CUT AND PASTE. The Peterson advisory chooses what to clip out of magazines for their collage.
Advisories craft gender collages
During the last hour of Speaker Day, students returned to their advisories to think about their own gender identities through collage-making.
The Student Intercultural Life Committee, a selected student group focused on addressing issues within diversity, equity, and inclusion, gave a presentation on gender to inspire the art activity. They talked about ideas of gender within different religions and cultures that go beyond a binary understanding of gender and defined terms that might be new to members of the community.
Sophomore Raven Glaser is a SILC representative and helped plan the programming.
“For the presenation, we realized that there were going to be a lot of new words thrown at people and a lot of new words they might have not been exposed to earlier on,” Glaser said
Students were then sent back to their advisories, where they were given a large piece of blank paper to create a gender expression collage.
“Defining the difference between gender and gender expression was an important distinction before we went into the advisory project,” Glaser said.
This is one of SILC’s first projects with the whole student body, and incorporating a student-oriented activity was a priority.
“During Speaker Day you’ve got the adult speakers, so doing something that was student-planned and student-run was a big part of it,” SILC member Cassandra Zirps said.
The collages will be hung up in the Upper School as a reminder and celebration of gender expression.