Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators [1 ed.] 9783030571368, 9783030571375

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction and Looking Both Ways: How (and Why) a High School English Teacher and an English Education Professor Formed a Partnership That Informed Their Practices
Introduction
A Word About Word Clouds
Creating an Immersive Pedagogy for Students and Teacher Candidates
Amanda Gulla: Live Your Life Like an Artist
Molly Sherman: Placed in Worlds of Which I Had Never Conceived
Why Voice Matters
Art as a Portal to Voice
Works Cited
2 Teaching to Meet the Moment
Teaching and Learning in the Upside Down—Amanda Gulla
Inside/Outside
What Is It You Plan to Do with Your One Wild and Precious Quarantine?
Somehowly—Molly Sherman
Works Cited
3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic Poetry
Creative Responses to Texts
The World Goes on in Spite of Everything
Daedalus Is Held to Account for Building the Labyrinth and Other Crimes
Storytelling and the Years After
Works Cited
4 Imagining the World as If It Could Be Otherwise: Preparing Students for Solving Problems and Seeing Possibilities (Writing Poetry as Evidence-Based Argument)
Found Poetry in Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey
In the Land of Not Make Believe
We Hold On
Works Cited
5 Analyzing and Synthesizing Our Stories: Exploring Identity Through Art and Poetry
Works Cited
6 Art as Exploration: Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration
Works Cited
7 Making Claims and Making Change: Creative Responses to the 1619 Project
Antiracism Teaching: The 1619 Project
Reflection
Works Cited
8 Point of View: Stepping Inside the Story
Singing America and the Underground Railroad (Amanda Gulla)
The Trilogy of Singing America Poems
I Too, Am the American Dream
Below 14th Street
I, Too Sang America
The Underground Railroad
Assignment Framing
Literary Analysis Through Performance: Molly Sherman
Works Cited
9 Teaching as Transaction: Building Community Through Shared Inquiry
Works Cited
10 This Is Not for Me: In Which We Discuss Some Challenges and Obstacles That May Impede the Development of an Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Arts Practice, and What Might Be Done About Them
Works Cited
Appendix
Resource Guide
Visual Art and Artists
Index

Citation preview

CREATIVITY, EDUCATION AND THE ARTS

Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators

Amanda Nicole Gulla Molly Hamilton Sherman

Creativity, Education and the Arts

Series Editor Anne Harris School of Education Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Melbourne, VIC, Australia

This series emerges out of recent rapid advances in creativity- and artsinformed research in education that seeks to reposition creativity studies within (and in conversation with) education as a multi- and interdisciplinary field. This series takes as its starting point the interrelationship between arts-based research and a growing neuroscientific, cultural and economic discourse of creativity and creative industries, and the need for education to play a larger role in these expanding discourses. It also takes as a priori an invitation to creativity scholars to move more robustly into theorizing the work of arts- and creativity-based research work, bridging a historical gap between ‘science’ and ‘art’, between ‘theoretical’ and ‘applied’ approaches to research, and between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms. The following are the primary aims of the series: • To publish creativity research and theory in relation to education (including schools, curriculum, policy, higher education, pedagogy, learning and teaching, etc.). • To put education at the heart of debates on creativity, re-establish the significance of creativity for learning and teaching and development analyses, and forge links between creativity and education. • To publish research that draws on a range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses, strengthening the links between creative and arts education and geographies, anthropology, creative industries, aesthetics and philosophy, history, and cultural studies. • To publish creativity research and theory with an international scope that explores and reflects the current expansion of thought and practice about global flows, cultural heritage, and creativity and the arts in education.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14926

Amanda Nicole Gulla · Molly Hamilton Sherman

Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators

Amanda Nicole Gulla English Education Lehman College City University of New York Bronx, NY, USA

