I’ve been having conversations with a few different folks in my Mastermind and some coaching connections about language this week, and thinking about specific
verbiage as it relates to comments on report cards, or what we call Communications of Student Learning here in BC. For example, what is a good alternative to the gender specific
term “sportsmanship”? I’ve come up with a few ideas, such as rearranging the sentence to include “sporting”,
or “sporting behaviour”, or “sense of fair play”. I’d be interested to hear what others come up with.
I believe it is important that we have conversations like this, so our students (and school communities) see representations of themselves in our daily workings, and also so it is a welcoming, safe place. For this to
happen I need to reflect on my gendered, white-normative, binary privileges and reexamine how and why I do things the way I do in the school environment.
I can't remember where I found this link, but here’s an example of a someone doing that challenging work:
