Read the full transcript of Episode 30 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features two school heads with deep expertise in leading diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Jessie Barrie of the Bosque School (NM) and Kalyan Balaven of the Dunn School (CA) join host Tim Fish and special guest co-host Caroline Blackwell for a conversation about equity, well-being, and the future of inclusion efforts in independent schools.
Tim Fish: Here we are at Episode 10 of Season Three. What an incredible season it has been. You know, we've been in conversations about new school options, tech addiction, the future of higher education, and learning design. It has been a lot of fun.
Today, we're going to continue a tradition that we started in Season One: having a conversation with some school heads. And we’re going to focus this conversation on well-being, belonging, and DEI work in our schools. To get there, I am so excited to welcome back Caroline Blackwell, the NAIS vice president for equity and justice. She’s going to join us today as our co-host for this conversation. Caroline, it is such a joy having you back on the program.
Caroline Blackwell: Thank you, Tim.
Tim Fish: We’re also excited to welcome Dr. Jessie Barrie, the head of school at Bosque School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining the team at Bosque, Dr. Barrie worked at Albuquerque Academy and started her career at the Dunn School. She’s also the founder and former executive director of ISEEN, the Independent Schools Experiential Education Network, and is the current chair of the New Mexico Association for Independent Schools. Jessie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jessie Barrie: Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Caroline. I'm honored to be included in today's conversation.
Tim Fish: And we’re joined by Kalyan Balaven. He’s the head of school at the Dunn School in Los Olivos, California. Kal is the founder also of an organization called the Inclusion Dashboard, and the Santa Barbara Inclusion Lab. And he's the host of the Whole Student podcast, which I recommend, everyone check it out.
Kal, it is so great having you with us today.
Kalyan Balaven: Thank you. I appreciate you.
Tim Fish: So, so let's jump in. Let's get to it. You know, in New View EDU, we often talk about this idea of, why do we have school? What's the purpose? You know, years and years ago, it was always about content and learning skills to work in, pretty much, in an industrial society and an industrial workforce.
But things are totally different today. School is even more essential than it's ever been. But what's its purpose? What should we put at the center of school? I leave that to the two of you to tell us what you think about that question.
Kalyan Balaven: Well, I, I'll say this. I think throughout time, schools have always been about preparing students for life. It's life that always changes. Schools continue to prepare students for life, and I think that hasn't changed, and all schools are trying to do the same thing now.
Jessie Barrie: I think in my perspective, school is a critical place for students to be able to really identify and connect with their passions, and then most importantly, identify their intrinsic motivation to be able to follow those passions and to stick through the challenges that are going to come up on the pathway to manifest those passions.
I also think schools, especially today, and this really connects to the topic of today's conversation, are such a critical place for individuals to be able to find their sense of safety and belonging within a caring, connected community, and to help find a place where they can be vulnerable, to be able to take risks in their learning, because we know ultimately those risks are so critical for their own growth, and then also to be able to find those passions.
Caroline Blackwell: Thank you both for starting us off at that base, and Tim, for you asking that terrific question, which is going to… just inspiring me to sort of drill into that just a little bit. Each one of you, we asked because of some of the uniquenesses in your own professional leadership. And so we want to illuminate a little bit of that as it relates to equity as well.
And so, Kal, Tim mentioned your creation of the inclusion dashboard and the lab, and so we'd love for you to illuminate what that's all about, a little bit, you know, to share with us how that helps that purpose of education that both of you described. And then Jessie, we're going to come back to you also, to talk about something that you know, all of us think is really important and it's how do we embed this really important work in the curriculum of our schools.
So, Kal, tell us about the experiments and what you've brought to the independent school industry.
Kalyan Balaven: Yeah, I think, coming into independent schools, realizing that, independent schools do a great job of gathering data on two fronts. Gathering data in relationship to a student's diversity, however that's captured, in whatever form and all the different categories that might be there in terms of admissions. And then capturing data in terms of equity dollars and space allocation and transportation and other things in the budget. And so you have equity, and you have diversity, being measured. But what wasn't being measured, or at least what wasn't being measured in, in data, was inclusion. And inclusion was often measured in narratives.
Just stories. Stories of disconnection, stories of being alone, stories of being left behind, stories of being on the brochure, but not being part of the school. And stories weren't strong enough. And so we set about trying to figure out a way to measure inclusion. And realizing the measurement of inclusion is really the measurement of the mission of the school, that filters what the community says are the factors that help students and adults in a school thrive. And realizing that if we could measure it, then we could start to recognize best practices at different schools.
And the idea of the lab was born because a partnership between schools allows a school that might be really good with English language learners share what they're doing well with a school that's doing really well with students of color, another school that might be doing really well in terms of gender spectrum, et cetera. And we could share our practices. It's based on the principle that we can compete in everything. We compete in speech and debate, we compete in sports. We can compete in all these different ways, but we can't compete in inclusion because when we compete in inclusion, that's exclusion by nature.
Caroline Blackwell: Mm-hmm. Thank you.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know what I also love about it, Kal? When I saw a demo a few years ago with the work you were doing, and the part that really got me was how the school is responsible for setting and thinking about what those sort of metrics are that you're going to be looking at, that, for measuring inclusion. That there isn't sort of a standard boiler plate, but it's really of the culture and the community to, and, and a good part of the work, if I'm not mistaken, was in defining what those things are. That even that conversation alone, if I, if I remember correctly, really helped to sort of get, help the school to move forward.
Kalyan Balaven: Yeah, capacity building, and it's different. Parochial school is going to be different. East coast school, west coast school, boarding, boys school, girls school, all those things. Depending on the type of school, the questions that are going to be different, inclusion is going to look different because the promise of the school, each school is different. But that process builds the capacity for each school to be inclusive of every student they let in.
Tim Fish: Exactly. So what does inclusion mean for us now? What do we want to measure? How do we want to see it? Right? And that imperative for the school to set that I think is foundational to the success.
Caroline Blackwell: And Kal, one of the things that I know is implicit in your work, but that we haven't called out this morning, is the connection between inclusion and policy making. Right? I mean, that… you need practices and policies to follow, in order to make schools inclusive. Which, Jessie, that might be a little in-artful, but it's part of the, the connection that I'm making now between the way you're such a champion of embedding DE and I work in the everyday, the thing that students value in the curriculum, where we as schools measure their success and their progress. And so will you tell us a little bit about why that's so important to you and how you're doing that at Bosque?
Jessie Barrie: Thanks for the question, Caroline. I think the nature of this work is so foundational to everything we're trying to accomplish, whether it's, you know, student academic outcomes, whether it's, you know, student social- emotional health and wellness throughout the day. That the only way to really effectively do equity work is to ensure that it's embedded in the foundational documents, philosophies, values of your school, and in every element of how you lens everything, from assessment to book selections, to hiring practices, to evaluation practices.
So I think that the thing that at Bosque we've really committed to, is starting from the ground up. And that began with, prior to my arrival at the school four years ago, some really beautiful work done within the staffulty to create a series of equity, community, and culture principles and best practices. And that's something that we have an internal version of that, that is for all employees of the school that we all commit to through our job description, that was incredibly well referenced in our employee handbook. And then we have a public facing version of that on our website, and that we lead very strongly with in terms of our admissions work, onboarding new trustees through the first round of interviewing for all new potential candidates to the school. And then once in my first year at the school, we went through a process of rewriting our mission statement and our core values, and our mission statement hadn't changed in the school's 25 year history. And there was some very specific language in that mission, that was by nature not inclusive to some members of our community. And that was a hugely important process to go through to ensure that our mission and our core values, in every situation, is something we can refer back to in terms of the why of the work, because we know that there are going to be many bumps in this work. There is only going to be bumps in our intentions towards growth and progress. And having something that is at the core of who you are as a school that you can reference back to, that obviously your students, your staffulty, your families are all committing to through their annual commitments with the handbook, with the contracts, is so critical, I believe, to the work.
