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Lisa Brown

    ON THE FLATS

    Meet the Farmers of Mayo Beach

    Growers respond to nature and science as they consider the future of shellfishing

    By

    WELLFLEET — Jake Puffer beckons a group of touring visitors closer, asking if they want to peek inside the ridges of his farm’s oyster hats. Disks dipped in lime, sand, and cement, then stacked and staked into the muddy flats, the hats are arranged in rows designed to catch the billions of oyster larvae swimming in Wellfleet’s waters during the early summer.

    During tours organized by the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance, the nonprofit organization behind the town’s OysterFest, Puffer and others have been giving visitors to the flats a closer look at the shellfishing work most see only from the shore.

    Lisa Brown, a founder of Wellfleet’s OysterFest and the nonprofit behind it, now called the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance, starts the tour with some facts about the history of shellfishing here. (Photos by Edward Boches)

    There are three more tours scheduled this month, says Nancy O’Connell, WOA’s president. The days will be growing shorter by the end of the month, and the festival ahead, on the weekend of Oct. 19-20, will require the attention of just about everyone in the industry.

    The baby oysters Puffer shows the group — once they are lodged on the disks they are called spat — comprise 90 percent of the seed he starts nurturing each year. That’s a lot, Puffer says, in an industry where many buy oyster seed spawned in hatcheries, of which there is only one on Cape Cod, the Aquacultural Research Corp., or A.R.C.

    Puffer put his hats in the water in mid-June, and on an early morning in late July miniature oysters have already begun forming inside the folds like precious crystals. “These are what fuels the farm,” says Puffer, who’s been raising oysters here for over two decades. He took over the grant — these are intertidal parcels that the state allows towns to license to local shellfishermen for aquacultural use — just off Mayo Beach from his father, Irving Puffer, in 2022.

    Jake Puffer who took over his father’s grant in 2022 has himself been farming oysters in Wellfleet harbor for over 20 years.

    In addition to being the time for catching future harvests, the warmer months offer Wellfleet aquaculturists relief from punishingly cold waters. But the summer’s longer days can also mean two low tides during daylight hours, expanding the amount of work to be done on their farms.

    Alongside these seasonal changes, other gradual shifts are underway, some from climate change and others in the way of a generational handoff.

     

    Passing the Torch

    As has happened with his own family, Puffer says, transitions are on the horizon for other older farmers. “There’s going to be a changeover more and more as time goes on,” he says. Puffer says oyster farming is “site-specific,” and he hopes to one day pass what he’s learned about his grant to the next farmer.

    According to Nancy Civetta, Wellfleet’s shellfish constable, the shift is well underway. Since the start of this year, eight people have been added to the list of grant holders, and three of them are the young adult children of current holders. There are now 142 grant holders for 161 grants and 121 farms in Wellfleet, says Civetta.

    “There are very thoughtful plans by a lot of shellfishermen to do things like Jake and his dad did in terms of passing the torch,” says O’Connell. That’s happening in her own family. Her husband, Jim, has been cultivating oysters and clams for over two decades, but he has also been working hard to bring along younger farmers. Over the last few years, his nephew Jimmy Mulpeter has stuck with it, learning every aspect of the work from seed to harvest.

    Jake Puffer tells visitors about collecting and nurturing wild oyster spat on conical hats in the harbor. The natural seed oyster, he says, is “what fuels the farm.”

    Another kind of transition happens when a grant holder has no ready successor. In those cases, the grant is awarded to an up-and-coming shellfisherman through a lottery. Grants that are returned to the lottery are often there for a reason, having been or become unproductive, says Alfred Pickard, who is showing off his clam farm on the tour. He’s not optimistic about those farms.

    But Civetta, the constable, says she’s seen all kinds of difficult plots find success. She adds that, for those entering the industry, there are opportunities for apprenticeship on existing grants, with the possibility of taking over a license in the future.

    Aquaculturists are searching for people who are learning the necessary skills and working on Wellfleet grants when it comes to succession plans. “If you’re actively engaging, you’re part of the community,” Civetta said. “People look around.”

     

    Confronting Climate Change

    The next generation of Wellfleet shellfish farmers will certainly need to navigate the effects of climate change on this harbor that has been known for its ability to nurture oysters for centuries. Although Puffer says the specific effects of global warming here can be hard to discern, some are nonetheless obvious.

