“Share the learning, but not the details.” This is a norm that I must adhere to in order to honor the new relationships I have forged as the director of a leadership program for students in the greater Birmingham, AL-metro area. The program was created in 1986 to bring student leaders together from all corners of Birmingham. For 37 years, it has paved a way to a more compassionate and understanding community.
This year’s class is comprised of 35 student leaders from 19 schools. I came to this new work five months ago from a fairly diverse independent school, and I thought I was prepared. It didn’t take long for me to figure out I had quite a bit of learning to do.
On the second day of the program, we all came together to talk about what makes us different, special, and unique. One of the students who had been quiet on Day 1 boldly spoke up.
“Y’all might think I go to public school, but I really attend an all-girls school because all of the boys at my school feel more hope and connection in their gangs, so they just don’t come.”
You could hear a pin drop.
I was stunned.
I had to dig in, but not to the conversation. Rather, I had to step back and deal with the reality that I may not truly understand the realities that some of the students in my new community were facing. Though I had enjoyed hours and hours of diversity, equity, and inclusion training, and though I was moderately aware of what students in low-income public schools faced, I was not prepared. Call it naivety, call it white privilege, call it ignorance, but now that it was out there, her story called me to contend with the degree of self-awareness and pedagogical readiness that I needed to run this program.
She continued, “The boys don’t feel like they belong in school. They feel safer and more hopeful in their gangs.”
There it was: Belonging. Safety. Hope. Connectedness. These are all harbingers of community and leadership that we talk about at the gcLi. These are all concepts that I’ve written lesson plans around when teaching leadership in the classroom and at retreats. So why was I so surprised to learn that one of the student leaders in this selective leadership program saw this from an angle I had never considered? Whereas I saw school as the place to create community and belonging, she was telling me that school was the last place students in her community found belonging.
Yes, I knew the statistics, and I’ve studied articles about the connection between violence, truancy, community, and belonging, but as a teacher in an independent school, the stats just didn’t apply to most of the students in my classroom. Certainly, in the almost 30 years I spent in an independent school setting, I saw trauma, conflict, pain, and I worked with students from very diverse backgrounds. In fact, the majority of the students in my classes were from hard-working middle class families who made enormous sacrifices to meet their monthly tuition payments. So what created this productive dissonance? 
It was in the face-to-face, matter-of-fact way that my new student told her story that I saw a known reality in a way that articles and statistics simply cannot. In the course of a few minutes, the vulnerable bravery of my new student opened my eyes not only to her reality, but also to the bubble that had held my entire career up to that point.
BEFORE THE BUBBLE BURST:
As a leadership educator in independent schools, I like to think that I helped students make a difference in the community. I directed students to community service and helped design impactful projects. All of that was wonderful, and it mattered, but now I was seeing that my ability to mentor and advise was limited by my own experiences and vantage point, and I realized that the subject matter that I once used to help students grapple with to develop projects were largely topical and academic– poverty, literacy, healthcare-related topics, racism, mental health, etc. They were all topics grounded in data. Also, until this moment, I siloed stories more than I care to admit, and I will admit that I didn’t actively seek personal narratives as priority in my leadership education teaching paradigm.
AFTER THE BUBBLE BURST:
In an instant, I was seeing root causes that cannot ever be truly quantified: belongingness, respect, trust, hope. My brilliant, astute new student had connected truancy to belongingness, and through her story my heart flayed open and I saw my charge as a leadership educator in a much more human way. Through story, I not only better understood her situation, I also better understood myself and my limitations. Through story, I not only felt connection, but I also finally understood the facts and statistics that were once just facts. In short, empathy made my understanding of the data come alive, and it also gave me a pathway for improved self-awareness and pedagogy.
In Conscious Leadership, authors Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer delineate fact versus story. “Facts are objective data. Facts are what a video would record…Stories are interpretations of facts. Stories are all judgements, opinions, and beliefs that we derive from facts…[Conscious leaders] make sure that all facts are out on the table and then they encourage the expression of stories.”
It’s a fact that truancy is a problem in many underserved schools. Of course, I knew that. Rather, it was her quick story– and how vulnerably and matter of factly she told it– that allowed me to see realities within the facts a little differently. Data and facts are compelling, but from her story I derived the motivation to add much more listening and storytelling to my work in leadership education.
Story has always shaped our world. Famed anthropologist and ethnographer Clifford Geertz exonerated the magnitude of story, stating, “Stories matter. So do stories about stories.” We use them to explain the unimaginable and imagine the impossible.
So, I urge teachers and leaders to intentionally think about how stories can work in your organization to simultaneously deepen learning and strengthen relationships.
My charge as the director of a metro-area leadership program is to bring students together to learn from one another and to forge authentic relationships that will reach across racial and socio-economic lines to make a change in our community.
I knew I would probably learn a thing or two from the students when I took on this new role, but I didn’t expect the lessons to be so immediate. The lessons that my students are teaching me and one another are essential to understanding how to make the world a better, more equitable place, and they are doing it through intentional, honest, vulnerable storytelling.
Yes, data is vitally important, but I will never again underestimate the power of a truth-telling, truth-seeing, truth-hearing, truth-seeking story when it comes to my own pedagogy of leadership.
(This is Part I of a two-part piece. Stay tuned for Part II in April.)
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Katherine Berdy, M.Ed, is the current director of Youth Leadership Forum, a non-profit designed to teach leadership and forge relationships to students throughout the Birmingham, AL metropolitan area. Katherine’s career and pedagogical foundations began in the mid 1990’s while working as an outdoor educator in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, work that directly influenced her career as the director of The C. Kyser Miree Ethical Leadership Center at The Altamont School in Birmingham, AL, where she created community partnerships and experiential educational opportunities for Altamont’s students. In addition to hosting the gcLi Podcast, Katherine has presented at SAIS (Southern Association of Independent Schools) and NNSP (National Network of Independent Schools) with gcLi. She holds a B.A. in Communication Studies from Vanderbilt University and an M.Ed. from the University of Montevallo. Her teaching portfolio includes classes in English, theater, creative writing, leadership studies, public speaking, and debate. In her spare time, Katherine enjoys traveling, reading, knitting, photography, and spending time with friends and her husband and two children.