So moving beyond that, the big thing that we've really shifted to, and this has been a three year process to get here, is really de-siloing our equity work from the work of one to the work of all. And really reflecting on the fact that for us to actually be able to move the needle in our equity efforts, we have to start and maintain a focus on centering students in the work and really setting clear expectations for the adults in regards to what the expectations are for professional growth, what the expectations are for having a growth mindset when bumps, when we hit those speed bumps in the work. And really understanding that for us to manifest our value of cultivating community, we have to forever be ensuring that community is being experienced equally by all, and that that is not an assumption that we can ever make. And we have a lot of work to do to get to that space.
And so we've created a program that we call our WILLDS program, which is an acronym that stands for Wellness, Identity, Leadership, Life Skills, Diversity, and Service. And this takes elements of the curriculum that always existed around the periphery, and brings it under one departmental umbrella with a dedicated staff who are hired for teaching expertise in each of those different areas—and the same people do not have expertise in all of those areas, so we have to really look for those experts, just like you look for experts of, in math or humanities. And then creating dedicated time in our schedule for this curriculum, and that was the big shift we made this year, is that all of our students now have a dedicated WILLDS block in their schedule, just like math.
So every other day, we have a block schedule, they have math, every other day they have WILLDS. And that's a 75-minute block where they're meeting in small cohort groups with these WILLDS teachers to really investigate and explore topics in these different areas, including a huge part of that being identity, being belonging, diversity, inclusion, what we really mean by walking our talk in those areas.
Kalyan Balaven: Yeah.
Caroline Blackwell: Thank you so much. And Kal, that's like the, actually the sort of the outcome of the lab that you've created and, and all of that exploration around what inclusion really means and can look like. Tim, it also sounds a little bit like Base Camp.
Tim Fish: Well, you know, Caroline, I was, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, you know, Jessie, I love the fact that you all stepped back at the start of this commitment, took a look at your mission.
Caroline Blackwell: Yep.
Tim Fish: Took a look at, and said like, is this mission really serving us? You know, I, I, if anyone's ever heard me speak, they've heard me talk about a mountain and a journey, and now town and getting outta your now town and setting your summit. And then along the way there's base camp. Right. And I've always said that your mission and, and your purpose and your values are your base camp, they are what give you the stability. They were what you can return to when you hit those bumps. When you are exhausted, when you need to recharge, you can go back to that place.
And so this weekend, I was working with some heads and some, some board chairs and it was awesome leadership through partnership retreat that NAIS runs. And one of the board chairs raised his hand and said, You know, I hear you, like I get this whole like going back, but he's like, When you're climbing the mountain, right, you can't always go all the way back down to base camp. He said, in fact, your mission needs to be your guidewire. You need to be, you need to be like clamped into it all the time. And when you hit that bump, you need to grab hold of that mission right then. And that like, I was like - Kaboom! Like, completely sort of changed my sort of perspective on this.
And I'm wondering if you all have some thoughts about this notion of the grounding effect and the essential grounding nature of a mission, in terms of helping you set the course for what you're trying to do with young people.
Kalyan Balaven: Well, going back to the, the first question you asked about what is the purpose of school. Each school is defining what its mission is in relationship to its students. In going back to the idea of preparation for life, every school is, is measuring what that is. Some schools have decided that the preparation for life is college preparation. Other schools have said no. It's, it's preparation that, like Kurt Hahn says, you need to go out there and be out in the wilderness. It's important to be in the outdoors. Other schools have said other things. And that's a choice that families and students make in partnership with schools to help their students thrive in the world they're entering.
And that's the choice that's out there. And now that you've made that your mission, it's important to now look at your mission and see how each student is receiving, or achieving that mission, to the fullest extent while they're there. Oftentimes you'll find students at schools. You actually find them on the brochure. You'll find 'em on the website, because they represent some sort of visible diversity. And if you really interview some students, in these, who are visual representations of difference at a school and say, did you take full advantage of it? Did you, did you participate in that outdoor ed program? Did you go on that international trip? Did you go on the college visits and the college tours? And the answers that we get back are not the answers we want to see. That's not inclusion. Inclusion is all those students thriving and finding a way for themselves, to see themselves in the mission of the school as achieving those things that are the promise of the school in relationship to the world they're entering.
