Working Toward Our Goals

RPS Summer 2021 Professional Development Program

Reimagining, Building and Creating Culturally Responsive and Equitable Learning Environments

Presenter: Pat Hans, English Department

In 6 hours of professional development and reflection, educators will be given the tools to journey through thematically connected workshops that will guide them through an exploration of themselves through reflective inquiry, storytelling, and art to grasp new understandings that will address and disrupt biases, norms, and mindsets that can compromise teaching and impede learning, and reimagine a recentered inclusive equitable learning environment that will give students voice and agency to become sociopolitically conscious and socioculturally responsive to engage in critical conversations and become agents of change. In the final session, teachers will consider whose voices are included and excluded in our learning environments, and whose knowledge counts in the curricula we teach to move toward competency based learning that prepares students for life.

*This professional development session was also offered to faculty in the English and social studies departments during the school year.

Third Culture People (3CP), 2020-2021 School Year

A group of district staff and administrators engaged in a comprehensive equity training program provided by Third Culture People (3CP) focusing on Cultural Intelligence or CQ, a globally recognized way of assessing and improving effectiveness in culturally diverse situations. Through an initial self-assessment and during four professional development sessions, participants reflected upon their CQ profile in the areas of drive, knowledge, strategy, and action.

• Session 1: What is CQ and why does it matter?

• Session 2: Understanding Different Cultural Values

• Session 3: Analysis of our own CQ competencies

• Session 4: Application of this knowledge to our work with students and families

With the guidance of 3CP, a Staff DEI Subcommittee was formed to continue this important work.

The Philosophy of Race (English), Implemented 2021-2022

This full-year course will study race, through literature, history, and the media, as a socially constructed source of human differentiation that has been a powerful force in shaping America. The purpose of this course is to illuminate points in America’s history and culture that speak to the construction and evolution of the concept of race from racialized slavery and freedom to the intersection of race and immigration, and its perpetuation through popular culture. While the conventional paradigm of race focuses on the white and black divide, race over the centuries has been complicated by the idea of “otherness” imposed on various groups, as Native Americans, and a constellation of cultural groups, immigrants, who have been imagined, usually negatively, through a racial lens.

Therefore, this course will move from a study of race as a black and white binary through literature, history, and the media to immigration and the process of racialization that includes America’s indigenous peoples. This course will move to expand the definition of race and conclude with a close examination of how race has been perpetuated throughout the 20th century and the present through the media, which causes us to question how the legacy of slavery has followed African Americans into the present day, what other systems have been put into place to mimic the power dynamics of slavery, such as incarceration and voter suppression, and what role the media has played in perpetuating violence against African Americans and others who have been disenfranchised and marginalized in society.

The Global Citizen (Social Studies), Implemented 2021-2022

In a world of 7.7 billion people, and growing, your actions matter. Every global citizen has a civic responsibility to become informed about the world’s biggest challenges and to remain engaged in the global community. This course examines the global issues that significantly impact communities and how these issues create citizenship challenges. By drawing upon historical and contemporary data, students will understand how changes caused by modern development affect individuals and society in the areas that are of most concern to global communities, such as the influence of social media, poverty, climate change, education, health, women's rights, and the environment. Through inquiry, discourse, and analysis, this course examines three essential questions: 1) What is my role as a global citizen?; 2) How can I remain an engaged global citizen?, and; 3) How can I employ my beliefs and actions to advocate for meaningful change? Students will apply their knowledge to real world problems of our culturally diverse, ever changing global community. In doing so, this course empowers students to utilize their newly ethical decision-making with humility, integrity, and a sound conscience.

The Power of One: The Holocaust and Beyond, 2021-2022

Through the study of Holocaust literature and media, as well as contemporary topics and materials, students will learn that decisions made by individuals and organizations not only impact history, but resonate with all of humanity today. Various roles – survivors, upstanders, bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators and victims will be examined in detail through the exploration of various genres: fiction, poetry, diaries, oral histories, art, music, and video. Students will realize that historical events were not inevitable and that one person’s choices impact not only the individual, but a community and society, as a whole. They will explore the parallels between history and today and see the power that one individual may possess. Students will learn that a person of any age can truly alter the course of events.

The Staff DEI Subcommittee was formed with the guidance of Third Culture People and began meeting in the Spring of 2021.