Molly Hamilton Sherman Harvest Collegiate High School New York, NY, USA

Creativity, Education and the Arts ISBN 978-3-030-57136-8 ISBN 978-3-030-57137-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Salvatore Gulla This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The “Upside-Down” of Creative Education in Pandemic Times To regard this book as simply a “pedagogical,” education one, or a book on creativity, is not the whole story. This book responds to the sudden psychic, material and emotional shifts in teaching and learning that have been required in the COVID-shattered 2020 academic year, and how creativity helped guide these teacher-scholars—and their students— through the uncertainty, but that is not the whole of it either. Amanda Gulla and Molly Sherman have written a book that deeply interweaves democracy and the arts, a beacon through the storm of universal assaults on the arts, humanities, and education worldwide, a keenly needed talisman of the power schooling to be more than “work-readiness.” The philosopher Maxine Greene (1997), whose aesthetic and imaginative education imbues this book with a sense of hope and creativity (and with whom Gulla worked extensively), suggests that, “A metaphor not only involves a reorientation of consciousness, it also enables us to cross divides, to make connections between ourselves and others, and to look through other eyes” (p. 391). Dark times call for powerful metaphors. The authors use this book to maintain such connections between themselves, their practice, and teachers and students everywhere; to that end, they employ the central metaphor of “upside-down” to describe the turn

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that life took when COVID-19 hit in early 2020, in a range of productive ways throughout the book. Put another way, the expression “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” may offer another metaphor for the artistry and hope offered here by the co-authors. Two master New York City educators who have a long-standing collaboration in arts and creativity education, and who use that grounding to retain hope for themselves and their students throughout the worst days of the pandemic in New York, and the worldwide economic and political contractions that have accompanied it. But this is a timeless text, based on vibrant traditions, that will have resonance long after the current troubles have passed. The authors critically address the Common Core and its limitations, offering their own brand of “inquiry-based learning through the arts in the hopes that with enough commitment and imagination, even teachers who are so constrained can find the cracks through which they might be able to slip some creativity.” Grounded in their expert knowledge and ethic of shared inquiry, hope blooms amid pandemic alienation, standardized testing, narrow curricula and racist and xenophobic national agendas. This book offers a heartful lifeline to teachers and students (and their families) from immigrant, intercultural, inner city, lower socioeconomic, and refugee backgrounds, and other collaborators and learners from vulnerable communities including youth of color, LGBTIQ+ youth, and those for whom formal educational experiences are challenging, demoralizing, or simply untenable. The book includes examples of lessons and student creative work from both their high school classrooms and graduate level teaching methods courses. Weaving these practical tools with Greene’s aesthetic education philosophy offers pedagogical strategies with extensive potential application, including multiple disciplines in higher education and professional development in a range of contexts. As they remind us throughout, “An inquiry-based learning approach is designed to work for virtually any age or learning style, because it draws upon a person’s prior knowledge and their curiosity.” And that is just one of the important contributions from this book: a kind of arts-based, applied aesthetics that is transferrable yet particular to each unique environment. This is artistry and creative teaching and learning at its best. At a time when teachers and scholars across the globe are grappling with confusion and overwhelm about operationalizing the mandate to “teach creativity” in their diverse fields of enquiry, this book not only tells, but shows us how.

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Importantly, the authors tell us that “Teachers need to be able to understand how to engage with their own creativity before they are able to teach their students how to do so. Teacher education and professional development rarely address creativity or imagination in any way,” and indeed this is the central purpose I had in mind in setting up this series. While teacher education and professional development in creativity are growing, it still often focuses on skills-building and assessment, rather than mindset shifts or teachers’ own experiences of creativity. It’s a joy to be able to offer readers a volume that is so directly focused on teacher education and creativity in classrooms, and never more timely than during COVID-19. Their personal backgrounds are a testament to the power of being raised with appreciation and practical experience of creativity in the home. In my own research, these early experiences certainly go a long way toward putting teachers at ease or discomfort in approaching the expectation that they nurture creativity in their students. These co-authors have taken their childhood experiences into adulthood, and their many students over the years are its beneficiaries—as now their readers will be. The book remains grounded deeply in practical and passionate classroom experience, and this depth and respect for their student-collaborators comes through vividly. This, as much as any of the more formal strategies and exemplars, is responsible for the rich teachings you will take away from this book. Lastly, these authors tell us—but also show us throughout the book—how powerfully their long collaboration is “rooted in a shared enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities of imagination and creativity in teaching and learning, as well as an understanding of the importance of helping students develop their voices in order to achieve full participation in a functioning democracy,” the kinds of creative-relational (Wyatt 2018) commitments we need now, more than ever. It is with enormous excitement and pleasure that I welcome this important text from Amanda Gulla and Molly Sherman into my series Creativity, Education and the Arts (Harris 2016). The book and their bodies of work (together and separately) exemplify a desperately needed inquiry-based approach to arts-, creative- and democratic-education. Maxine Greene’s aesthetic education is the beating heart of this text. Her shining example of the ways in which philosophy can inform everyday and

