Day is a critical aspect of the School’s ongoing conversations about identity and inclusion, student and faculty planners alike pointed out that a 90-minute Diversity Day workshop alone isn’t enough. All agreed that students and faculty must continue discussing and reflecting outside of these workshops in order to bring full awareness to Choate around these issues.
Mr. Camarotti said, “You can’t just have one-off conversations. They have to be woven into the fabric of an institution. They have to be a cultural norm and expectation.”
Over the past several months, Director of Equity and Inclusion Dr. Rachel Myers has worked to bring such conversations to the entire community with the new Community Conversations series and has continued to encourage participation in national events like the Student Diversity Leadership Conference.
Mr. Camarotti said that, whether in planned Diversity Day workshops or impromptu encounters among students and faculty, discussions about diversity are essential “to gain a better understanding of others’ lived experiences — because if we only have ourselves to reference, we’ll never be able to fully appreciate what the world is and who we are as a community.”
