Teachers Kick Off The School Year With Implicit Bias Workshop

The school community at St. Bernadette Catholic School in Burien, WA is highly diverse, welcoming students from all backgrounds. These students bring their identities, cultures, traditions, families, hopes and aspirations to class each day, all of which are all wrapped up in the package of their names. What happens to a student's self perception if his or her name is unfamiliar or unpronounceable to their teacher, or the cause for teasing with their classmates? The Teaching Tolerance 2018 fall workshop for teachers and two classrooms, "What's in a Name?" given by Anupama Singh and Kathleen McHugh seeks to uncover occasions for implicit bias around names. This workshop gives strategies for respectful ways to approach unfamiliar names, discusses universal values and particular religious and ethnic naming customs, and strives to promote the awareness that no name is a random accident. Anupama Singh, an educational, cultural and public administration professional in both India and the United States, and Kathleen McHugh, a visual artist, teaching artist and advisory board member of the International Child Art Foundation, were introduced to one another by Wing Luke Museum staff during their participation in the exhibition Under My Skin. As an outcome of Under My Skin, they developed the workshop "What's in a Name?" The generous support of the Fulcrum Foundation is bringing this workshop to every classroom at St. Bernadette Catholic school. Every student and teacher in the school is creating his or her own artistic name plaque. All the name plaques installed together in one unit will be shown at the school's international student art exhibition in November-December 2018.