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political pedagogical activism are kept faithfully and dynamically alive in this text by Gulla and Sherman, and we’re so very grateful to them for it. Anne M. Harris

References Greene, M. (1997, January). Metaphors and multiples: Representation, the arts, and history. Phi Delta Kappan, 78(5), 387. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19192251/AONE?u=lehman_main&sid= AONE&xid=6cee3e8c. Accessed 30 September 2020. Harris, A. (2016). Creativity and education. London, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wyatt, J. (2018). Therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing: Towards creativerelational inquiry. London: Routledge.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the following people for helping to make this book possible: I would like to thank my wife Ann Sherrill, a gifted artist and eagleeyed editor, for her love, support, and encouragement that transcend all of the superlatives in my vocabulary. The students of Lehman College’s English Education program, who have so much heart and so much passion that they give me hope even in the darkest times. The students of Kingsbridge International High School, whose brave and moving poetry was the inspiration that started it all. My mentors, both living and gone, especially Maxine Greene, Holly Fairbank, John Mayher, Gordon Pradl, and my parents. …and of course Molly Sherman, whose enthusiasm, brilliance, and stamina make all of this work possible! —Amanda Nicole Gulla I would like to thank my son Cooper whose thoughtfulness and support was unflagging as I juggled teaching during a pandemic and writing and might have been the least bit crabby at times. Ann Sherrill whose wit, aesthetic, and culinary expressions have often granted me sanctuary from a less than civilized world. The students and educators on three continents and of the New York City Writing Project who have shared themselves and their stories with ix

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me. You all live on in my head and heart as I navigate the world. For that gift, I am exceedingly grateful. …and of course, Amanda Gulla, whose brilliance, wise and generous heart and ability to softly wrap a moment and present it as a gift leave me speechless time and time again. Finally, we would both like to express our gratitude to Anne Harris, Milana Vernikova, and Linda Braus for their wonderful support. —Molly Hamilton Sherman

Contents

1

Introduction and Looking Both Ways: How (and Why) a High School English Teacher and an English Education Professor Formed a Partnership That Informed Their Practices

1

2

Teaching to Meet the Moment

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3

What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic Poetry

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Imagining the World as If It Could Be Otherwise: Preparing Students for Solving Problems and Seeing Possibilities (Writing Poetry as Evidence-Based Argument)

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Analyzing and Synthesizing Our Stories: Exploring Identity Through Art and Poetry

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Art as Exploration: Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration

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5

6

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CONTENTS

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Making Claims and Making Change: Creative Responses to the 1619 Project

143

8

Point of View: Stepping Inside the Story

159

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Teaching as Transaction: Building Community Through Shared Inquiry

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This Is Not for Me: In Which We Discuss Some Challenges and Obstacles That May Impede the Development of an Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Arts Practice, and What Might Be Done About Them

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Appendix

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Visual Art and Artists

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.2

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.1 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 7.1 7.2

Word cloud 1 Word cloud 2 Onion goddess Ghana beads Mr. Bear Record Internal word cloud Word cloud 3 Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1558 Word cloud Word cloud Word cloud Maria Roy Andy Ema Fabilisa Assad Harlan Loraines Nelson Word cloud Tubman 1 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by Elliott Guzman)

2 18 28 31 33 34 42 52 59 68 82 118 121 122 124 125 129 131 133 136 140 144 154

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1

Tubman 2 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by Elliott Guzman) Cloud Cloud Cloud

155 159 186 205

CHAPTER 1

Introduction and Looking Both Ways: How (and Why) a High School English Teacher and an English Education Professor Formed a Partnership That Informed Their Practices

Introduction In this book, we would like to provide a theoretical and practical guide to understanding and implementing an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning centered on creative responses to works of art. According to Maxine Greene (Fig. 1.1): Aesthetic education is an approach to teaching and learning that teaches what it means to pay heed to the appearances of things, the sounds of things, to be responsive to new vistas and new forms. It is–deliberately and delicately–to move students to fresh insight and awareness.

