The Shanti Alliance Experience - Student Reflections
Reflections by Grace S.
This year’s Shanti Alliance Conference was an amazing experience. This was my second year attending the conference and I loved hearing Mrs. Rosetta Lee speak about how to foster courageous conversations in our school communities. One resource she shared caught my eye immediately: William Taylor’s Reflective Competence Model. I’ve found myself at different stages of this model as my Shanti cohort has navigated our DEI work focusing on ability. We’ve been creating a blog that shares resources and personal stories about how ability affects those in our community in an attempt to expose students at Punahou to a topic they otherwise may know little about. As I’ve been researching ability, I’ve had to recognize my own ignorance on the topic and work through the different stages of the Reflective Competence Model. In the beginning, I found myself in the discovery stage (conscious incompetence), working to understand more about the topic of ability itself. Then, I moved towards the learning and effort stage (conscious competence), where I’ve been attempting to unlearn all my biases and reflect on what the topic of ability means to me. I hope that in the future, all this knowledge will become second nature as I find myself in the unconscious competence section of the model! By having the opportunity to attend these conferences through Shanti Alliance as well as reflect on my own abilities when creating my blog, I’ve become a more educated and empathetic person.
-Grace S., Punahou School
Reflections by Caitlyn N.
To address the lack of diversity and underrepresentation within our society, I joined my school’s Shanti Alliance Cohort in 2020 to learn more about what is required to increase DEI. The first year was spent studying the different Core Cultural Identifiers that differentiate a person’s identity. I was fortunate to be able to work with other passionate students at ‘Iolani and learn from engaging conversations with my advisors. After a few months of figuring out what the ‘Iolani community needed in terms of DEI, our Aloha Cohort designed a project to integrate a ninth grade sequence course that would broaden students’ mindset in terms of race and DEI and hopefully facilitate meaningful conversations in and outside the classroom. Throughout the first year, many workshops were offered through zoom as stepping stones to help us develop our school project. Branching into my second year working with Shanti Alliance, I found that my interest in social justice became one of my passions. One of the impactful things I learned from Rosetta Lee this year is that we spend most of our time thinking we know everything, instead of leaning into the unknown by educating ourselves and listening with empathy. This idea has influenced my perspective of being a thoughtful listener when having difficult conversations with my friends, classmates, and family members. The 2022 annual DEI Conference, began with a beautiful chant said by Kealoha Scullion followed by presentations from Rosetta Lee, students, and schools that defined the process of Interrupting Injustice with care and patience. At the conference two of my cohort members and I presented the timeline of our current project and our hopes for future endeavors. The critical and positive feedback we received is one of the many reasons that made the DEI conference a success. Overall, one thing I would like to share with my ‘Iolani community would be the idea that there are many ways to “interrupt injustice,” either through student and faculty surveys or by sharing daily vocabulary words in our daily bulletin about DEI. We do not have to be perfect or politically correct in every conversation, but to achieve our goal of greater diversity, equity, and inclusion, we have to start somewhere.
-Caitlyn N. ʻIolani School