    This year, Puffer put his oyster hats out in mid-June, but that hasn’t always been the case. The change in timing is part of a delicate balance. Staged too early, the hats will “foul up,” but delay too long and the spat will pass you by, Puffer says. He used to put the discs on the flats in the first week of July, but starting a few years ago, that was too late. Warmer waters have caused oysters to spawn earlier in the summer, he says.

    Almost a decade ago, a report by a working group that brought together local shellfishermen and biologists with the Social and Environmental Research Institute outlined the potential effects of  climate change on shellfishing in Wellfleet Harbor. That 2015 study suggested the possibility of a rise in mortality due to a lack of the oysters’ food source, phytoplankton, and also suggested that global warming could increase disease in oysters and quahogs and benefit predators, among other negative effects.

    “We should be looking at that report and evaluating impacts that we might be able to mitigate,” says Civetta. “We have time, but we need to prioritize it.”

    This gauge tells Alfred Pickard whether his clams have reached harvest width (one inch for in-state markets).

    These developments come to an industry that is the town’s largest year-round and continues to grow. In 2022, the value of Wellfleet’s shellfish landings was more than $9.5 million, up from $6.8 million in 2018, according to the Wellfleet Shellfish Dept.’s annual reports.

    Like Puffer, Pickard says the local effects of warming waters aren’t clear. But recently, Pickard, who mostly farms clams as opposed to oysters, has seen species of warmer-water predators that he has not seen in the past.

    From afar, Pickard’s farm looks like an unplanted garden with seaweed lying on top. At low tide, while showing a summer tour around his clam farm, he drags a cleanout rack across brown mud. The movement reveals a dark black layer of mud underneath. Shells pop out from below. A crab scrambles away.

    “Normally we’d annihilate him, but I’m going to be nice since you’re all here,” he says.

    Alfred Pickard demonstrates the rake he uses to harvest clams on his farm near Mayo Beach.

    Pickard’s raking is part of his planting process, which typically occurs in the summer. Large nets are pulled over the cleared flats, which are called “runways,” usually 13 feet wide and stretching between 100 and 250 feet long. Pickard and his employees plant 100,000 clams in each plot, roughly six million total each year.

    An array of other rakes round out Pickard’s collection of tools. He sweeps the seaweed off the nets regularly with a garden rake so that previously planted seed doesn’t suffocate. He harvests with a cage-like bull rake, designed to be used underwater.

    Pickard, who says he’s been working in the industry for at least five decades, has seen aquaculture become a science over those years as opposed to “just doing it.” He believes a reliance on science and technology will help the younger generation, which includes his own family. Two of Pickard’s sons have entered the industry, both with degrees in marine sciences.

    “The kids have the education that we didn’t,” he says.

    On the Flats 

    The event: Shellfishing farm tours
    The time: One-hour tours on Sept. 18 at 5 p.m.; Sept. 21 at 8 a.m.; and Sept. 22 at 9 a.m.
    The place: Mayo Beach, Wellfleet
    The cost: $30, age 13 and up; 12 and under free; details at wellfleetoa.org/events

    ON THE FLATS

    Meet the Farmers of Mayo Beach

    Growers respond to nature and science as they consider the future of shellfishing

    By

    WELLFLEET — Jake Puffer beckons a group of touring visitors closer, asking if they want to peek inside the ridges of his farm’s oyster hats. Disks dipped in lime, sand, and cement, then stacked and staked into the muddy flats, the hats are arranged in rows designed to catch the billions of oyster larvae swimming in Wellfleet’s waters during the early summer.

    During tours organized by the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance, the nonprofit organization behind the town’s OysterFest, Puffer and others have been giving visitors to the flats a closer look at the shellfishing work most see only from the shore.

    Lisa Brown, a founder of Wellfleet’s OysterFest and the nonprofit behind it, now called the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance, starts the tour with some facts about the history of shellfishing here. (Photos by Edward Boches)

    There are three more tours scheduled this month, says Nancy O’Connell, WOA’s president. The days will be growing shorter by the end of the month, and the festival ahead, on the weekend of Oct. 19-20, will require the attention of just about everyone in the industry.

