The Gift of Difference
By Lauren Brownlee
Carolina Friends School • Durham, NC
T
hroughout my career in education, the independent schools that I have worked in
and with have tended to be more homogenous by political beliefs than by race,
ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. The one outlier from that pattern was a Catho-
lic school at which I served as Director of Social Action. I was at that school in 2016
when there were both cheers and tears the day after the presidential election. Through
a professional development workshop earlier that fall, staff had been directed not to
engage in discussions about the election, and students took their cues from the adults
and spent that year feeling that they should not talk with each other about current
events. The following summer I was with two of my students who were asked about
the political make-up of our school’s student body, and the students looked like deer
caught in headlights because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. I responded
to the questioner that we were gifted to have a community of diverse political per-
spectives and that unlike many schools in our area, our students all had friends with a
variety of beliefs. I shared that, as an educator, I had learned a great deal from students
whose social justice priorities were different from mine because of their religious and
political beliefs. That summer conversation led to my championing dialogue across
difference at school so that we could make the most of the gift of our community.
As we headed into the following school year, a few colleagues and I had the opportu-
nity to offer the school’s staff the training necessary to empower them to support safe
conversations in their classrooms about current events. Our first step was to encourage
staff to consider the difference between a lack of safety and a lack of comfort. In her
presentations on equity (including for CSEE), Rosetta Lee defines safety as a feeling of
“In this space, I can ask questions without fear of judgment. I can voice my perspec-
Page 6 Summer 2020
CSEE Connections