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Bosque School
Bosque School

Bosque School Equity, Community, & Culture (ECC) Principles & Best Practices

At Bosque School, we strive to create a learning environment that respects and dignifies the diverse identities and experiences of our students, their families, our colleagues, trustees, and our shared and individual communities. Our ECC guiding principles and best practices seek to inform all deliberations, decisions, and policies in our daily work both on and off campus. We are committed to proactively engaging in anti-racist work and believe that an inclusive and equitable learning environment is essential to fulfilling our school’s mission of creating “ transformative learning experiences that empower a diverse community of students to lead lives of intellectual curiosity, personal integrity, and compassionate contribution to a more just world.” This is a living document intended to reflect our unending capacity for, and commitment to, growth.

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my  humanity and right to exist.” -Robert Jones, Jr.

We manifest these principles in the following manner:

  1. As a foundation to all such principles, we actively acknowledge that Bosque School exists on the ancestral homelands of Puebloan peoples in the Rio Grande bosque.
  2. We understand that building a respectful and empathetic classroom community and staffulty culture requires recognition of how implicit bias and systems of privilege may affect our interactions with students, families, and colleagues. We intervene constructively when dehumanizing language, actions, or ideas are put forth in or out of the classroom. 
  3. We consider all teaching, learning, programmatic, and administrative decisions through the lens of equity, community, and culture. 
  4. We recognize that our richest learning takes place when we step beyond our comfort zones. We expect to experience discomfort when discussing identity, privilege, (in)equity, and (in)justice, and we understand this discomfort to be a natural part of learning.
  5. Student and staffulty exploration of topics through the lens of equity, community, and culture is humanizing. Curricular representation of any group of people should not be limited to trauma, discrimination, or oppression. We promote examples of diverse individuals and groups who have successfully overcome systemic racism, oppression, adversities, and barriers to equity. 
  6. We proactively design our curriculum so that all students experience a coherent, current, age-appropriate exploration of topics that challenges them to more fully appreciate the range of human experiences. 
  7. As a school whose identity is so closely defined by its specific place, we intentionally connect with, seek to understand, and contribute to the diverse and complex cultural composition of New Mexico.
  8. We acknowledge that our students and community members are citizens of the world. We strive to find our place and voice within the larger context of humanity.
  9. We aspire to facilitate effective cross-cultural learning by creating student-centered classrooms— recognizing and respecting our students’ lived experiences.
  10. We use multiple approaches to engage students with a wide variety of learning styles.    
  11. We commit to speaking from personal experience. We avoid making generalizations about individuals and/or groups of people that are grounded in stereotypes and/or dehumanizing 
  12. We avoid statements and curricular framings that assume particular positionalities are shared by everyone in the classroom and community. For example, teachers seek to know and use individuals’ preferred pronouns and respect their self-identification, while avoiding centering whiteness, unnecessarily gendered language, and activities that assume our students share the same economic realities or familial compositions. 
  13. We commit to ongoing professional development related to equity, community, and culture, including deepening our knowledge of current best practices and continuing the individual growth required to manifest these practices. 

 

As a NAIS member school, we commit to the NAIS Principles of Good Practice of Equity and Justice: NAIS schools value the representation and full engagement of individuals within our communities whose differences include—but are not limited to—age, ethnicity, family makeup, gender identity and expression, learning ability, physical ability, race, religion, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.