John Daves is a 1990 graduate of The Pennington School in Pennington, New Jersey.
Dr. John Patrick Cansler Daves has served as an educator, an organizational excellence consultant, and a community-building social justice leader for independent schools for more than twenty years, and he was adopted by a family of educational and racial uplift leaders dating back to before the Civil War.
His ancestors’ careers as educational Black communal uplift leaders in the South and the North provided them with opportunities to interact with Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson—individuals who were prominent leaders, including former Secretaries of State and Presidents.
Dr. Daves carried on the family’s legacy by serving as the former inaugural Head of Equity and Inclusion at Packer Collegiate Institute, in Brooklyn, NY; as the former Director of Community and Equity Affairs at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, MA; and as the former Dean of Faculty at his alma mater The Pennington School in Pennington, NJ.
While he was at Phillips Exeter Academy, Dr. Daves developed the vision for The Exeter Diversity Institute, a week-long summer program designed for faculty and administrators to learn from each other around Harkness tables, boardroom tables, about how to actively listen to each other’s social identity experiences and teach from what they are learning from their conversations.
EDI helps teachers and administrators with learning how to share their identity stories and to use active listening, learning, and identity storytelling skills to serve as Diversity, Equity, Inclusio,n and Belonging leaders within their school communities.
Dr. Daves came to Exeter after receiving his doctorate in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he won a teaching assistant award in the American Studies Department, and Dickinson College, where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department. Dr. Daves also earned a Master of Arts and Teaching degree in English Literature from Colgate University and a continuing education certificate from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Dr. Daves is currently serving as the Director of Diversity, Equity, Belonging, and Inclusivity at Friends’ Central School, a Pre K to twelfth-grade school in Wynnewood, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia, PA.