Improving Equity and Empathy at School
Last spring a group of students representing our Gender Sexuality Alliance asked to have a meeting with our district’s curriculum director and myself. We sat down in my office and the students began to make a calm, thoughtful, and well reasoned case for more LGBTQ+ representation in our curriculum. The students made a persuasive case […]
Imputing the Best Motive
As a graduate student in the UVM counseling department in the mid 90’s, I enrolled in the most difficult course I have ever taken, Robert Nash’s Professional Issues in Counseling. It was a rigorous investigation of both the ethics and the personal, moral dimensions of the helping professions, and for me it is a class […]
Empathy is a Skill
It seems that when it comes to race in America, everyone has something say. When student leaders at Montpelier High School made national headlines by raising a Black Lives Matter flag this year, news outlets spread the story and the opinions poured in. At the heart of the many lessons learned in our ongoing shared […]
Equity Begins with Knowing the Heart
Several years ago, as students rolled up their yoga mats and filed out the door at the end of the school day, a senior boy slowed as he passed by. “Thank you for making me not hate Ben,” he said. And then he speeded up and continued on his way. As the loudspeaker announcements competed […]
Inspiring Empathy through Artmaking
Inspiring Empathy Through Artmaking / Abbie Bowker / Champlain Valley Union High School “It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.” ― Käthe Kollwitz Art and empathy. There is rarely a better match. Since 2008, the Visual Arts Department at Champlain Valley […]
Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas
Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas A version of this piece originally appeared at VTDigger.org on 8/17/17 BOOKS ARE WEAPONS IN THE WAR OF IDEAS is an oft-used paraphrase of Franklin D. Roosevelt speeches and FDR-commissioned posters during WWII. And make no mistake about it, we are fully entrenched in the latest battle of the […]