    The baby oysters Puffer shows the group — once they are lodged on the disks they are called spat — comprise 90 percent of the seed he starts nurturing each year. That’s a lot, Puffer says, in an industry where many buy oyster seed spawned in hatcheries, of which there is only one on Cape Cod, the Aquacultural Research Corp., or A.R.C.

    Puffer put his hats in the water in mid-June, and on an early morning in late July miniature oysters have already begun forming inside the folds like precious crystals. “These are what fuels the farm,” says Puffer, who’s been raising oysters here for over two decades. He took over the grant — these are intertidal parcels that the state allows towns to license to local shellfishermen for aquacultural use — just off Mayo Beach from his father, Irving Puffer, in 2022.

    Jake Puffer who took over his father’s grant in 2022 has himself been farming oysters in Wellfleet harbor for over 20 years.

    In addition to being the time for catching future harvests, the warmer months offer Wellfleet aquaculturists relief from punishingly cold waters. But the summer’s longer days can also mean two low tides during daylight hours, expanding the amount of work to be done on their farms.

    Alongside these seasonal changes, other gradual shifts are underway, some from climate change and others in the way of a generational handoff.

     

    Passing the Torch

    As has happened with his own family, Puffer says, transitions are on the horizon for other older farmers. “There’s going to be a changeover more and more as time goes on,” he says. Puffer says oyster farming is “site-specific,” and he hopes to one day pass what he’s learned about his grant to the next farmer.

    According to Nancy Civetta, Wellfleet’s shellfish constable, the shift is well underway. Since the start of this year, eight people have been added to the list of grant holders, and three of them are the young adult children of current holders. There are now 142 grant holders for 161 grants and 121 farms in Wellfleet, says Civetta.

    “There are very thoughtful plans by a lot of shellfishermen to do things like Jake and his dad did in terms of passing the torch,” says O’Connell. That’s happening in her own family. Her husband, Jim, has been cultivating oysters and clams for over two decades, but he has also been working hard to bring along younger farmers. Over the last few years, his nephew Jimmy Mulpeter has stuck with it, learning every aspect of the work from seed to harvest.

    Jake Puffer tells visitors about collecting and nurturing wild oyster spat on conical hats in the harbor. The natural seed oyster, he says, is “what fuels the farm.”

    Another kind of transition happens when a grant holder has no ready successor. In those cases, the grant is awarded to an up-and-coming shellfisherman through a lottery. Grants that are returned to the lottery are often there for a reason, having been or become unproductive, says Alfred Pickard, who is showing off his clam farm on the tour. He’s not optimistic about those farms.

    But Civetta, the constable, says she’s seen all kinds of difficult plots find success. She adds that, for those entering the industry, there are opportunities for apprenticeship on existing grants, with the possibility of taking over a license in the future.

    Aquaculturists are searching for people who are learning the necessary skills and working on Wellfleet grants when it comes to succession plans. “If you’re actively engaging, you’re part of the community,” Civetta said. “People look around.”

     

    Confronting Climate Change

    The next generation of Wellfleet shellfish farmers will certainly need to navigate the effects of climate change on this harbor that has been known for its ability to nurture oysters for centuries. Although Puffer says the specific effects of global warming here can be hard to discern, some are nonetheless obvious.

    This year, Puffer put his oyster hats out in mid-June, but that hasn’t always been the case. The change in timing is part of a delicate balance. Staged too early, the hats will “foul up,” but delay too long and the spat will pass you by, Puffer says. He used to put the discs on the flats in the first week of July, but starting a few years ago, that was too late. Warmer waters have caused oysters to spawn earlier in the summer, he says.

    Almost a decade ago, a report by a working group that brought together local shellfishermen and biologists with the Social and Environmental Research Institute outlined the potential effects of  climate change on shellfishing in Wellfleet Harbor. That 2015 study suggested the possibility of a rise in mortality due to a lack of the oysters’ food source, phytoplankton, and also suggested that global warming could increase disease in oysters and quahogs and benefit predators, among other negative effects.

    “We should be looking at that report and evaluating impacts that we might be able to mitigate,” says Civetta. “We have time, but we need to prioritize it.”

    This gauge tells Alfred Pickard whether his clams have reached harvest width (one inch for in-state markets).

    These developments come to an industry that is the town’s largest year-round and continues to grow. In 2022, the value of Wellfleet’s shellfish landings was more than $9.5 million, up from $6.8 million in 2018, according to the Wellfleet Shellfish Dept.’s annual reports.