Caroline Blackwell: Mm-hmm.
Tim Fish: That's really something. You know, I'm curious. Both of you have used the terms, right? Inclusion, the inclusion dashboard. And, and Jessie, you were talking a lot about equity and how you're sort of really focused on ensuring equity. I'm wondering, and Caroline, you've helped me in this a lot. Can we sort of just take a couple minutes and just talk about sort of, from your perspective, lived experience in a school, how you really think about and see equity and inclusion both being essential and, and also having elements that are unique.
Jessie Barrie: I mean, I, I would start with saying that we have to acknowledge that there's an inherent contradiction with the word equity for anything we're doing in an independent school setting, because independent schools by default are not equitable, because we charge tuition and we have an admissions process.
And so that is a contradiction that I'm always really wrestling with. I think that as schools, we have to be honest about that, and we have to really think about how we orient ourselves in our commitments and in our work based on those, the polarity of those two realities, that we are deeply committed as a school towards having an equitable experience for our students, and by default, we are not creating an equitable environment.
And at Bosque, the way that we are navigating that is through a board-level strategic commitment to offer need-based financial aid to 50% of our students, which more than doubles the national average for need-based financial aid for independent schools. And that's a big commitment on so many levels. But what's so critical, and this is what Kal was just talking about, is that it's not a matter of hitting markers of this percentage of students on financial aid, this percentage of students who represent different identities. It's a matter of what happens in the experience of those students and those staffulty members when they arrive at your school. And do they feel that they have a place at the table? Do they feel that their voice is heard? Do they feel that they are having an experience of safety, of belonging? And what we know is that the answer is a hundred percent no, often. And that's the real work that we have to do. And that's where the real needle gets moved, is not just getting people in the door, but ensuring that those experiences are equally connected and valued and experienced.
Kalyan Balaven: I would say something in relationship to equity. So I will say that the idea of equity oftentimes is only talked about at our schools in relationship to financial aid, sometimes in relationship to transportation and other things. But if we really expand the notion of what equity can be, still in terms of dollars, but in terms of how those dollars are spent, sometimes that means an FTE. It means being able to see myself in the professional community, in the teacher in front of me in the classroom. That's dollars spent. Sometimes the class, the seminar that's being offered, that speaks to my interest. That might be different than the majority population at the school. It might mean a club that's funded. It might mean a field trip or the international trip options that have always been at that school, that go to Europe and all these other places. Maybe those international trips need to shift and change to help serve my needs. And so that idea of equity is really expansive and it really requires a deep interrogation of each student, right? And our schools are small, and we have the opportunity to do it the right way.
Caroline Blackwell: I want to follow up on that comment, Kal, because it is absolutely the case that what we're driving toward when we talk about equity is that no individual descriptor, no racial, ethnic identity determines a student's outcome in our schools. Right? Which is what both of you are, are talking about. And inherent in that is a notion of fairness, right? And It's not equality, right? Because sometimes we give some people things that they need that we wouldn't give to other people. Right?
That kind of distinction between equity and equality creates tensions in our school environments, and I'm wondering how you all, as leaders, and successful leaders in this area, communicate that tension to your students, to your communities at large? How do you help parents understand that if Johnny doesn't need a pair of mittens and needs a hat, then our job is to give him the hat and not the pair of mittens that we're giving to everybody. So maybe Johnny gets mittens and a hat. How do you explain that distinction in a, in an environment that, and in a society that prides itself on equality?
