Equity Audit Toolkits
WHAT THE TOOLKITS OFFER
Adjustments to language in stories
Ideas for increasing the diversity of representation in your classroom
Ideas for adjustments to make to materials
The process of auditing our materials is intensive and includes storytelling, wondering, and response time for each story. For the first iteration, we were able to explore ten stories. Because this is significant and intentional work, we know it will take some time before we can do this for all 90 stories. While we continue to add specific language and material changes for each story, we invite you to make general adjustments to the stories. We offer suggestions below for how you might adjust the stories you tell. Please note that the published story scripts have not been adjusted. At this time, we offer the toolkits to support the work of storytellers in adjusting the language and materials. We hope to arrange with our publisher to update the story scripts, but that is not optional this time.
Downloads of our updated Creation, Parable of the Good Shepherd , Parable of the Good Samaritan, Parable of the Mustard Seed, The Great Family and Circle of the Church Year materials are available for free in our shop. Skilled artists developed these materials, and we are committed to paying them well for their work. We also want everyone to have access to these materials, so we are offering free downloads of these new materials. We invite you to support the work with a donation to our Beloved Me, Beloved We fund for the ongoing work of this vital initiative.
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Creation
February 2023. Volume 2 - Lesson 4, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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Circle of the Church Year
February 2023. Volume 2- Lesson 1, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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The Ark and the Flood
July 2024. Volume 2- Lesson 6, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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The Great Family
September 2023. Volume 2 - Lesson 7, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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PARABLE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD
February 2023. Volume 3- Lesson 9, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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Parable of the Good Samaritan
April 2023. Volume 3-Lesson 9, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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Parable of the Mustard Seed
July 2023. Volume 3- Lesson 13, The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Revised and Expanded
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Faces of Easter Enrichment
January 2024. This Toolkit is an enrichment lesson to the Faces of Easter found in the Complete Guide to Godly Play, Vol. 4.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
Examining our Godly Play Practice for Implicit Bias
In the winter of 2021, the Godly Play Foundation convened a group of 17 people to participate in a 5 month process of exploring our organizational culture, training, and curriculum and materials through an anti-racism lens. The Beloved Me, Beloved We Initiative came out of that task force.
One of the priorities of this initiative is to audit our storytelling curricula and materials to identify what terms, phrases, art, and materials “bump” people from different perspectives out of the circle. The goal is to update the language and materials in all our 90 stories so that everyone can feel their belonging and worth in a Godly Play classroom. We commit to highlighting and increasing access to those updated lessons and materials.
In the spring of 2021, the Foundation, in partnership with the Diocese of Massachusetts, was awarded a Becoming Beloved Community Grant from the Episcopal Church to begin this work. We convened a team of eight people to lead an audit of several of our stories as a beginning point to start this work. This work continues today. The Equity Audit team gathered again in person to spend time in the entirety of Volume 8 revisions set to go to to our publisher spring 2024. Some questions that were raised resulted in the creation of several brand new stories.