INSIGHT: Learning from Our Students

By Bess McKinney, EICL Co-Coordinator

A teaching cliché that I think about nearly every day is that we learn as much from our students as we teach them. I think about it so often because it is so true, and so essential to what we do at EPS and in EICL work. As Lisa Delpit, an education researcher, scholar, and author, wrote in Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, “I pray for all of us the strength to teach our children what they must learn, and the humility and wisdom to learn from them so that we might teach better.” In thinking and leading on equity, inclusion, and compassionate leadership, we cannot do the work properly without listening to and learning from students. It is students who know their own experience, after all. And it is students who, time after time, have made our world more equitable, more compassionate, more just.

Student engagement and leadership in EICL has made EPS better, full stop. Allies for Equity Club created and continues to help coordinate Culture Night, a yearly celebration of our community in all of its beauty and diversity. Students plan and guide Upper School and Middle School affinity groups. And, in hundreds of countless conversations throughout the year, students push EPS to be more equitable, more inclusive, more compassionate.

Student engagement in EICL work at EPS continues to evolve, and we continue to work to listen and learn from our students, too. Two years ago, students returned from the National Association of Independent School’s Student Diversity Leadership Conference and proposed the addition of EICL Co-Chairs to the Upper School Student Leadership Council (SLC). These new positions were approved last year and the 8th – 11th graders just elected two new Co-Chairs, Ansuya ’25 and Jazlynn ’25, two student leaders who were instrumental in the creation of these new positions two years ago. Dr. Castro and I look forward to guiding them and learning from them in the coming year. It’s Ansuya and Jazlynn’s leadership and engagement and the commitment of so many other students that not only enriches our school community but also will help them to continue to grow as compassionate leaders and agents of change in an increasingly diverse world.