How can boarding and other independent schools help their students navigate safe relationships in a technology-intensive environment? A June symposium at St. Paul’s School (New Hampshire) hosted some 140 teachers, counselors, and other education professionals from 50 schools to collaborate on answers to this increasingly complex question.
“Empathy, Intimacy, and Technology in a Boarding School Environment” provided three days of conversations intended to decipher students’ real-time and digital identities and to recommend ways of helping guide young people toward healthy choices in their personal relationships.
“I think very few educators want to retreat from the opportunities that electronic media offer for learning in virtually every field,” says Michael Hirschfeld, rector of St. Paul’s and symposium host. “But technology yields its own dangers, from alarming web content to the ability for young people to post hurtful and unsafe communication. We hope these conversations have helped guide us all toward some answers for helping our students.”
The symposium opened with morning presentations by experts in the fields of youth, technology, and their intersection: Sherry Turkle, the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self; Danah Boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a scholar focusing on technology and society; Donna Freitas, research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame; and Catherine Steiner-Adair, research associate in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an associate psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Columbia University sociologist and St. Paul’s School alumnus Shamus Khan moderated the presentations and discussed his own research.
Storyteller Cindy Pierce also offered an hour of anecdotes about her time visiting high school and college student groups from whom she learned about prevailing myths and realities in today’s campus “hook-up” culture.
Symposium participants spent the majority of the conference in working groups, discussing the intersection of student culture and technology in areas such as academic curriculum, counseling and student support, inclusivity and identity, policy and procedure, prevention and intervention, school-parent relationships, and the “hidden” school culture.
“It is essential to keep these conversations going — not only among those of us who attended but also with other schools,” Hirschfeld says. “All of us, from middle school through college, are facing many of the same issues. The answers are complex, but to ignore the questions is not something we can do.”
A summary of the discussions, along with findings, recommendations, and resources, will be available this fall at sps.edu or by emailing [email protected].