Moments of: The Blog
The View From Here: Brave Spaces
Like every other week in the year 2020, the last few days have provided ample opportunities for challenging discussions, disagreements, and debates. Even in a small and tight-knit community like ours, it can be hard to talk about controversial topics in a productive and equitable manner. Emotions are running high, and the stakes are even higher.
This year more than ever, it feels important to equip our students to handle this type of conversation with confidence and maturity. With that in mind, this week, our students engaged in an activity intended to promote the concept of Brave Spaces in Advisory. As a group, they created agreements to guide them through the difficult conversations that may come up at school and out in the world. These agreements will be tools to use as we talk about current events, particularly the November election.
This summer, a team of our staffulty members (Interim Director of Diversity, Equity Inclusion Dot Kowal, Director of Technology Sean Freese, and Experiential Curriculum Coordinator Kiska Kosakowski) attended a workshop entitled “Can We Talk About Politics?” Run by Allison Park of Blink Consulting, a nonprofit exploring diversity in education, the workshop was designed to help educators facilitate challenging conversations in an equitable way. This week’s Advisory activity was inspired by this workshop and by other DEI-related professional development our staffulty has participated in over the past year.
Creating a Brave Space for students to speak and to listen is crucially important to successfully navigating challenging conversations. Different from a “safe space” (originally an affinity group/space for marginalized people to gather and share, now often misunderstood and politicized as a place where any discomfort or challenge is not allowed) a Brave Space is an environment where people can discuss complicated issues respectfully.
The guiding principles of Brave Spaces include engaging controversy with civility, owning both intention and impact, and allowing students to choose when to step in and out of the conversation. In a Brave Space, students are expected to truly listen to others and to offer their opinions without attacking. (It is important to acknowledge that for students who are from marginalized groups, every space is a Brave Space, as in many situations, minorities must be brave simply to exist.)
To build our own Brave Spaces in Advisory, each group was tasked with collaboratively creating a set of agreements for discussion. Examples included “listen with the intent to listen, not talk next,” “remember that feeling UNCOMFORTABLE is not the same as feeling UNSAFE,” “be brave: try to say the things that are hard, and stretch yourself,” and “remember everyone has the right to start somewhere and grow.” Each Advisory group’s list is unique, and these lists will be referenced whenever we discuss a potentially controversial topic together.
This process of brainstorming and talking through ideas together was not only helpful for building community in our Advisory groups, but it was also an exercise in creating policy together. Writing equitable and fair guidelines that all have agreed to is a way to practice and understand the importance of equitable and fair policy in our larger communities and institutions.
We look forward to putting these Brave Space agreements to work in Advisory in the coming weeks. Parents may find these agreement examples useful, themselves, as they engage in challenging discussions with others. If there is one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s the importance of navigating hard conversations with grace and respect. Let’s all be brave together!
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