    Like Puffer, Pickard says the local effects of warming waters aren’t clear. But recently, Pickard, who mostly farms clams as opposed to oysters, has seen species of warmer-water predators that he has not seen in the past.

    From afar, Pickard’s farm looks like an unplanted garden with seaweed lying on top. At low tide, while showing a summer tour around his clam farm, he drags a cleanout rack across brown mud. The movement reveals a dark black layer of mud underneath. Shells pop out from below. A crab scrambles away.

    “Normally we’d annihilate him, but I’m going to be nice since you’re all here,” he says.

    Alfred Pickard demonstrates the rake he uses to harvest clams on his farm near Mayo Beach.

    Pickard’s raking is part of his planting process, which typically occurs in the summer. Large nets are pulled over the cleared flats, which are called “runways,” usually 13 feet wide and stretching between 100 and 250 feet long. Pickard and his employees plant 100,000 clams in each plot, roughly six million total each year.

    An array of other rakes round out Pickard’s collection of tools. He sweeps the seaweed off the nets regularly with a garden rake so that previously planted seed doesn’t suffocate. He harvests with a cage-like bull rake, designed to be used underwater.

    Pickard, who says he’s been working in the industry for at least five decades, has seen aquaculture become a science over those years as opposed to “just doing it.” He believes a reliance on science and technology will help the younger generation, which includes his own family. Two of Pickard’s sons have entered the industry, both with degrees in marine sciences.

    “The kids have the education that we didn’t,” he says.

    On the Flats 

    The event: Shellfishing farm tours
    The time: One-hour tours on Sept. 18 at 5 p.m.; Sept. 21 at 8 a.m.; and Sept. 22 at 9 a.m.
    The place: Mayo Beach, Wellfleet
    The cost: $30, age 13 and up; 12 and under free; details at wellfleetoa.org/events

    NAUSET HIGH SCHOOL

    Creator of ‘Respecting Differences’ Class to Retire

    Lisa Brown’s students give credit to a teacher who believes in them

    By

    EASTHAM — Anyone who has ever been a student will tell you that some courses seem inseparable from their teachers. But Lisa Brown, who teaches Nauset Regional High School’s Exploring and Respecting Differences (EARD) courses, insists that hers can be.

    Lisa Brown at home in Wellfleet. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    When Brown retires at the end of this year after 25 years at Nauset, the school administration must decide if EARD, EARD II, and the honors compendium known as HEARD will outlast her. The school’s principal, Patrick Clark, did not return a call seeking comment.

    Nauset Regional School Committee Chair Chris Easley hopes the courses will continue. “No program has affected that school’s culture more than EARD,” he said. “It is worth its weight in gold.”

    Brown’s classes are electives that begin with exploration of an attention grabber for most teenagers: cliques. The curriculum segues into stereotypes, explicit bias, the formation of hate groups, and cults. “This is where it gets dicey and really cool and fun,” Brown said.

    They take on gender and sexuality. “That whole section — I let the kids teach it now,” said Brown, who is gay.

    Her one interjection is to show the students a few ads from the 1950s, including one with a woman’s head superimposed on a bearskin rug. “A man is stepping on her,” Brown said. The ad is selling shoes. “We look at the intrinsic and extrinsic implications of sexualizing, humiliating, and debilitating one whole half of our population for many, many years.”

    EARD II covers the Black Lives Matter movement, human trafficking, and mediation, said Ali Hawk, a junior from Orleans who has taken every course Brown offers. Through Brown’s advanced courses, Hawk has become a student mediator and presents twice-monthly seminars on empathy to 90 middle-school students at a time. The skills she honed don’t just look good on a college application, Hawk said. “They matter to me personally. You learn a lot in Lisa’s classes that you would not normally be taught in a classroom but that you really should be taught.”

    Sophomore Lily Rice of Truro takes a class called Study Strategies with Brown. “Not only does she have energy that is off the charts,” said Rice, “she doesn’t look at kids as ‘problem’ kids.” Brown, she said, sees students’ potential “if only someone believes in them — and she is the one who believes. She is the first person I go to if I need advice.”

