Middlebury’s Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation fortified BLTN’s longstanding tradition of teaching and learning across difference by supporting grants to teachers and community organizers who designed school or community projects focused on creative solutions to conflict-based systems and situations. BLTN awarded 16 grants during the 2022-23 school year. (A new round of offerings will be announced in early fall, 2023.) Rabiah Khalil and Lauren Davenport’s “Insight on Sight” project is detailed in this issue. Each of the funded projects is listed below.

• Fallon Abel (MA ’19) of The Sharon Academy in Sharon, Vermont, submitted her Change Action Grant during her semester teaching in Finland. (See BLTN News and Announcements). Abel will apply grant funds to a yearlong academic course and international collaboration between Vermont and Finnish high school students. The collaboration supports the design of action projects aimed at decreasing “rates of suicidality, self-harm, and substance use.”
• Colin Baumgartner of JR Tucker High School in Henrico, Virginia, took on poor perceptions of his students’ rural and suburban community by offering minigrants to students aimed at positive community change. See Seeds of Change: Minigrants for Social Change and Conflict Transformation.
• Laura Benton (MA ’17) of Woodford High School in Versailles, Kentucky, purchased novels and anthologies to diversify her students’ curriculum.
• Yili Fan of East Pt. Academy in West Columbia, South Carolina, proposed a film festival to help students with creativity and communication “in a hypertechnological, hyperconnected artificial intelligence era.”
• An “enrichment deficit” is how Matthew Haughton (MA ’18) described the conflict at Safe Harbor Academy in Versailles, Kentucky. Haughton addressed music through teaching artists and instruments, and included art therapy as well.
• Music educator Genithia Hogges of Arlington Elementary in Lawrence, Massachusetts, designed a music education intern program as model for other schools in response to under-representation of teachers of color in a majority students of color district.
• Kayla Hostetler, Site Mentor of BLTN NextGen’s South Carolina site and teacher at Aiken High School reported that her students identified poverty as the most important underlying conflict in their community. They carried out “an interactive resource fair designed and planned by youth.”
• To address post-Covid social-emotional needs of students, Lauren Jewett of Kipp Morial Charter School in New Orleans organized art therapy lessons to help 3rd and 4th grade special education students build their growth mindset, confidence, self-awareness, and self-affirmation.
• Rabiah Khalil (McDonough School, Maryland) and Lauren Davenport (Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology, New York City) designed a classroom-to-classroom exchange, studying Leila Aboulela’s “Farida’s Eyes,” culminating in a virtual author visit and a face-to-face visit between the students. See “Insight on Sight: Seeing One Another across Difference.” Rabiah has been awarded a second grant in 2023 to support next school year’s version of “Insight on Sight.”
• Susan Miera (MA ’97) at Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, took on individual and cultural isolation at a Native American boarding school through student-led literacy nights focusing on indigenous culture and through a social action film club. Susan received a 2023 Change Action Grant to continue this work.
• In “Literacy Nights and Languages: Conflict Transformation in South Burlington Libraries,” Alex O’Brien documents her work at Rick Marcotte Central School in South Burlington, Vermont. She and colleagues organized a series of multilingual literacy nights at area libraries to increase library access for English Language Learner families.
• Marianela Rivera of the Fortaleza Latinx Community Advocacy Group in Lowell, Massachusetts, focused on Inequities experienced by Latinx students in Lowell, Massachusetts, via video documentation of youth led advocacy efforts of Fortaleza (in partnership with Andover Bread Loaf and others).
• Anna Russell Thornton of Yes Prep Public Schools in Houston, Texas, formed a drama club to expand student perspectives through performance and through attending plays.
• Jamie Wilber at City as School in New York City proposed to address “the pervasivenes of racism and culturally un-responsive pedagogical practices within schools” through student training in peer mediation and restorative justice.