But the Great Recession, which rapidly accelerated depopulation1 and divestment in the Motor City, exposed an important truth: beyond the divide, we are all part of the same metropolitan area — and share the same stagnant local economy and shrinking major city. As a school, we felt that we owe it to our students and our community to be part of the solution to the region’s troubles — troubles, of course, that are echoed in every urban area of the nation. But how could we view the city, which seemed to be our greatest liability and vulnerability, as an educational asset for 21st-century, real-world problem solving?
Simultaneously, within our school community, we identified social divisions that were problematic. At a typical Saturday brunch in our dining hall, while our day students are at home, our international boarding students shuffle half-awake with their cereal to sit with friends who speak their native language, and the 162 urban public school students, who come to campus for our 47-year-old Horizons-Upward Bound (HUB) college preparatory program, grab a tray and head for the opposite corner. In an age when cosmopolitanism is a necessary skill for the culturally diverse workforce, we knew that the students sharing our campus were missing out on valuable intercultural learning about race, ethnicity, and class. Like many independent schools, we have worked hard to develop an inclusive culture, but we know from the history of desegregation that merely throwing people together does not necessarily lead to mutual understanding and regard; true integration in a community requires shared purpose, equality and collaboration among groups, and a mandate from those in positions of power to make cultural understanding an institutional priority.2
So, a second question arose: how could we incentivize our most promising resource — our youth — to join together to face the crisis in our region that was not their creation, but is their inheritance?
The answers to both questions, it turns out, are entwined.
Turning Problems into Opportunities
It was impossible to ignore the ways in which the social divisions within our community and outside of our community mirrored each other in certain respects. So at Cranbrook Schools, we developed a public-purpose partnership — called “Bridge the Divide” — with the University of Michigan, various urban institutions, and public school students in our HUB program. The partnership prepares students to work together in collaborative leadership. To this end, we have held one-day workshops for already-elected student leaders such as student council members, residential hall advisors, club presidents, etc., to do experiential training. We have also had students apply to our two- and three-day workshops that, depending on our focus, have paired a small group of 15–20 students from HUB with a small group of Cranbrook students, or paired a group of U.S. students with our international students. This training is the first step for students to become part of a much-needed and cosmopolitan generation of social problem solvers invested in the future of their communities.A sense of exhaustion with traditional methods of breaking down barriers led us to partner with the University of Michigan, whose excellent collaborative leadership training rests on a simple, tripartite foundation: empathy building, community discovery, and community action. Facing racial tension in their dorms in the 1980s, the University of Michigan developed methods for effective intergroup dialogue among students of difference races to transform the conflict that comes from the mix of cultures in college residential life into intentional processes for growth and learning. Specifically, the University of Michigan leadership-training program weaves together strands of directed dialogue about social identity, adventure games and role-playing, and community advocacy.3
Drawing on their research and practices, as well as their professional instructors and college student trainers who are “near peers” to our students, we ended up completely restructuring our own student leadership training around two phases of community building:
Intergroup Dialogue — Student participants take part in a process of reflection on self, group, and other, followed by cross-cultural conversation.
Community Engagement — We build social capital through an ongoing series of student-led projects that reach local urban areas through community gardening, coaching, and public art.
Bridge the Divide brings our faculty and students — international, urban, metropolitan — into interactive relationships with college students and University of Michigan instructors. Specifically, the program consists of a series of unfolding events — curricular and co-curricular — that occur throughout the academic year on our campus, at the University of Michigan, and in the Metro Detroit area. Now in our second year of the program, we have already seen three projects push through the soil in the Detroit area, with more than 300 of our students and more than 35 faculty and staff participating in one or more of our Bridge projects. Our hope is to have each of our 800 students take part in at least one such project as they move through the upper school.
We have also completely restructured all of our student leadership training, which includes options for a one-, two-, or three-day retreat. The dialogue component brings students together and is followed by community action training where students imagine ways to create positive change in our school community and in Metro Detroit.
Intergroup Dialogue
Our collaborative leadership training has three phases: dialogue, role-playing, and community problem solving. Students reflect on and share the various aspects of their social identity, answering a question central to teenage life: “Who am I?” by creating and sharing “cultural identity” bags that reflect who they are inside and what people see on the outside. Students also divide into caucus groups, based on shared race or ethnicity, for dialogue about the question: “Who are we?” One dialogue focuses on the divisions between our international and U.S. students on campus, the other on the racial segregation in the Detroit metropolitan area.In answering both questions, our kids tackle controversial topics, such as racial and ethnic stereotypes, with an honesty and candor that most adults would find daunting. Students create a list of stereotypes about “the other” race or ethnicity, and then share and discuss them together. One white student, unsettled by what she had heard in an exchange with students of color, earnestly asked: “Is it true what they say? Is it really so much harder to be black?” In such questions lie the roots of empathy and change.