    Exploring and Respecting Differences students at the State House on March 24. Left to right: Orianna Porter, Maya Anastasio, Savannah Still, Sage Lach, Ali Hawk, Jada Bennett, Sofia Carswell, and Joe Vouvakis. (Photo courtesy Lisa Brown)

    Many of Brown’s students are members of the school’s Human Rights Club, which Brown advises. Until 2018, Brown traveled to Haiti with some of her students and artist Ellen LeBow, who helped build an arts center there in the 1990s. In the summer, Brown still takes students to the Hague Global Student Leaders Summit where they once heard Greta Thunberg speak.

    EARD is not a how-to on becoming a political activist, said Brown. The point, she said, has always been to inspire students’ interests.

    When Brown left restaurant ownership — she had opened the Flying Fish in Wellfleet with Pat Foley in 1990 — and began teaching special education at age 40, her students were near dropouts, she said. Keeping them in school was her sole focus.

    “I used current events and the injustices that they were experiencing to hook the kids in a meaningful way,” said Brown, now 65.

    Two years later, she began teaching EARD as an elective, and students with a wide range of interests signed up. Brown has a degree in ethnomusicology from Hampshire College and also taught World Music at Nauset until 2008.

    She grew up in Wellfleet and still lives in her childhood home. She credits her career success to Wellfleet Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Barbara Winslow. “She was a poet,” Brown said. “Frankly, I had a massive crush on her.”

    Eager to please on her first book report for Winslow, Brown read The Hobbit in a single weekend (it was easy, she said, given that her parents had already read it to her). But when she told Winslow, the teacher said, “I think you skimmed it. Go back and find me the longest sentence in the book.”

    Brown said it took her another week and a half to find that sentence, on page 17, which she recited from memory for a reporter: “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green and the hobbits were still so numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing in his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his long woolly toes (neatly brushed), Gandalf came by.”

    What Ms. Winslow taught her, she said, is that a good teacher can help students do just about anything they set their minds to. Brown’s students have done a lot; each year, the Human Rights Club has lunch with legislators on Beacon Hill, where the students are recognized on the floor of the Senate and get to talk about the issues that matter to them. “I cry every single time,” Brown said.

    In 2018, the right-wing group United Cape Patriots showed up at Nauset High School to protest at a forum her students were holding on a Saturday about a ballot question known as “the transgender bathroom bill.” One member of that group carried a sign that read “Safety Trumps Diversity” and depicted a transgender person with horns and a tail. The figure had a big slash through it, Brown said.

    “There were kids who were afraid to leave the auditorium,” Brown recalled. “There were parents who were saying this is not safe. We circled up and everyone held hands. I said, ‘We can do this.’ ”

    MacKenzie “Mac” Bell, 24, of Harwich, who graduated from Nauset in 2018, said Brown inspired him to pursue filmmaking when she assigned him to produce a documentary on their trip to the Hague leadership summit. She bought the camcorder.

    Brown encouraged Bell to attend Hampshire College where he is now a senior studying film. “Hampshire students pave their own path,” he said. “That is why I love Lisa so much. She instilled this sense of path-making for yourself, taking your own trail, and making an impact.”

    OUTER CAPE PORTRAIT

    Dispatches From a Teacher’s Year

    By

    LISA BROWN / EDUCATOR / WELLFLEET

    When schools went largely online this year, teachers were faced with a daunting challenge: how to reach and connect with their students sitting at home in front of computer screens. Lisa Brown teaches music and a course called Exploring and Respecting Differences at Nauset Regional High School. She says it’s only since returning to in-person classes this spring that she’s beginning to know her kids. Here’s Lisa in her own words, recorded over an extended period. 

    So, my school year has been pretty difficult. My classes for the last 23 years have been highly personal, very socially, emotionally oriented. We sit in a circle; we don’t have anything impeding being able to look at each other or interact with each other. We might as well be sitting around a fire pit, the way that we lead our discussions.

    There is a camaraderie that happens in class. Kids walk into my classroom, and they get to know each other really, really well. Freshmen end up being friends with juniors and seniors, and the juniors and seniors take these younger kids under their wing. It’s really magical. Because of this remote learning, it’s something that we’ve missed a lot this year.

    I have been teaching online all year. For the most part, I had between one and six kids live and in class a couple of days a week. And then most of the other kids were always on the screen — in the abyss, I call it.