I (Amanda) had been teaching aesthetic education courses as part of the English Education program under the guidance of teaching artists from Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education while Maxine Greene was their Philosopher-in-Residence. Over time, my practice emphasized the inquiry and art making aspects of the aesthetic education process and as it evolved, I began calling my classes inquiry-based learning through the arts because the name more accurately reflected the direction of my teaching practice. I was fortunate enough to be able to discuss this change © The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_1

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Fig. 1.1 Word cloud 1

of course name with Maxine Greene, who expressed her approval because it matched the classroom practice that it described. Philosophy in practice has to evolve to meet the moment, so this renaming reflects a practice that is deeply influenced by aesthetic education and emphasizes the hands-on inquiry pedagogy that is an essential element of that philosophy. Our work juxtaposes strategies for teaching at the secondary school level with pedagogy designed for higher education or professional development. An inquiry-based learning approach is designed to work for virtually any age or learning style, because it draws upon a person’s prior knowledge and their curiosity. Inquiry in the classroom involves carefully organized steps that include observation, questioning, hands-on artmaking, and then deepening the learning through further questioning and analysis. This process in itself is transformative, teaching learners to look and respond to the world in new ways. Because we are simultaneously thinking about teaching adolescents and teaching their teachers, our goal is to guide teacher candidates in the kinds of learning experiences we want them to curate for their own students. As teacher educators, our focus is on having candidates engage in a range of experiences themselves and then reflect on their work in ways that will support them in adapting these experiences for their own classrooms. Because this book is based on the experiences gained through a collaboration between a high school

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teacher and an education professor, we bring to this project the experience of our co-teaching and how it influenced our practices with teacher candidates and with adolescent students.

A Word About Word Clouds The word clouds that begin each chapter started out as a tool that we were using at the completion of each chapter draft to allow us to see where our emphasis was when it came down to the actual words we were setting down on the page. This is a very useful tool, particularly in a collaborative text when two or more people are collaborating on a text, and want to make sure that their voices are well harmonized. The word cloud is computer generated—you just copy and paste your text into a box and the word cloud generator calculates the number of appearances made by each word and places them in order of importance by size and proximity to the center. We were delighted to see that the word “students” appears prominently at the center of most of our word clouds. The word clouds mirror what we are writing. It occurred to us that it would be useful for readers to have a quick glimpse of key words we would be discussing at the beginning of each chapter. There are a number of different word cloud generators that you can experiment with. We have used Wordcloud.com (https://www.wordclouds.com/), which offers free and open access to their product. Their website carries this statement: The word cloud images you create are yours to use any way you see fit. Feel free however to give credit to Wordclouds.com and spread the word! You are even allowed to use the generated word clouds commercially.

The word cloud made with Molly’s students in Chapter 2 was generated using a different site, WordItOut (https://worditout.com/) which graciously gave us their permission.

Creating an Immersive Pedagogy for Students and Teacher Candidates Teachers need to be able to understand how to engage with their own creativity before they are able to teach their students how to do so. Teacher education and professional development rarely address creativity

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or imagination in any way. If they are mentioned at all, it is with an expectation that teachers will build creative experiences for students into their curriculum, without any regard for whether the teachers have had such experiences themselves. In our graduate and undergraduate methodology courses, we have observed that many teacher candidates lacked experience and confidence engaging with works of art and creative expression. In this book, we discuss the need for educators at all levels to engage with creative work and provide examples of how we have designed methodology courses for teacher candidates that allow them to engage in creative work while simultaneously reflecting on those experiences. We will discuss the role of the imagination in inquiry-based learning, the importance of placing the arts at the center of the curriculum, and the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice as we also provide practical models for how one might actually bring this work into both secondary and higher education classrooms. The technique of immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning is designed not only to teach classroom strategies, but to foster in teacher candidates the visceral experience of learning through the active use of creativity and imagination. All of this depends upon the ability for students to make personal connections with works of art and through that shared understanding, connect their personal stories with history and world events. As one English Education graduate student said: This class allowed me to be vulnerable without even realizing it. Sharing in class was something that always gave me anxiety. However, in this class it was always so easy and effortless. I knew we were all there to grow and speak our truth and this, as a result made me comfortable about being uncomfortable.

