Educating about difference: day-to-day at Milton

How does “embracing diversity,” translate to day-to-day experience at Milton? At least three individuals focus their professional lives and talents on cultivating a rich and rewarding multicultural campus environment. Classrooms are one powerful venue, and the extracurricular and residential life of the School also provides key opportunities for learning that matters to young people.

Joyce Atkins
Assistant Dean for Community Relations
Joyce Atkins is Milton’s assistant dean for community relations. Hers is a broad portfolio that includes helping to recruit diverse classes, supporting students of color once they are here, and promoting the flow of cultural awareness and celebration among all students, throughout the School.

Beginning with the Transition Program in late summer, which orients students of color, Joyce helps students find an early comfort level and sense of support at Milton. One of the best aspects of this program, Joyce feels, is “students making friendships with boys and girls similar to themselves, and forming bonds that that support them during the early months of School, when they have to manage so many transitions.” Joyce chooses Milton Class I and II students as counselors – “students who know Milton, who are succeeding here and serve as role models to the new students.”

Students meet other faculty in the Transition Program, but Joyce is one of the adults they know well, right from the start, so she serves as a “drop-in” resource person for many students. Her office is near the mailboxes, activities office and snack bar, so students can find her easily when they have time. Along with their own faculty advisors, she helps them make their way through the issues and concerns they are juggling. Joyce is also the conduit for outreach information from universities and organizations concerning opportunities for students of color.

Joyce weaves her extensive work through meetings (and follow through) A typical week, for instance, would include meetings with the network of groups that that affect students’ lives and developmental progress at Milton: class deans, house heads, dean of students’ office meetings, etc. She often provides sage advice about cultural sensitivities, implications of actions, important awareness. Other meetings are with groups of students: meetings with Milton’s culture groups—the Latino Association, Onyx, Common Ground, the Asian Society, and Jewish Student Union, the newly formed Muslim Association, etc.—where she helps the students and faculty advisors make sure that the meetings are good ones, that the topics are interesting, that the discussions are lively, and that the students have fun as they probe the various cultural backgrounds.

Milton uses assemblies as vehicles for education and entertainment about different cultures, and Joyce assists Onyx with planning and staging its own assemblies. In addition, Joyce and Christine Savini (director of diversity planning) develop Milton’s community relations assemblies, which are specifically focused on building awareness and appreciation for the differences among students and in the national culture today. This year’s community relations assemblies feature preparation for the scholar’s symposium on race, to be held February 3: that is, viewing sections of the film “Race, the Power of an Illusion,” followed by discussing the film in advisor groups. Together they also direct the diversity orientation day for all new CL III and IV students as part of the new student programs series.

Joyce’s role at Milton has many other aspects — serving as Milton’s liaison with various programs for students seeking admission to independent schools such as Prep for Prep, Steppingstone, or ABC; planning the biannual CultureFest; or managing Milton’s active Host Family program. Beyond the list of responsibilities, however, Joyce is a versatile and skilled resource for students and adults in helping shape the life of the School, and the unique experiences Milton students have during their high school years.

Christine Savini
Director of Diversity Planning
As director of diversity planning, Christine’s work supports the adult community, and complements Joyce’s focus on students. Her position reflects the strong feeling of Milton’s former headmaster Jerry Pieh (1973–1999) that an institution seeking to be a vibrant multicultural community needed to rely on strategic help with hiring, resource development and ongoing training. Christine is proud of Milton’s institutional commitment to that point of view, affirmed by two successive heads of school. Our effort to sustain a thriving multicultural community is “explicit, conscious, and long term,” Christine says.

Christine works most closely with the Upper School principal, Hugh Silbaugh; she works with the Lower School principal (Annette Raphel) on an ad hoc basis, and now with Mark Stanek, Middle School principal. She helps recruit candidates of color for administrative and faculty positions. Christine meets interesting people and encourages them to consider Milton both at non-traditional sites, such as academic conferences, and at more typical sites, such as job fairs. Examples of faculty who are leaders on campus today and who first learned about Milton through Christine include Vivian WuWong, Jeanne Jacobs, Mary Jo and Juan Ramos and Heather Flewelling.

The mentoring program that new faculty experience benefits from Christine’s attention as well. She assists Hugh Silbaugh in implementing an orientation and monthly meetings designed to introduce new faculty to the people, policies and procedures—as well as the culture—of Milton. The diversity component of the program involves two of the monthly meetings that are devoted to diversity training. Among the concepts faculty learn, for instance, are the stages of racial identity development, and different phases along this identity continuum represented by the students in their classrooms and dormitories. Christine feels confident that at the close of the mentoring program, “new faculty have a full tool kit for working in a multicultural community.” For new faculty, as for students, Milton could be as diverse, less diverse or more diverse than what they came from, and as Christine says, “we all need greater assistance in being able to interact in a multicultural environment.”

