CAIS DEI Vision Statement
通过多元、公平与包容实现办学宗旨
Fulfilling Our Mission Through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We envision a school community rooted in kindness, where all members experience a sense of belonging. As a dual language immersion school, we have distinctive opportunities to build upon our community’s existing mix of languages, cultures, ideas, and identities to foster an intellectually challenging and socially meaningful education. The formidable and complex work of building diversity, equity, and inclusion is vital for realizing our potential.
When focusing our energy and resources to further this mission, we must look at factors such as differences in how particular group identities thrive at CAIS and imbalances of privilege and opportunity both within and beyond our school.
GROUNDED
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OUR COMMITMENTS
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DEFINITIONS
认同 Identity: The characteristics that define one as a unique individual and as a member of different groups. Social identity is a characteristic that matters in a group because it is attached to commonly-held preconceptions and enduring beliefs about who we are. Because of these beliefs, social identities—especially those that are unexamined—have consequential impact on our experiences, relationships, and self-concept.
多元 Diversity: Differences of identity that impact the social status, access to resources and opportunities, and other privileges and disadvantages of entire groups of people in a community. Sometimes used to refer to minority groups, “diversity” includes majority and normative groups, without whom there would be no perceived difference.
公平 Equity: As opposed to treating every individual equally (i.e. identically), equity practice presumes diversity and strives to equalize the ability of individuals and groups with different experiences, status, privileges/ disadvantages, and access to resources and opportunities to thrive in a community by recognizing and addressing unfair cultural and institutional biases and discrimination.
包容 Inclusion: Beyond simply being nice or prohibiting discrimination, inclusion is how a group actively creates an environment in which diverse members “share a sense of belonging, mutual respect, being valued for who they are, and supportive energy and commitment from others so that they can do their best work” (Miller & Katz, 2002). The practice of inclusivity begins with noticing and broadening our own sense of “normal” and “how we do,” to cultivate shared rights and mutual stewardship of the community.
CAIS has adopted the definitions above through our work with Blink Consulting.
SUPPORTING RESEARCH
New York Times (NYT article is a helpful introduction to further reading such as this article in Psychological Science)