Organizational
Context

As is the case for many organizations within our field, Teton Science Schools is on its own path to building a more just, equitable, and inclusive teaching and learning environment by critically examining our practices and implementing intentional changes. We often grapple with the real urgency we feel to make changes while continuously examining our readiness to engage in this work. While the urgency comes from a place of knowing we need to do better, understanding our readiness to engage is of paramount importance because there is real risk of doing harm to members of our community if we proceed without the appropriate literacy, competence, and care.

There are many drivers for our goals related to equity and inclusion. One is having a better understanding of the culture and climate of our organization and how it impacts people of different identities and lived experiences. Another key driver is building literacy around issues of inclusion and equity, and investing in our capacity to navigate these issues within the context of programming. To this end, we’ve worked with The Avarna Group to implement training on equity, inclusion, and diversity for all staff. This introductory training prioritizes the exploration of identity, establishment of common language, and institutional standards for inclusion, as well as practicing skills for managing incidents of inclusion and exclusion. This is the first in a series of trainings and affinity group engagements focused on biases at the individual and institutional levels, which will provide a foundation through which team members can begin to think about equity and inclusion within their work.  

In 2019, after two years of successful training around social and emotional learning for our field instructors, it became clear that we needed a more intersectional approach, allowing our team to engage in issues of equity as it relates to SEL. The article “Equity & Social and Emotional Learning: A Cultural Analysis” provides equity elaborations to the CASEL framework that represent an entry point to this work. By integrating these elaborations into our existing SEL training, we managed to make progress on examining issues of equity in SEL. That said, further reflection returned us to the question of readiness and literacy. While all staff members had engaged with ‘Unconscious Bias’ training, it became clear that these two topics (equity and SEL) when taken on together were overwhelming for some. In some cases, considering equity in SEL prompted a sort of paralysis; team members became acutely attuned to the risk factors of approaching SEL without sufficient consideration for the lived experience of members of marginalized identities and therefore felt unable to engage SEL authentically in their instruction.  

These observations led to a number of shifts in thinking as it relates to training around SEL and equity. First, there is a clear need to take a more metered approach to training around SEL and equity, separating the topics into different training modules to allow for each to be fully understood in its own right before engaging with them simultaneously. Second, we began to grapple with a more competency-based approach to training around equity and SEL. We needed to acknowledge that team members come out of ‘Unconscious Bias’ trainings with varying levels of literacy and that must inform our approach to further training. By allowing team members to self-select into a conversation group focused on Transformative SEL, we were able to allow individuals to assess their own readiness and then build literacy. This approach helped mitigate the risks of engaging in difficult conversations with a lack of skill. The risks in having conversations around the lived experiences of members of marginalized identities without sufficient literacy are myriad and cannot be discounted just because we feel the urgency to engage. Each decision around training should be made with great intention and consideration of the readiness of each individual. 

Thinking beyond Teton Science Schools, the learning process illustrated above has informed the decision to not include an equity and SEL focused training module in this toolkit. Readiness and literacy are specific to each team and team member, and making such a resource available here comes with the possibility that it is used for a group that is not sufficiently prepared to engage, and as mentioned above, conversations of equity advanced without skill have potential to do more harm than good. Our recommendation is to think critically about the readiness of your team and work with partners with expertise in equity and inclusion to inform your training plans.