To build greater empathy, we ask a cohort of day students to spend the night in our dormitories, and ask U.S. students to learn to speak aloud three lines of an international student’s native language. To deepen understanding of how social identity impacts American society, participants play the board game “American Dream”4 in which players are given a set of social identities (race, sexual orientation, nationality, economic status, religion, language) that can either help or hinder them as they try to move along the “path of success” toward the American Dream. Role-play, as in an exercise called SIM CITY, assigns small groups of students a fixed space, a set of mock resources, and access to “decision makers” with the goal of building a neighborhood. This activity helps students confront the uncomfortable truth that, depending on socioeconomic circumstances, sometimes hard work and ideas are not enough for success.
In our student literary journal, also entitled “Bridge the Divide,” a student of color powerfully expressed her hope: “I wonder silently; becoming more and more aware of the things we share.… Stepping outside of the box society has drawn around us, maybe, just maybe, we will also be the ones to erase the lines that divide us.”5 In understanding their differences, students are inspired to work shoulder to shoulder in true community toward the greater good.
Community Engagement
Finding this common ground empowers students to take bold action in their communities to affect the change they would like to see. Among other things, we have partnered with the Clark Park Coalition, which provides neighborhood kids with recreational activities in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Southwest Detroit. The coalition reached out to us for help with its tennis program, and one of our Bridge student leaders led a drive to improve the tennis facilities and equipment, and organized fellow tennis players to work alongside local volunteers in a summer tennis program for neighborhood kids.In another of our Bridge projects, our art students collaborated with art students from schools near Clark Park to design a bench for the park. The creative process has been a conduit for intercultural learning among the adults facilitating the project, as well as among the students, as we surmount obstacles created by inequity of resources and a metropolitan divide that rarely brings suburban and urban kids together to co-create. Witnessing the surrounding urban decay, one art student was unsure of the value of our bench project, but when she saw that other works of public art in the neighborhood had been carefully preserved by the residents, she blogged, “Art is the most direct expression of human divinity… now I understand; the bench will make a difference.”6
Urban gardening has been a big part of revitalization efforts in Detroit since it makes use of vacant land and provides produce for urban areas that lack access to healthy food. Last spring on campus, we broke ground on the HUB/Bridge Garden, which brought together our Bridge students and HUB students to prepare, plant, maintain, harvest, and put to bed our community garden. The garden became a gathering place where one could expect to work alongside parents, students from various schools, and a wide array of campus staff to prepare what amounted to several hundred pounds of produce that were donated to a local food shelter.
Riding Down Woodward
We have also implemented into our curriculum a program developed by the University of Michigan called “Down Woodward,” a ride along the historic avenue from the heart of the city at the base of the Detroit River north to where Cranbrook is located. The purpose of the trip is to study the divisions in our metropolitan area, and the ride is narrated by anyone on the bus who would like to share a story of growing up in the city or suburbs. The tales can be surprising: a suburban student appreciating the diversity at our school that she doesn’t see in her neighborhood; a former urban resident longing for the friendliness of his old neighborhood in the city; an Asian American student who lives in a rough neighborhood in the city, speaking candidly about her fears. The bus makes several stops: the first Model T plant, where a tree now grows out of a window; spectacular buildings designed by the world’s top architects during the city’s heyday; neighborhoods that have lost their former grandeur; and a segregation wall built to protect real estate interests in the 1950s near 8 Mile Road.Driving back up the road to our beautiful campus, students report seeing with a new perspective, thinking about how things came to be this way — and, more to the point, how they can make it better.
Summon Your Mission
Last spring, New York Times columnist David Brooks critiqued the predominant message in commencement speeches that tells the graduate to “find yourself.” He chided, “Most successful people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.”7When we track the progression of our own adult lives, we know this to be true. But this same critique can sometimes apply to our schools, where we can get stuck focusing inward: on our challenges, our resources, our graduates, our successes. The dramatic changes in our economic landscape demand that our schools also look outward. It is no longer enough to be an academically excellent school educating academically talented students when the community around you is falling apart. By working for the common good in independent schools, we can amplify Brooks’s message: “Successful schools, educators, and students look outside to find a problem to summon their mission.” Because smart schools can do what smart people do — they turn problems into opportunities.
Notes
1. Edward Hoogterp, post to MLive.com newsgroup, April 10, 2011, www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/04/census_2010_shows_michigan_los.html.2. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The Four Conditions of Intergroup Contact,” Newsweek, September 8, 2009, www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/blogs/nurture-shock/2009/09/08/the-four-conditions-of-intergroup-contact.html.
3. Barry Checkoway is a professor of social work and urban planning and Roger Fisher is associate director of the Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan. Both help coordinate the Youth Dialogues on Race and Ethnicity in Metropolitan Detroit, an initiative between the University of Michigan and numerous community collaborators in our area, including Cranbrook Schools.
4. The American Dream board game was developed by Professor Jennifer Yim, director of the University of Michigan’s Global Scholars Program.
5. Dominique Boyer, “Bridge the Divide,” July 18, 2010, Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
6. Fan Jiang, “Streams of Thoughts 2: Grass Root Art and Human Divinity,” Conversations with Muse (blog), May 16, 2011, http://fanjiang1002.blogspot.com/2011/05/streams-of-thoughts-2-grass-root-art.html.
7. David Brooks, “It’s Not About You,” editorial, New York Times, May 30, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opinion/31brooks.html?_r=1.