The Air and Share series, new this year, went out with a bang Tuesday, May 12. The event was commenced with a speech from Mr. Teacher, who created the event. He told the students that they might not be able to share their voices this year because summer was approaching fast. The purpose of this Air and Share was to plant the seeds of thoughts on diversity and bias so the people who went to the Air and Share in the fall would have ideas to harvest next year.

Mr. Teacher broke the students into small groups of seven or eight, each of which was led by two teachers. The participants were given questions that allowed students to think about problems like stereotypes and personal biases. These questions made the students and teachers confront their own personal biases and how they view and are viewed by people based on social identifiers.

After a small discussion about the questions in the groups, Mr. Teacher asked everyone to write “I will no longer. . .” and “I will challenge myself to. . .” on two different slips of paper on which they completed the phrases by making promises about what they will change about their views on social identifiers.They folded the papers up and kept their responses to themselves.

Mr. Teacher lead the group outside and had them place their negative papers, the “I will no longer…” slip, in a fire pit and he and Mr. Arnold lit them on fire to symbolize the release of their negative prejudices.

The final Air and Share’s goal was to spark thoughts of diversity for students and teachers to dwell on over the summer, so the Hackley community will return next year with ideas to contribute to the first Air and Share in the fall.

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Credit: Benjy Renton

The fire pit at this year's final Air and Share.