Rye Country Day has partnered with the non-profit organization Common Circles as part of the School’s ongoing effort to foster connection and inclusion within a community that works collaboratively to combat bias and hate. 

Founded by RCDS alumni parent Marla Felton P’19, P’21, Common Circles partners with schools to bring together art, community participation, and history to improve intergroup relations, offer Holocaust education, reduce antisemitism, increase empathy, and encourage changed behaviors. 

The result of this important collaboration is a two-part interactive educational exhibit that will be integrated into Rye Country Day’s curricular work and on view for the entire RCDS community through the 2025-26 school year.

On View Now
WE ARE RCDS: BRIDGING, BELONGING, AND BUILDING COMMUNITY (PART 1)
Using art, photography, and storytelling, part 1 of the Common Circles exhibit, We Are RCDS, is an interactive museum experience that invites visitors to explore their own identities, embrace a diversity of perspectives and ideas, challenge first impressions, and express their hopes for humanity and the RCDS community.

THE WE ARE RCDS EXPERIENCE

• When visitors first arrive at the exhibit, they approach a curated collection of artwork on the topic of bridging and belonging, along with definitions of the terms bridging, breaking, othering, and belonging.
• On the next panel, a series of optical illusions are presented to demonstrate the differences in how individuals perceive information, even when they are looking at the exact same image.
• Following the optical illusions, the exhibit poses the questions “What are the many layers that make you . . . you” and “Which parts of your identity can be seen?” A visual depiction of puzzle pieces that might make up a person’s identity follows to remind viewers that some aspects of identity are visible and others are not. The various identity puzzle pieces include languages, values, thinking style, education, life experiences, and opportunities, etc. 
• Visitors next move on to the “Stories We Live” section, a series of photographs of RCDS administrators, faculty, and staff in five different outfits. The compelling images, accompanied with a series of self-descriptive words,  showcase the multifaceted lives, experiences, and interests of each subject to encourage understanding, empathy, meaningful conversations, and connection.
• An additional panel allows the visitors to scan QR codes and watch videos featuring each "Stories We Live" participant and hear them describe their identity in depth and share their experience being photographed for this series.
• The exhibit then features several panels of RCDS students’ representations of themselves through hand-drawn self-portraits and photography. Nearly 400 Lower, Middle, and Upper School students created the self-portraits in art classes in the spring and fall of 2024.
• The exhibit concludes with the Pavel Friedmann poem “The Butterfly.” Friedmann wrote the poem in 1942 when he was one of the 15,000 child prisoners that passed through the Terezin concentration camp, before he was killed in 1944 at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The poem is the basis for the Butterfly Project, which is the concluding part of the We Are RCDS exhibit. In the Butterfly Project, students from around the world have created butterflies in memory of the approximately 1.5 million children, primarily Jewish, who perished in the Holocaust. Exhibit participants at RCDS–and other Common Circles partner communities– are invited to write their own wishes for humanity alongside the poem. Butterflies are a universal symbol of resilience, rebirth, and hope, and seeing community members’ wishes written on butterflies is a powerful visual affirmation of the potential we all have to make our world more inclusive and peaceful.

COMMUNITY COLLABORATION & LEARNING: THE ROAD TO WE ARE RCDS
In the Spring of 2023, Common Circles Founder and Alumni Parent Marla Felton P’19, P’21 and Creative Director Sue Spiegel partnered with Assistant Head of School Meredith deChabert and began the preparatory work to bring this interactive experience to Rye Country Day. In addition to planning for the specific elements of the exhibit, Common Circles and RCDS worked together to develop curriculum and student engagement resources to enhance learning around the topics of antisemitism and bias, as well as the importance of being an upstander. 

In November 2023, RCDS employees volunteered for various working groups to add their expertise to the curriculum integration materials to be used for History/Social Studies, English/Language Arts, Computer Science, Drama and Dance, Music, Fine Arts, Photography, STEAM, Public Purpose, Modern Languages, and more. 

During the spring and summer of 2024, volunteers worked as subjects with Creative Director Sue Spiegel to bring the community portraits element of the exhibit to life. RCDS student photographers, as well as LSArt Teacher Lauren Behar and US Photography teacher Chris Kaye, also jumped in to help with the photo shoots. Additional volunteers completed the Q&A cards for the “What Do We Have In Common” panel of the exhibit. For the “Who Am I” panels, hundreds of Lower, Middle, and Upper School students created self-portraits in art classes.
 
In November 2024, the full We Are RCDS exhibit was installed and students and employees began participating in guided tours of the experience led by Marla Felton and Sue Spiegel. When part 2 is installed in January 2025, the entire RCDS community, including parents and guardians, will be invited to explore the full exhibit experience.

Upcoming Learning
VOICES AGAINST HATE: LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT (PART 2)
The second part of the Common Circles exhibit VOICES AGAINST HATE, will be installed in January. In Partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, this part of the exhibit will feature the foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony Interactive Biographies and offer opportunities for visitors to have lifelike conversations with a Holocaust survivor and a Jewish American liberator. VOICES AGAINST HATE plans to also feature immersive conversational video of Clarence B. Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter, lawyer, and best friend. In addition, the exhibit includes powerful stories of hope and survival from members of the RCDS community, along with narratives highlighting other local Holocaust and WWII survivors, liberators, and upstanders. 

FOSTERING CONNECTION
In a year where Rye Country Day’s theme is Connection, Common Circles is a perfect complement. Head of School Randall Dunn said about the exhibit, “Common Circles is a wonderful initiative that dovetails with our active approach to building awareness and educating our community about antisemitism and other forms of hate. This work is critical, as we strive for a more inclusive, connected world. We Are RCDS is a beautiful, thought-provoking celebration of the range of identities in our community. It is an affirmation of RCDS’s commitment to inclusion and combating hate through education, connection, and mutual respect.”

EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE
Common Circles in partnership with RCDS and American Jewish Committee received a prestigious grant from the Claims Conference: Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to study the impact of the exhibit on students and teachers from RCDS and neighboring public schools through a multi-year study. The independent impact evaluation will gauge expansion in knowledge and understanding around the Holocaust and antisemitism, as well as any increase in the desire to bridge differences and engage with humanitarian topics.