When You Wonder, You're Learning by Gregg Behr & Ryan Rydzewski

Author:Gregg Behr & Ryan Rydzewski [Behr, Gregg and Rydzewski, Ryan & Rydzewski, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Community Weavers and Leaders

Taylor Allderdice High School is a hulking, beige-gray building on a sloping green lawn in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, a bustling mashup of cultures, traditions, religions, and food. Its students come from some of the poorest parts of Pittsburgh as well as some of the wealthiest, converging on streets lined with synagogues, churches, Chinese restaurants, specialty shops, and leafy trees that shade the wide boulevards.

It’s an idyllic couple of miles—the kind of place you’d picture when you hear the word neighborhood. No wonder Rogers made Squirrel Hill his home: The lifelong Presbyterian felt a spiritual kinship with his predominately Jewish neighbors and their concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” For much of his adult life, Rogers lived just a few blocks from Allderdice—the school where, in 2016, a first-year student named Peyton Klein looked around and saw that something was wrong.

“I was sitting in homeroom,” she remembers, “and I realized I knew everybody’s name except for one. I’d grown up in a Jewish household and I believed all these things about being welcoming and understanding, but I wasn’t really living those values. So I turned and said hello.”

The stranger’s name was Khwala.

Although Khwala was still learning English—it was only recently that she’d fled her home in Syria—she and Klein managed to bond. The girls shared, after all, something that transcends the limits of language, of borders, and of childhoods spent an ocean and a scripture apart. “We both really, really hated biology,” says Klein. “We talked about it every day.”

The friendship gave Klein a glimpse into the challenges faced by English language learners. Things that native speakers take for granted, such as meeting with a guidance counselor or getting a schedule changed, become orders of magnitude more difficult. So do everyday things like making friends and doing homework. And then there’s the added challenge of prejudice—of being teased on one end of the spectrum and being called a terrorist on the other.

The insight led Klein to launch the Global Minds Initiative, an intercultural organization run entirely by youth. At its core, Global Minds is part conversational English practice and part cultural bridge—a place where students’ voices matter, whether they’re from Squirrel Hill or Syria. “We always say that diversity is a fact, but inclusivity is a choice,” says Klein. “At Global Minds, we make the conscious choice to be inclusive.”

What began with Klein and Khwala quickly grew to ten members, then twenty, then one hundred. By the end of its first year, Global Minds took up a whole floor after school. Students came for conversations about diversity and human rights and inequality, says Klein, but they stayed for community—for fellowship and mutual exchange. “At Global Minds, my friends from Ecuador might help me with my Spanish homework, and I might help them with history or math,” says Klein. “No one is saving anyone. We’re all cocreators. We’re all building a community together.”

Over time, Klein and her peers developed a curriculum for building positive, diverse communities:

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