The All-Terrain Teacher

Peter Gow

Things are getting rugged, and change is in the wind.

But a few things are clear for educators. One obvious fact is that the diversity train has long since left the station, and those of us who teach kids had better be ready. The haters and white supremacists have already lost the demographic battle, try as they may to keep warping the rule of law to favor their own kind. European Americans in the United States will be a minority—whether it happens in 2020, 2030, or 2050, it doesn’t matter, because it is the future.

But when will this racial and cultural diversity be manifest everywhere? I don’t mean just regionally, or city/suburb/rural, or public school/private school, but everywhere we go and everywhere we look and everywhere we live? This is likely to happen farther off than 2020, as the current European American majority has had a few centuries to learn how to keep to itself when it’s in our (ouch! but yes, for this writer it’s the fact) interest to do so.

The contemporary political climate has done nothing but make things worse. Whether one is on the offensive or defensive, one is always made to feel that one’s own position is either vulnerable or intolerant. It reminds me of the way in which White America from the colonial period through the 19th century dealt with Native Americans: concoct or imagine signs of some sort of dire threat, loudly play the victim, and then respond by attacking with overwhelming force. It’s the “paranoid style” at its most egregious.

If independent schools are as committed as most of them say they are to issues of equity and justice, and if they really want to enact the ideals in their missions, they have a lot of work to do. Plenty of schools are busy doing that work, discovering that the farther along they get, the harder the work becomes. Idealism of any sort requires great courage and great honesty, and humans are frail; when having to open our minds and our hearts to whole new ways of being and knowing, we are often more frail still.

Some years back a colleague by the name of Nadine Nelson did some amazing work at the school I worked at to help us figure out how to be a better place for our students and colleagues from underrepresented groups. She had a term that has stayed with me, the “All-Terrain Kid.” The ATK was the student who would be sufficiently curious, sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently humble, sufficiently informed, and sufficiently brave to be at home in any cultural milieu. Parachute the All-Terrain Kid into any setting, and they would be able to present themself with respect and intelligence and to communicate on an authentic level with anyone.

The All-Terrain Kid is an ideal I still hold in my head for our students and for my own children. That’s the kid who can look beyond the divisiveness that agitates our society now and for whom newly evolving communities that truly represent the diversity of our society and our planet will be welcoming, welcome, and exciting places.

I think schools should be thinking equally hard about how to develop the All-Terrain Teacher. However one construes “diversity,” the ATT has to be able to negotiate it with the integrity, wit, and courage in all of its manifestations. Who is going to teach generations of All-Terrain Kids, if not generations of All-Terrain Teachers?

Once upon a time the TJX Corporation put together a diversity task force built around what they called the “arenas of diversity.” I like the model, and drawing on it I would propose that the training and the work of the All-Terrain Teacher be built around these six Arenas of Diversity:

1. Age and generation. We’ve become cutely adept at naming generations and fractions of generations to differentiate them, but differentiation cannot become segregation. Boomers, Millennials, or end-of-the-alphabetters or whatever—they will represent significant diversity in an aging society that paradoxically worships youth culture, and they will need to learn to understand one another and work together. This is especially true in schools, where the (relatively) old and the (relatively) young must come together for the highest of common purposes
   
2. Race and culture. Whatever the other dimensions of diversity, these remain at the heart of the matter. Often visible and burdened with a long and terrible history, race matters, and so, broadly construed, does culture, especially in a society dogged by its own identity crisis, as witnessed by too many daily occurrences of violence, prejudice, and sheer disrespect, not to mention an inexplicable and toxic inability to come to grips with the issue of immigration.
   
3. Gender, gender expression, and sexual orientation. How do we build a society that can guarantee security, respect, and equal opportunity and compensation to all people, regardless of gender and sexual identity? Schools are already unsafe places for children who wrestle with these issues, and the achievement and reward gap between boys and girls seems to be an intractable problem. These challenges must be addressed, and again, schools are the crucibles in which better practices must be forged for society as a whole.
   
4. Class and status. We’re in an era when income disparities have risen to all-time highs and when “Masters of the Universe” privilege themselves in every conceivable way. At the same time, the “middle class” scarcely knows how to define itself. Teachers and schools are going to have to face difficult issues in this arena. Independent schools, especially, which tend to come with a significant dollar cost, will need to figure this out.
   
5. Ability and wellness. Issues around health care, accessibility, genetic testing, and accommodation of different abilities will continue to grow as genetic science moves forward and as our society ages. How will differences in access to services and support manifest themselves among students and teachers, and how will schools be able to confidently address these differences? Will schools have to take stands on issues we cannot now even foresee? How can teachers keep up, and what new fields of ethics will guide them toward confidence and competence?
   
6. Religion, faith, and spirituality. The ecumenical spirit that moved some of the Western world a few decades ago seems to have passed, and religious extremism, exclusivity, and active prejudice are rampant. Conservatives (or fundamentalists or hard-liners; call them whatever) are quick to call down righteous wrath upon those with whom they disagree, but humans need to believe in something. Beneficent, inclusive spiritual lessons—lessons of love, not hate—are very much to be found in every faith tradition. Educators and institutions will need to be comfortable with not just multiple but multiplying perspectives on the spiritual lives being lived in their communities.

​The All-Terrain Teacher in the thoughtful school will need to have given enormous intentional consideration to each of these areas. Some schools may choose to opt out of this work, keeping their doors and hearts closed to certain kinds of difference, but the terrain that their students, families, and faculties will be negotiating will change nonetheless. Those who choose not to participate will surely be left far behind.

Like the All-Terrain Kid, the All-Terrain Teacher is an ideal. But the ideal can be fulfilled. It will take more than workshops and seminars, more than “diversity days” and diversity offices. It will have to begin with a systemic acknowledgment within the school that the world is truly changing, and that old modes and orders are going to be giving way to new ones, regardless of anyone’s comfort with the change. To do the work will take nerves of steel and a willingness to try new things and to learn from our blunders as we do. And it should go without saying that all-terrain-ness will have to be manifest in every aspect of a school’s curriculum and programs.

Perhaps there is a Seventh Arena of Diversity, the arena of change itself. Above all, schools that want to be themselves “all-terrain” will need to master the art of moving forward like a camel in a sandstorm, able to survive ever-shifting conditions and avoiding the ever-present temptation to stop and rest. The goal, the creation of an “all-terrain world” whose ideals are as inclusive and morally generous as the ideals of the school, is out there: it lies just where our words and our loftiest hopes place it. If we keep it in sight, we can make it.

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