SEED leader and high school American history teacher Mary Jo Merrick-Lockett, a White woman married to an African-American man, writes about how SEED Founder Peggy McIntosh’s piece on White privilege and the experience of leading a SEED group helped her understand her own experiences with race and to communicate about race in a way that placed her story within the larger framework of institutionalized racism.

Modeling strong leadership through vulnerable transparency, SEED leader and former staff member Eric Chapman, head of the Middle School at the Calhoun School in Manhattan, wrote to his staff about Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Jr., and has allowed us to share his words here.

This post is by Allison Spire, a SEED leader and K-1 teacher at Our Community School in Chatsworth, California.

Since attending SEED New Leaders’ Week, I can no longer teach the traditional pilgrim stories (the single story) I have always known. I keep hearing the voice of Chimamanda Adichie saying in her video (in that beautiful voice), "Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story." At first, since I had not had an opportunity to develop new curriculum, I simply focused on a general theme of "being thankful." I believed that was, at least, better than teaching the single story—until I could get my act together.