Kalyan Balaven: I’d say this. The word, the inherent word that we're not talking about is the word discriminate, right? And the word discriminate is interesting. Right? Because we always take a secondary definition of it in society, which is prejudice, right? You know, has invocations that, hate and other things that are associated with discrimination. It's negative, but the first definition of discriminate is to differentiate, to distinguish, to discern, to see difference between each other. Seeing difference is not a bad thing, inherently. The bad thing is when a school, and I imagine, imagine the school has a view of all the students, and in the view shared of all the students, certain students are getting lost.
What schools will often do, and the schools that get critiqued for doing this, will then then focus on the students, only the students that are getting lost. What happens in that process? All the other students feel like, Hey, I just lost a view shed of the school. The best example I've seen is NAIS. When we come together for PoCC, there's affinity spaces for everybody, right? And there's also a come back together for everybody. And I've seen people leave PoCC, go back to their schools and try to do affinity spaces and do it the wrong way. They'll do it in a way that only paying attention to certain groups, other schools, other groups being left behind saying, Oh, this whole process has been problematic. And in, in a attempt to create a sense of belonging, they've actually created a sense of otherness. Right? Right. They've gone to the secondary definition of discrimination. But not having, haven't discerned and found what each group needs, and every group realizing that, hey, the school is seeing us, the school is giving us what we need in order to achieve all that we can.
Jessie Barrie: Oh, so much good stuff said. Thank you, Kal. You know, I think, I think there's so much divisiveness in our country right now, and every, every single thing is up for, for division, and we've seen this so significantly in, in how it's impacted schools, and that came about through covid. That obviously has come about significantly through the critical race theory conversation that's happened, social emotional learning conversations that have happened, and what I find so fascinating about the divisiveness of those topics as they relate to school is that if you asked any individual parent, would you, for your child, hope that your child has an experience of feeling safe, seen, heard, valued in their daily experience at school? Of course, every single parent would say that and would, if you ask them, would you want that for all students? Every parent would say yes. And yet then there's this perspective that somehow weaponizes the very conversations, the curriculum, the work that's necessary to try and create something within the next generation of our culture that's radically different than our current generation, which is modeling the worst case version of divisiveness, of civil discourse.
And so I always, when these conversations come up, I always love to ask questions and say, Tell me more about what is driving that statement. What's driving the question? And we know that most of the time what's driving is a sense of emotion, a sense of fear for their child. And when we actually can lean into that, there's so much humanity in the shared emotion we all have for our children. I believe that most people who hopefully have read our mission statements have committed to the values of our school, conceptually do agree and want to support the work that's necessary to fulfill those missions. But oftentimes it really does require a level of education and parent education that as schools, is tricky for us because our focus is on our students. We have limited resources and time, but I do find that oftentimes that little investment of education, whether it's a conversation with a parent who's brought up a concern or a very targeted newsletter piece that speaks about a curriculum that you're launching in the school, can really help dispel some of the myth and also diffuse some of the fear.
But I think ultimately, it's so critical for us to not just be preaching to the choir in regards to the individuals who are jumping on board with the importance of this work, because that's not going to move the needle. Ultimately, we need to ensure, as Kal said, that we're not leaving behind one percentage of the population in the focus to support another part of our population. Because that, that first part of the population is critical to lean into the work and to actually make the change. And so we have to find ways to engage, inspire, motivate, that this is a collective opportunity for all of us as schools, as communities, to better ourselves, as schools, as communities, and that that strengthens all of us. Or we're just going to be speaking into vacuums again.
Tim Fish: Thank you both so much for that because it, it makes me wonder about this idea of doing the work and what it looks like in a school community on a daily basis to continue to make progress. Do you have some other examples of what you all are doing to continue to do that on a daily basis at school?
Kalyan Balaven: I would go back to something we talked about, which is, you know, this idea of creating the inclusion dashboard seemed like a great moment for schools. But I found it also to be a moment where schools are following, falling into a pattern of behavior where the dashboard they created became the chief indicator that they felt, well, like, oh look, we're doing it. We're doing the work. That's not doing the work. You created a tool to help you to do the work. And so it became almost like proof of something, but it wasn't, if that makes sense. And so the idea of the lab was, no, let's, let's really hold ourselves accountable to what we're seeing, right? Like we really have to come together, really what are we seeing and how do we hold ourselves accountable? So systems have to be created.
