Our Lower School faculty instills a positive attitude toward learning that is crucial as each student begins to establish an academic foundation.

About Brookwood School

  1. Mission
  2. Diversity/Cultural Competence
  3. Message from the Headmaster
  4. The Banner & Bulletin Publications
  5. History of the School
  6. Brookwood Facts
  1. Board of Trustees
  2. Strategic Plan
  3. This Week at Brookwood
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Diversity and Cultural Competence

BROOKWOOD STATEMENT OF COMMITMENT

In an effort to create an equitable and just school environment for all members of our community, we endorse the following Statement of Commitment.

It is my right to be physically and emotionally safe within the Brookwood School community.

It is my responsibility to help create a positive environment by treating all people with dignity. I will strive daily to respect difference in appearance, perspective, ability, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, class, and family structure.

When I choose to communicate my perspectives, I will strive to communicate them directly. I will listen  respectfully  to the perspectives of others.






“By bringing into the classroom their cultures, their backgrounds, the wealth of their life’s experiences, our faculty teach from a multicultural rather than a monocultural perspective.  This approach is the only way our students will understand the world from many viewpoints which is essential to success in the 21st century.   We also teach our students the skills of cultural competence -- to be good citizens who respect the beliefs of others.  Brookwood prides itself in being an honest, equitable, and just community.”

– Headmaster John Peterman

BROOKWOOD'S COMMITMENT TO CULTURAL COMPETENCE

The Brookwood School Board of Trustees recognizes the importance of developing a student body competent to negotiate a world that is made up of peoples of different races, cultures, backgrounds, belief systems and orientations.  Towards this end, the Board Committee on Cultural Competence drafted a list of beliefs relating to cultural competence that have been long supported by the school but had not yet been expressly articulated. This list was unanimously endorsed by the Board and was received with overwhelming enthusiasm by our faculty. We hope this list will serve to clarify for both current and prospective parents our commitment to cultivating cultural competence. 

We believe: 

  • Students’ membership in their immediate communities, as well as their competence and confidence as global citizens, will be significantly enhanced by virtue of a global consciousness and a broad cultural awareness.
  • Students will be better prepared to solve problems, simple and grand, when their empathetic imaginations have been enlarged by exposure to and consideration of the culturally and ecologically rich world that surrounds and contains them.
  • In the importance of a school culture that values inquiry and inspires students to consider multiple perspectives to push past what otherwise gets taken at face value.
  • Encounters with diversity and appreciation for differences within the Brookwood classroom, faculty and curriculum are essential to the development of cultural competence.
  • Our students’ experience with differences will develop an enhanced self-awareness, and a fuller understanding and respect for those who practice, believe and live differently.
  • Our experiences with diversity can sometimes pose challenges, but with a spirit of exploration and respect, these experiences will cultivate a sense of global citizenship and a greater appreciation for the common humanity that binds us.
  • The development of cultural competence is essential for success in a global environment and in our pursuit “to graduate academically accomplished students of conscience, character and compassion”.