Within the bi-monthly meeting of the diversity planning group—the three principals along with Joyce and Christine— Lower School principal Annette Raphel first surfaced the opportunity (brought to her by a Lower School parent) of hosting MIT faculty in the upcoming scholar’s symposium about race. Christine helped plan and implement the students’ preparation for the symposium, viewing the film and reviewing it in discussion groups.

Christine directs the summer institute: Cultural Diversity, Implementing the Commitment in Independent Schools, about to mark its tenth annual program. Enrolling 60 administrators and faculty from schools that span 30 states, the six-day institute gives educators the philosophical, intellectual and practical resources for implementing a diversity plan in their numerous schools. The annual waiting list of people who would like to attend speaks to the institute’s success. The institute boasts well-known writers and researchers as speakers, such as Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Attendees plunge into issues of hiring, training, supporting the student body, developing curriculum, teaching and planning. In addition, Christine advises class I students and a student group called common ground.

Christine labels another fruitful aspect of her role at Milton simply “resources.” The title implies a range of activity, including locating relevant texts and articles for certain curricular areas or school-wide issues discussions and connecting faculty with conferences, lectures, or learning tools that would enhance their work. Christine particularly enjoys handing off, to an interested individual, an idea for a program that will flourish and grow over time, like the SEED program initiated several years ago by Betty Brown (former faculty member). Now led by Kim Samson (Science), faculty members in the SEED program read and share reactions to literature by authors who have written about multicultural experiences. “Resources” often work together in subtle and steady ways to educate and enrich the adults and students at Milton, just as Christine’s role at Milton affects the quality of the experience here, for all members of the community.

Ed Snow
Interfaith Chaplain
Ed Snow is Milton’s interfaith chaplain, having arrived last summer from the Baylor School in Tennessee, where he had developed a strong and successful program. Ed interacts with students constantly: all day, one-on-one and in various groupings, and at night in Hallowell, where he and his wife Kathy are dorm parents. The faculty-student group that recruited Ed last year set the bar high for Ed’s role at Milton: among other challenges, the interfaith chaplain, “with good humor and sensitivity, the chaplain will provide leadership in promoting reflection among Milton students and faculty about questions of faith and doubt, belief and non-belief, character and service to others.” So reads the position description.

Ed teaches nearly all sections of the Class III required course, Ethics. It’s hard to imagine a class more directly connected to educating students to appreciate difference. Ed’s ethics class stresses that the first task for students is to identify a foundation for personal ethics. From family background and the many other influences in life, a student develops his or her own moral code. Within this context, Ed and the students examine examples of vast differences in quality of life across the nation and the world, and the effect on people’s lives of categorizations superficially assigned to individuals. They look at what a society uses to designate “difference”—economic status, religion, culture, race, gender—and how that designation boxes in a person. Ed also teaches a World Religions course, in which he looks at each religious tradition from the point of view of its own merits, rather than in comparison to other traditions. He tries to explore with students the range of thought within a tradition, as well.

Getting to know the students and faculty has been a priority for Ed thus far; one strategy he has used is attending the meetings of student identity and culture groups such as Onyx, the Asian Society, the Latino Society, the Jewish Student Union, the Christian Fellowship, the new Muslim student organization, etc. “I don’t represent just a presence or a token gesture,” Ed says, but a real support.”

While all these groups have an assembly slot on Milton’s calendar, Ed often works with them on Chapel presentations. The Onyx Board, for instance presented a chapel program the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, and Ed has invited the Jewish Student Union to prepare a program for chapel as well. Ed says he wants “students to gain real clarity about the difference between assemblies and chapel.” Chapel is reflective, and the readings or performances are inner-directed. Important among Ed’s list of responsibilities, is directing the weekly Chapel program, which brings boarding students together every Sunday evening.

Recently Ed undertook responsibility for a new group on campus whose task it will be to consider how we educate students specifically about religious differences. As a result of the Class of 1952’s gift of an endowed lecture series on religious pluralism, within the last two years Milton students have heard from Rabbi Ronaldo Matalon of New York and author James Carroll of Boston. Both speakers exposed the dangers of religious triumphalism in the course of history. They compellingly advocated openness and dialogue as critical needs in a world where religious beliefs have been used to incite tragic violence. Ed’s group will develop ways including assemblies, speakers, and planned discussions to educate students consistently, over time, about religious differences. “The distinct traditions of religions are important,” Ed believes, “but there is also room for conversations about disagreements or differences, within the overall context of harmony.”