What's beautiful was when you start gathering information like inclusion metrics, you need to have people at the senior leadership level and in the board level looking at the data, setting goals for the school on what they're seeing, so that those goals are things we're going after. The goals need to be what funded. The goals need to, need to have time, the goals need to have people assigned to different pieces around it, and so that's how you get to creating the curriculum. Right. That's how you get to all these things. Because the goals will say, Oh, you need an evaluative system. You need to be able to audit your school. You need to be able to see, do feedback loops and surveys and things like this with the students and saying, Hey, are the courses really meeting your needs? Are you seeing yourself? I mean, you have to ask these types of questions and then respond to the community based on what you're hearing. Right. And so those types of systems need to be created downstream in order for it to really happen, right?
And sometimes it happens idiosyncratically, which is fine. But when personalities leave, unfortunately you know, schools that were doing the work, stop doing the work. And so I really love it when schools systematize it.
Jessie Barrie: I think, to what Kal just said, the commitment to equity work should be so much bigger than the personalities of anyone involved at any point in the school, and that's why having this foundationally written into missions and values, having this foundationally written into the board strategic plan, having this be part of every hiring process for trustees and staffulty members, and really boldly stated through admissions processes and conversations is critical. Because none of us are ever going to be done with this work. Our tenures at our own schools will never check a box of great! The school has met that need in regards to equity. This is going to be a lifetime of work within our communities, to support our communities. And so I think ensuring that it is not personality driven, ensuring, like Kal said, that there's systems and structures built around the sustainability of the work.
And I think also just really ensuring that as a leader, to me it feels like an everyday commitment. Just like we have an everyday commitment to excellence of our academic programs, to excellence in fundraising. I feel like as a leader, we would be negligent if we don't have an everyday commitment to be thinking about lensing equity through every one of the other job responsibilities that we have in our, in our role.
And that's hard because I think for many heads of school, we're used to being very competent in a lot of areas, and building our competency and starting to feel like we're thriving potentially in our competency. And this is an area where we might never feel like we've hit competency. And that's part of the messy middle of being a leader who has a commitment to equity, is knowing as, as a white woman doing this work, and a white woman who came from a background of my own privilege, I was a student of an independent school, I forever will be making mistakes. I will forever be needing to really lean into my humility in this work, to be listening and to be committing to ensuring that I'm not checking boxes. And that's a difficult position to be in for generally, I think a lot of type A personalities who tend to be the profile of a lot of heads of school, but I don't know how we can fulfill our responsibilities if we're not willing to stay in that messy middle and keep making mistakes and knowing that growth will come from those mistakes, but it is going to be hard.
Caroline Blackwell: And if we take the notion that both you and Kal, even Tim, when we were talking about and thinking about John Powell's work and the expansive nature and the ongoing nature of DE&I work, there's no question that our sense of competency is going to hit speed bumps, because we are meeting new people, we're experiencing new things, we're learning new cultures, all of those kinds of things.
And so that, the tension of learning and creating learning communities that support the work is really important. And so often, one of the things that comes up by way of criticism of equity, DE&I work, is a bifurcation between that and educational excellence or academic excellence. How do you, how do you address that? Maybe it doesn't come up in your communities, but we hear it all the time. The more attention we pay to this, we're going to be taking away from the academic program. We're going to be taking away. Students aren't going to be prepared for college. How do you address that with families who don't see the inherent nature of DE&I as part of education?
Kalyan Balaven: If, if families are viewing this work as a special interest, and are seeing it as a special interest, it's, it's, and if it's as positive as a special interest, then it's failing in, in, in and of itself. So I think that's part of it, like getting that out of the way. The other piece is really going back to the world. I mean, the, the interconnectedness of our world. You know, even, even schools are so regional and different, different areas of the world that might not be very diverse at all.
