How Can We Use Privilege for Good? Hillbrook Middle Schoolers Take on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Work

By Gulliver LaValle, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Hillbrook first established its Inclusivity Task Force—which evolved into today’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force—in 2015. This multi-constituent group is made up of strategic members of leadership, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty, and families who come together with the shared goal of prioritizing a school environment that challenges intolerance and values differences as a way to enrich and deepen our world. Some signature outcomes of this group’s work include Hillbrook’s Statement of Inclusivity and the appointment of our Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Gulliver LaValle. Another one of their recommendations was to create more intentional space for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the curriculum in a way that connects this work to Hillbrook’s values and mission. This year, Hillbrook’s Middle School Reach Beyond Block reflects a dynamic and supportively vulnerable space for students to grow their competency and gain a rich perspective on this work. 

During January’s Reach Beyond Block, Hillbrook ran a four-week experience with mixed 5/6th and 7/8th groupings around a division-wide Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) topic. This year’s guiding topic challenged students to consider “Bias & Using Privilege for Good.” 

Let’s define some key DEI-related terms:
• Explicit Bias (Conscious): Prejudices are directly and publicly displayed. 
• Implicit Bias (Unconscious): Prejudices can exist in a person’s mind and behaviors without their awareness.
• Privilege: A special right, advantage, or immunity granted/available only to a particular person or group of people.

In the first two weeks, students picked a movie related to DEI from a pre-selected list and were able to watch and discuss them through the lens of bias and privilege. The films provided a mirror onto life and opened the dialogue for students to connect how biases may play out in their everyday lives. This active watching experience also gave students opportunities to consider when and where they saw privilege either leveraged for good or not-so-good. Discussions with teachers proved rich as the students asked questions like, “why do we have biases?” “How can we recognize them?” “What does using privilege for good look like?” After watching how their questions were answered in film, students came away mindful of broader issues we are tackling today including gender equity in the workplace and socioeconomic structures and access.

The third week, students were able to engage with speaker, author, and storyteller Gyasi Ross from the Blackfeet Nation. He has visited hundreds of academic institutions throughout the nation working as a DEI specialist in the areas of biases and privilege. Adding to his list of accomplishments, Gyasi is also a Columbia University-educated and practicing lawyer. In this capacity, he shared both personal narratives and broader stories that allowed students to hear firsthand about how bias and privilege play out in the world, how responses to bias and privilege can be challenging, and how we can work through these challenges. Meeting an inspiring storyteller with a depth of world experience and engaging in brave and frank conversation with him proved to be a great learning experience and a meaningful moment of connection for our students. One student shared, “listening to him made me think more about how we can all use our privilege in a good way to help.” Another said, “I didn’t know that bias is normal.”

The final week of the cycle consisted of a wrap-up and culmination of the Reach Beyond Block experience, allowing students to begin their own process of connecting the dots. As students put the finishing touches on collaborative and research-based artifacts that show organizations and people who are working to address biases and use their privilege for good, they were asked to equate that with familiar, Hillbrook-based ideas of being an upstander and showing kindness. Through this prompt, students discovered organizations such as “Baby2Baby” which they identified was started by privileged female celebrities to support disadvantaged youth with the goal of giving students an equitable educational experience. 

As a school and a learning community, we continue to springboard off the core questions led by the Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship: what matters to me and what am I doing about it? Gyasi’s visit and the project-based learning constructed throughout January allowed students the chance to see the intersectionality of this work and the many ways they can ask intentional questions and reach beyond themselves to make a difference in their local and global communities.

The outcomes of this Reach Beyond Block experience stemmed from the following learning goals:  

• to have a concentration of diversity, equity, and inclusion experiences for all 5-8th grade students, centered on themes revolving around bias and privilege.
• to build off the success of movie discussion groups launched last January and expand the learning to include more personal reflection with an intention to include a guest speaker experience to connect to students’ discussion of their group’s movie. 
• to use a different structure to maximize engagement (trying out a 4-week, themed cycle versus the previous model of 6-week, elective cycles).
• to use a different type of planning and approach to adult and student Reach Beyond Block learning, specifically:
  • one that engages adults in leading a Reach Beyond Block in a model that pairs one adult with a group of students; 
  • one that invites students and adults to collaborate in real-time to shape the exploration of the content presented; 
  • one that allows HERO (student-group Helping Everyone Reach Out) students to help plan a Reach Beyond Block experience for their peers; 
  • and one that prioritizes our Reach Beyond Block Design Parameters of being culturally competent/aware, embracing ambiguity, valuing process alongside product, being inspiring, and embodying both The Hillbrook Way and Hillbrook’s Core Values.

As we forge ahead in this meaningful work to support children to share their voices in their communities, in their careers, and beyond, we hope avenues open for them to understand what becoming a changemaker feels like in a way that fits their individual growth. This four-week DEI-centered exploration was a way for students to engage in what reaching beyond themselves can look like and helped them develop empathy and a critical lens on moments of bias and privilege that can and will help them take the next steps toward making our world a better place.