Teaching students to challenge the assumptions we make about people is one of the many ways Shipley shapes empathic learners. By assigning Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere, Upper School English teacher John Hornung helps his students grapple with what it means—and feels like—to be an “outsider.”
 
Through this introductory unit, students look at how Ng explores the intersection of race, class, and privilege, and how she uses the photographic portraits by the main character to delve into the seemingly perfect lives of each character to uncover what lies beneath the veneer. Once they finish reading the novel, students complete a two-fold summative assessment—a written component paired with a creative component. Much like the portraits in the story, which are a deeply intimate portrayal of this insular community, students design an artistic concept to create self-portraits.
 
Guiding students on their path to personal discovery is an essential cornerstone of Shipley’s multi-faceted goal of building individual and collective well-being. Mr. Hornung provides scaffolding as students reflect on introspective questions such as: how do they see themselves and how do others see them? This exercise not only serves to help the teachers learn more about their students at the beginning of the year—a hallmark of Shipley’s model to developing collective well-being—but also helps the class connect on a deeper level with the significance of inclusion and community.
 
Students’ analysis of Little Fires Everywhere lays the foundation for examining the year’s overarching questions. Mr. Hornung explains, “The setting is a community not unlike the Main Line, where an ‘outsider’ comes in, so we consider: what does it mean for the outsider to be an outsider?” Students trace these essential questions in other poignant works such as Shakespeare’s Othello, the tragic tale of a black general in the Venetian army; Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, in which he details his father’s experience as a Jewish man living in Nazi-occupied Poland and Germany; and Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime, which describes his growing up as a biracial youth in South Africa during apartheid, an era when his parents’ union was punishable by five years in prison.
 
These texts, coupled with introspective questions, will undoubtedly guide students as they reflect on how they, as members of the Shipley community, can extend compassion to ensure that everyone has a place of belonging. For Mr. Hornung, this is his primary goal: “It’s all about using the lens of empathy to find commonalities in spite of our differences.”