Rivers Faculty Bruce Taylor, Jim Long Flourish as Instructors in Boston’s Student Leadership Institute

Every day, Rivers students have the privilege of learning from the school's passionate and resourceful faculty. During the summer, a select group of students from outside the Rivers community have the same opportunity, albeit for a much more condensed period of time.

 

Bruce Taylor ’73—Media Literacy teacher, assistant to the librarian, and coach—as well as Assistant Head of School Jim Long, are part of Boston's Summer Leadership Institute. Every summer for the last several years, they have joined forces to educate a small group of young student leaders, all of whom currently live in the city of Boston, as part of a seven-week youth internship experience.

 

During the seventh and final week of the program, Long and Taylor present a civil rights course to the SLI group, which reflects the curriculum of the civil rights course they have offered on campus at Rivers for the last decade.

 

“It's an opportunity for us to give back to the broader community on an issue that we have taught for a number of years,” Long said. “It's an incredibly motivating experience for kids who have had some really impoverished backgrounds, and their particular insights and personal journeys are pretty humbling.”

 

Added Taylor, "Working together and collaborating at Rivers, in our civil rights class, made our presentation to those students more genuine. That's why I think they buy into the information that we're presenting to them.”

 

Long, who has been involved with the SLI for a bit longer than Taylor, thought his Rivers colleague would be a good fit for the program and brought him into the fold about five years ago. Taylor—a native of Roxbury, Mass., who attended Boston Public Schools before coming to Rivers—has flourished as an instructor in the program ever since. 

 

"Jim finally said to me one summer, before we went on break, 'BT, we'd love to have you come in and work with these kids. You're from the city; you might connect with them better,” Taylor said. "So I jumped on board, and it's been a great experience."

 

Taylor uses his own personal experiences as a student who grew up amidst the city's racial turmoil to inform his teaching.

 

"In essence," he said, "what we teach them is something I've lived. I'm not just sharing some material from a textbook; I'm sharing real experiences and real knowledge."

 

All eight of the SLI participants are students from Boston Public Schools and are hand-picked from a group of 35-40 students following an application process that involves interviews and personal essays. Before each of the seven one-week sessions begins, the SLI administrators share biographical information with each instructor about the students' academic skills and familial backgrounds.

 

 

Though teaching at the SLI is a bit different from teaching at Rivers—mostly because of the time allotted—Taylor believes the students in the program benefit every bit as much from his class as the students at Rivers.

 

"This is a subject matter that's unlike most other disciplines. This is real life," Taylor said. "Math is real life, science and art is real life, but we're talking about human experience. Every student that we expose this information to has some opinion about it, whether it's good or bad. We make it so personal that the students leap at the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions."

 

The curriculum varies from summer to summer and covers everything from the Boston busing crisis, to the "I Have a Dream” speech, to Rosa Parks, to the Trayvon Martin case. In the end, the goal is that the students leave the program with a better understanding of how to use these historical events to inform their leadership styles and skills—and how to use that leadership in the future to improve America's ever-changing democracy.

 

"The kids were selected from their schools because they are potential leaders," Taylor said. "We want to reiterate that point to them constantly throughout the course. Leadership shows up in a variety of ways; Rosa Parks was an introverted leader, Martin Luther King was an extroverted leader. It takes all types to get something going. That makes them go out and say, 'Walls can be torn down. Successes and challenges can be conquered.'"