Even single binary gender schools, I mean, you're going to enter the world, and the world is not that. And so if you feel like, you know, every single educational outcome of any school out there fails if it doesn't see the world that we're entering and the world that we're entering is a diverse one. In depth diversity, even on the surface level, if you look at a school that it looks like, Oh, racially, it's, it's, it's one racial identifier. Even if it has, it's a, you know, gender based school and it's one, and one socioeconomic—Even in that instance, if you really dig into what we're learning about cognitive difference and so on, so we are like, Wow, there's a lot of stuff there. And if you're not engaging in that work period, woo. You're not preparing students for the world they're entering. So you're failing.
Jessie Barrie: Completely agree.
Caroline Blackwell: What are you thinking about that?
Jessie Barrie: I, I just don't think that the world that anyone who's paying attention to exists in any structure that can allow us to see building cultural humility skills, building collaboration skills, building communication skills, building self-awareness skills, as anything but critical skills for success in college and career. And every CEO who is interviewed, every labor force study that you pay attention to, is going to point to that so clearly. And you look at colleges, you look at what colleges are really looking for, you look at the challenges that exist on college campuses. You look at the challenges that exist in the workforce, and we've seen that magnified through Covid, extremely.
We need… To serve our students, we must be giving them skills beyond core academics. Our students at independent schools are excellent learners. They're excellent students. They are going to get those core academic skills. We do not have to question that in these schools. What we have to question is, are they going to get everything else they need?
And that's where our commitment to wellness, our commitment to equity conversations, our commitment to understanding what an individual student's responsibility is, not just to themselves, but to their school community and their broader community, is what is going to change the world. And I can't imagine many people in this country looking around and saying that we are in a healthy space as a country, and some of these exact issues are the driving force of that lack of healthy community and culture. And so this is our opportunity and it's not an either or, it's a yes and.
Kalyan Balaven: Caroline, you brought it, brought up the word humility first. And Jessie you touched on it in terms of framing its cultural humility piece. One of the things that's missing in the way schools are doing the work are those that are charged to do the work sometimes lack the humility in relationship to doing the work. And it becomes problematic because if you, if you play that defensive game of, you know, no, this isn't, this, I didn't make an error. I didn't make a mistake, right? There's no community being built. You think back to your family, how many disconnects have you ever had with your family? And every disconnect may, brings you closer and closer. Every friend, deep friend you had, you've had moments. And those are the moments that allow for the community to grow and learn together, right? And, but we need to approach the work with humility because we will make mistakes and errors along the way. But to be open, to learn together, be co-learning, that's key and that's a skill set that really does need to be developed across the board.
Tim Fish: Absolutely. You know, and it, it, it gets back to everything we've been talking about in this podcast, around this idea of how do we create the context to have students thrive in their lives. It's, it's Kal, what you talked about as being sort of the purpose of education, right? This idea about life. And it makes me also think about, Jessie, the work you're doing with ISEEN, the work that, how experiential education factors into this idea of being sort of part of the world, right? This idea that we open students to experiences that really do let them connect in a more broad way. I wonder if, if you want to speak to that, because for me this is all connected. This is all, I think it's, it's so much what you talked about, right? Kal, you mentioned this.
We need to take a, we need to always see our schools as systems. And we need to see all the interconnections in those systems, right? We need to see how those systems are overlapping within the school. And I think that this notion of how we design, purposefully, the experience, and allow others to partner with us in that design is super key to this.
So, I don't know, Jessie, I'd love to hear more about how experiential education maybe can also help us further this work.
Caroline Blackwell: Absolutely.
Jessie Barrie: Well, I think one of the big things we've done a lot of reflection of at Bosque School is as a school we've had a long commitment to doing professional development, being really intentional and looking at curriculum through a lens of equity. And yet what we find is that we continue to bump up to some of the same challenges.
And so our commitment from the staffulty side is to get out of the head and get into the heart, and I think at the end of the day, to really truly be able to make progress in our communities around equity, around belonging. This is not head work. This is not academic work. This is not read a book and take a test and check the box. This is an experience.
