The SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity & Diversity)
Peggy McIntosh, Brenda Flyswithhawks, and Emily Style, Co-Directors
Key Ideas behind the SEED Project
• Unless we as teachers re-open our own backgrounds to look anew at how we were schooled to deal with diversity and connection, we will be unable to create school climates and curriculum which more adequately equip today's students to do so.
• Intellectual and personal faculty development, supported over time, is needed if today's schools are to enable students and teachers to develop a balance of self-esteem and respect for the cultural realities of others, in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. SEED seminars often involve other school staff along with teachers; SEED seminars have also been held in colleges and universities, and with parents and students.
• Teachers and other school personnel are the authorities on their own experience. When teachers experience being put at the center of the process of growth and development they can, in turn, more successfully put students' growth and development at the center of their classrooms. What Peggy McIntosh and Emily Style call "faculty-centered faculty development" parallels student-centered learning and achievement.
• Both teachers and students need an awareness that respecting oneself and understanding one's own authority is intimately related to one's ability to respecting and listening to others, since they too are authorities on their life experiences. The SEED Project works within schools to deepen the practice of a democratic balance between self and others in classrooms, schools, and society.
• Without systemic understanding of gender, race, class, and other interlocking societal systems, individual educators who try to transform the curriculum will lack coherence and creative flexibility in dealing with current events and scholarship, old and new. Group conversation, intentionally structured, can support teachers and administrators in creating accurate, nourishing curriculum material, and pedagogical strategies that are more gender balanced, multiculturally equitable, and globally attuned.
• All education can benefit from asking key questions: What would curriculum and pedagogy look like if the lives of women and girls were seen as co-central with the lives of men and boys? And how can curriculum and teaching methods provide, in the metaphors of Emily Style, both "windows" into others' experiences, and "mirrors" of each student's own realities and validity?