    I’m a kinetic teacher. I do a lot of walking around in the classroom. So, sitting in front of a computer, having a little four-by-four-foot space that I couldn’t move from all year, was torture! I found myself narrowing my focus and talking as though I was talking in my own head. So, when I say something funny, I laugh at my own joke. And when I say something profound or meaningful, I get a little teary at the story, and I’m in an abyss myself.

    Figuring out the technology at first was daunting. And I had a little bit of performance anxiety around it. I was very appreciative that kids helped me technologically right away. Once I started to get the groove and feel comfortable, the part that was most difficult for me, absolutely for sure, was losing the dynamic of in-person kids.

    The thing that’s so disconcerting is that when kids are at home on the other side of that abyss on the computer screen, not only do you not see the breadth of who they are, but you see a TV image. I see a caricature of a student. I don’t get the depth of who they are. I don’t get their humor. I don’t get how they pause, and how they use their hands. I would see the tops of kids’ heads, or just an ear and an eye, or a hand. They would be looking away. They’d be looking down. I’m wondering, are they looking at their phones? Are they playing a game? Are they checked out? Are they listening to music? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell.

    I’ve lost something in my relationships with kids this year. I don’t know my kids this year as much as I’ve known them in the past. I feel kind of bereft. I feel sad.

    We’ve just recently gone back to in-person classes. I’ve got about 70 percent of kids in class. It’s liberating! It is exciting! Everybody’s in a big circle, and I’m in the gladiator pit. So now, I’m a little wild! I get to wheel around in my chair. I encourage kids to wave their arms around and make some noise now, because everybody’s been so shut down. I’m really trying to encourage them just to shake it loose.

    We’ve just started the conflict unit, and this is how we’re ending up our year. Just now I’m starting to get to know my kids, because they get to write anonymously about conflicts that they’re having in their lives: whether you’re going to buy a Celtics shirt or a Patriots shirt, which is a designer conflict, or whether they’re going to take a year off from school next year. And this is where kids really start talking a lot more about themselves in relation to their world. I purposely have to wait until the end of the semester for this, because kids need to bond with each other and trust each other and build trust in the classroom before we can start talking about really personal issues.

    Now that we’re in person again, we’re starting to get back to normal, which means that kids are laughing, and they’re talking to each other. There’s a lot of eye contact, and we’re finally getting back to joy!

    When school’s out, I try to keep it real and outside. I’m a farmer at heart. I’m a dig-in-the-dirt person. I love to build things. In fact, that’s probably one of my biggest values — building stuff, building relationships, building gardens, building tree houses, building a bus, you know, a travel bus.

    So, way before the pandemic, my wife, Dierdre, and I wanted a kind of an RV thing. But all these fancy RVs cost a bajillion dollars, and we couldn’t really afford it. And it wasn’t really what we were looking for. A couple of years ago, Nauset [High School] got a whole new series of mini school buses. I got in. I got behind the wheel. I was taking kids to the State House that day on a field trip. I sat in that driver’s seat, and I backed up the bus, and I started driving down the road, and I said, “This is it!” Of course, I’m a teacher! All I want is a school bus to renovate into a camper. So, that’s exactly what we did.

    We plan to go across country and to national parks everywhere, as soon as I retire. These last couple of years, they’re very poignant for me, and I’m going to pack as much of myself into my classes as I can. And that’s going to be my final hurrah.

    LEARNING

    Race vs. Cultural Differences at Nauset High

    Lisa Brown teaches kids the path to a common denominator

    By

    Lisa Brown, a veteran teacher at Nauset Regional High School in Eastham, has a popular class with a curriculum of her own making called Exploring and Respecting Differences (EARD).

    Brown has observed firsthand how much interaction there is between children of different ethnicities in the school. She is able to consider how the notion of a “racial” divide affects them, and how to steer them away from unexamined assumptions.

    Over the years the school’s demographics have shifted somewhat to include Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Indian, and, mostly adopted, Asian kids.

    Lisa Brown and students
    Lisa Brown (top right) is flanked by Soleil Green on top left and Windslowe Brown at right, and below, Abby Ricciardi on left and Breyana Newton, all of them students in Brown’s Exploring and Respecting Differences class. (Photo courtesy Lisa Brown)

    “Here’s the thing I observe at the high school,” Brown says. “It’s not so much about the color of the skin, but that cultural values are different. The trick at the teenage level is to find the common denominator of values — where is your own sense of right and wrong? If someone else’s is different, it challenges your sense of self.”