And Kal just spoke about the cultural humility side of this. We can only learn by opening our hearts and opening our ears to the experience of others and to the realization that we never will truly be able to understand the experience of others. All we can do is have the gift of someone's trust to share with us their experience, and to be able to try and listen really intently to that experience and look for the opportunities within our own biases, within our own defensive reactions for growth. And so a commitment in this work, from the head to the heart, feels critical to really break down the dynamics and the harms that I think replicate within our communities. Even if you have a really diverse book list, even if you've hired a staffulty that feels as reflective as possible of your student body, if you're not really leading and learning from the heart, those same harms just keep replicating. And experiential education is not head work.
It's heart work. It's body work. It's being connected. It's reflective work, it's processing work, and these are not things that we can do through an AP class. These are things that we have to do through being willing to be vulnerable. We have to do them through taking the time to build within our classroom communities, within our school communities, space to create a culture, to set ground rules and norms for that culture, to be able to reflect and to practice skills, and then to get real feedback on how we did, and where our growth edges are for the future. And then to practice again and again and again. And that does require time. It requires nuance and facilitation. It's a very different model from this page on the stage model that traditional education has been built around, but that's where we give our students and ourselves an opportunity for growth.
Kalyan Balaven: Mm-hmm.
Caroline Blackwell: I'm reminded Tim, you and I are both big fans of John A. Powell and I'm reminded of John Powell's work as Jessie and Kalyan talk about the, the, the head, the heart, the body. because he talks about bridging, right, and breaking, and the behaviors that help us either go inside to make the connections that we need to ourselves in order to be better, and at the same time make those connections to others.
Tim Fish: What this, what this conversation has taught me about is this notion, and I love Jessie, your point about this is work we're always doing. We're always in the bridge building business.
Kalyan Balaven: Mm-hmm.
Tim Fish: We're always bridging from where we are to where we want to be. And we're bridging in these relationships with people. And we're, and we're moving from, as John A. Powell talks about, the othering to that true belonging. And I just wonder, Kal if you have thoughts on that because I, I think for me that is such a pivotal way to wrap up this conversation.
Kalyan Balaven: Yeah, there's two, two pieces to this, right? We talked about one, right? The example of go, you know, that the NAIS, going to different spaces, having the opportunity to, and then coming back together mindfully, skillfully, building bridges, building connections, seeing each other in dialogue. That example, that's external. That's what schools need to be engaged with all the time. But there's another piece, right, and that piece is internal bridge building. Because there's intersections of identity that oftentimes if not done well, you could be in a space that is trying to create a sense of belonging, but while doing so is actually othering facets of who you are in the same space. Right? And so that's, that's very skilled. And that requires each person to be seen both above and below that iceberg. Right? And so there's, there's internal lattices as well as external structures. And so what we're really talking about is ultimately a web of interconnection that needs to be created, right?
Caroline Blackwell: Mm-hmm.
Tim Fish: That's right. I love that notion of that web, and that is an inspiring idea for, for our communities. Jessie, I don't know if you want to follow up on that as we, as we wrap up this, this amazing conversation that's gone way too fast.
Jessie Barrie: I think I don't have much to add. I think Kal, Kal just said it so beautifully. I just think that our real need as leaders is to ensure that the experience of community is being considered from all angles and is really being investigated from all angles, and also recognizing that our own positionality is going to not give us the ability to do that. And so how are we partnering? How are we collaborating? How are we creating, to Kal's metaphor, webs that support being able to look in to this web from all of these different needed angles that honor and respect and reflect the richness of our communities, and getting authentic data from those different angles. And receiving that authentic data with humility and with a growth mindset and really being willing to reconsider potential changes that, Kal spoke about some of those earlier in the conversation, that might be necessary to shift some of the dynamics that might currently be existing that are not creating that sense of belonging.
Caroline Blackwell: Tim, what fascinating guests. I am, I feel so honored to have been one of the hosts today for this podcast.
Tim Fish: Absolutely. And Kal and Jessie, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. What an incredible, incredible journey.