Alma Partners DEIJB Assessment Guide
The following Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging Assessment Guide provides perspective on the inclusion and support of different social identities in your school community in an ongoing way. We offer the questions in this guide to support you in honoring and recognizing the impact of intersectionality on the students, families, colleagues, and leadership at your school. It is organized by theme. In each theme are a few guiding questions, pulled from a more robust assessment guide, found in the Alma Partners Online Course, Fulfilling Our Promise: Becoming Inclusive Waldorf Communities.
Additionally, you can consider the following resources for deepening assessment:
Guiding Questions
1. Affirmation:
How are different identities portrayed to students in your classroom and school? Do you notice any stereotypes perpetuated in the portrayal of certain identities? Do you notice any attempts to break stereotypes? What is communicated in the portrayals of different groups?
Consider:
What roles do people of different races play?
What roles do different genders and gender expressions play?
How are different family structures portrayed?
How is a diversity of physical ability portrayed?
What about a diversity of socio-economic status? What roles do people with wealth have? What roles do people without wealth have?
What about people of other marginalized groups? Do you notice bias?
2. Community:
What events at your school recognize and celebrate racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity?
If so, what could be added to this list?
If you don’t have any, where could you begin?
Have you hosted events honoring other kinds of diversity in your community? Consider: Family structure, class backgrounds, neurodivergence, physical ability, languages spoken at home, etc.
For example: when do you host events and what does this mean about who can attend and how family members are expected to participate? Does your school include events such as LGTBQIA+ celebrations or celebrations of chosen family to make room for all kinds of family structures? Other examples might include an autism awareness fair, or extending the school’s festival life (or event invitations) to languages other than English, to broaden cultural reference points.
3. Curriculum:
Look at your curriculum through your students’ eyes: is there implicit or explicit bias in which stories you tell or how you tell them, in the depictions of characters or events?
Which characters have agency? Who are the heroes?
Are examples of oppression and also of collaboration between different identity groups studied?
4. Discipline:
Are there particular students whose behavior attracts a lot of attention? Does social identity play a part in this, such as race or neurodiversity?
What kinds of professional development and support do you and your colleagues have (or need) regarding awareness of and redirection of implicit bias and microaggressions?
What discipline practices and policies are in place in your school and classroom, and what do they reinforce?
5. Images:
Is the student work featured in the hallways or around the classroom highlighting both diversity and commonalities among students?
Do any of the pictures reinforce biases and stereotypes? How so?
6. Incidents of Bias:
Have you been made aware of prejudice or incidents of bias in your school or with your students?
If so, do you know how to respond or to whom to go?
7. Modeling:
Are your students exposed to a variety of diverse, positive role models?
What are you modeling to your students through how you do or do not address bias, prejudice, and oppression when it is apparent in a topic you are studying in the classroom or the world at large?
8. Practice:
Are you explicit about promoting equity and access points for all students?
What about academic and physical accommodations?
Are you building cross-cultural reciprocal relationships with people outside of the school community? What does this look like?
How does this inform your approach to lessons, learning, and school events?
9. Representation:
Who in your school community is in a position of leadership, and what are their social identities?
Who makes up your student body?
What social identities are represented in your faculty?
10. Values:
What classroom culture or school-community culture values do you hold?
How do these community values reflect the racial, ethnic, and cultural identities of your students' home cultures?
What about their class backgrounds, family structures, physical abilities, neurodivergence, spirituality and religion, etc?
How do the ideas and ideals of these class values play out in day-to-day interactions? How do you use them to shape your class or your school, interact with your families, and support your students?