    She has an effective exercise that she uses to allow students to practice this kind of self-awareness.

    “I ask a question, usually one already generally debated in this country,” she says. “For instance, ‘Is it okay for a parent to spank — not beat — their child if they do something wrong?’ Then I split the room in half into a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ side, and each student must go stand at one or the other, depending on what they believe about the question.”

    No ambivalent side is allowed.

    Then, by searching for values that they have in common, each group has to come up with a statement that they unanimously believe justifies their opinion.

    With this experiment, cultural rules are exposed.

    Most of Brown’s Jamaican students went to the “Yes” side: “You don’t talk back to your parents.” Most of the American kids went to the “No” side: “No, it’s not okay; it’s child abuse.”

    Brown recalls a Jamaican student telling her, “I spent the night at an American friend’s house, and she was talking back to her mother. I stood there with my mouth open — I never talk that way to my mom!”

    “A lot of the Jamaican kids who take my class are deeply valuing their education,” Brown says. “They see it as advancing themselves in a new and sometimes bewildering society. And they are working hard to assimilate. Assimilation means they buy into the rules, conditions, expectations of the school.”

    Although the EARD class itself becomes a kind of common denominator, connecting students from different cultures, Brown wonders how to get them to hang out outside of class. She’s beginning to see small changes.

    “More and more kids,” she says, “are venturing out from their potentially stereotyped groups.”

    In part, she feels it’s because the class conversations are more often based on recognizing differences in culture rather than race.

    “I give them a variety of perspectives and see where they land in the continuum,” she says. “It’s always about finding a common denominator. Once kids have come to recognize that cosmetic differences are cosmetic and that cultural differences exist — sometimes profoundly — if they can uncover enough values in common, then they have a basis to establish relationships outside of class.”

    Brown starts out having students explore their own tendencies to stereotype. Following that eye-opener, she shows how stereotyping fuels the beliefs of hate groups. And then: how hate and fear, born of deliberately distorted stereotypes, can devolve into cults that depend on rigid tenets and threats to keep their groups in line.

    From there, she takes the class through the escalations of conflict and how to apply methods of conflict resolution.

    “My job,” Brown says, “is to create a platform for problem-solving, then let the kids do it. It’s not about ‘race’ anymore. We have to have it be about cultural differences.” And self-discovery.

    “Who,” she asks them, “is your ultimate authority? Your parents? Your friends? Your conscience? Your religion?”

    Whatever the answer, it comes from the kids. “I create the template; they draw the pictures,” Brown says. “I’m not the docent — they tell me what the picture is. Then I ask, ‘What more can you tell me about it?’ ”

    An ultimate goal of the EARD class is for students not only to welcome differences and reject built-in prejudices but to find the indisputably elemental things they share as classmates, as teens, as people, and as a society.

    “They all say, ‘I would absolutely never kill somebody!’ What else do they have in common? It’s a fact, they all agree, that every kid opens the refrigerator as soon as they get home,” Brown says, laughing.

    Some may find leftover rice and beans in the fridge, others a tuna sandwich. “Okay,” Brown’s students might suggest, “Bring yours in next time. I’ll sample yours, you mine, and we’ll see if we like each other’s lunch.”

    “It’s not a shared value,” Brown says, “but it’s a habit, a shared habit. And that’s where a class conversation can begin.”

    When Brown teases out a subject, then sits back to witness the unfolding, she is demonstrating a powerful key to conflict resolution: a witness’s capacity to shut up and listen.

    “In our class,” she says, “we have an acronym: W.A.I.T.” (Why Am I Talking, or Texting, or Tuning out….)

    It’s a thought-provoking concept. And Brown’s class is meant to provoke thought.

    That’s important, because from nation to neighborhood, how we grapple with our differences now is the crucible from which the shape of our collective future will emerge.

    Luckily, our schools have the potential to embody this crucible, allowing us an opportunity to recognize how our assumptions act themselves out in our children, and, hopefully, how to bridge misunderstandings before they calcify once more into adult beliefs.

    In time, it may be those students who’ll replace a few worn and overloaded words in the national mind with their own acronym: W.A.I.T. — and then watch where it takes us.

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