That experience of being “comfortable about being uncomfortable” allowed this student to innately understand the rewards of taking creative and intellectual risks in the classroom, and the essential role of community in supporting risk-taking. Establishing a supportive community of learners became a central part of her teaching practice. Having a teacher who is willing to take risks as a writer and as a learner will benefit many students going forward. We will also illustrate throughout the book how inquiry-based learning engages students’ curiosity and makes them more active participants in their own education as it builds literacy skills, classroom community, and

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self-confidence. This book attempts to make the practices of teachers and teacher educators visible to each other. Too often, teachers are expected to coach students in types of writing with which they themselves are not familiar. Teachers who are not educated to integrate creativity into academic learning tend to avoid such engagement in the development of their curriculum, thus perpetuating schooling that is devoid of art and imagination. This book is designed to demystify the process of creative inquiry for teachers by providing examples of the philosophy of aesthetic education as it is enacted through the practice of inquiry-based learning through the arts. We provide concrete examples of art-based lessons for the English classroom that have been successful in helping secondary students develop literacy skills and become more engaged in their schooling, while our teacher education courses are aimed at providing candidates with immersive experiences that will help guide them in creating such learning opportunities for their own students. The techniques in this book were developed as an informal collaboration between an English teacher at an international high school in the Bronx, (Molly Sherman) and a professor of English Education at Lehman College, the Bronx campus of the City University of New York (Amanda Gulla). Each of us in our own way has strained at the limitations of expectations in defining our respective roles. Having each been raised in an environment that nurtured creativity, we understood how various forms of writing—not just the school essay, but poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction—could help to enhance comprehension and the ability to make connections between ideas. We understood how sometimes creative exploration using non-word-based art forms can offer opportunities for students who struggle as readers and writers to engage with complex ideas. Such experiences foster a kind of conceptual literacy, giving students practice in tackling sophisticated ideas which they can interact with more confidently when they encounter those ideas in more complex texts. For the students at Bronx International High School with whom we began this collaboration, literary elements such as metaphor, point of view, setting, mood, and tone were abstractions until they were asked to apply them to visual images. All of these elements were explored in a single day’s discussion of Frida Kahlo’s painting Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States. While the Common Core Standards have largely limited what is required of students in the English Language Arts classroom to writing arguments and explanatory texts, our experiences both as teachers and as

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learners had taught us that the opportunity to experiment with a variety of genres strengthened engagement, efficacy, and skill. Our collaboration is rooted in a shared enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities of imagination and creativity in teaching and learning, as well as an understanding of the importance of helping students develop their voices in order to achieve full participation in a functioning democracy. This book is structured as a dialogue between a teacher and a teacher educator in order to highlight the need for learning spaces for teachers at all stages of their careers, where they can experiment with approaches to pedagogy by first trying them out on themselves, then in their classrooms, and then returning to the learning space in order to reflect on their practices. In order to frame the possibilities of such creative collaborations between educators, we give the reader a little bit of our own backgrounds and the work we were doing individually before we began working together. We will begin with stories about our respective backgrounds and the various influences that led each of us to believe in creativity and immersion in the arts as an essential part of education at all levels. In some places (like these first two chapters) where the goal is to focus on how our individual experiences inform our collaboration, we have written separate parts. In other parts of the book where the focus is primarily on texts and teaching strategies, our voices will be blended and/or intermingled.

Amanda Gulla: Live Your Life Like an Artist It was never a question for me whether the opportunity to experience and make art was necessary. I grew up in a home full of books and paintings. My first word was “book.” Also, I began speaking in full sentences at nine months old (and, according to family legend, once I started, I never stopped). My mother Enid was a voracious reader who, while she never really considered herself a “writer,” wrote poems and the most fabulous letters full of personality and clever wordplay. From her example, I learned the power of language to express and connect. Language—spoken and written—was her art form and naturally became mine too. My father Salvatore was an artist who taught art to middle school students in the South Bronx for 32 years. Although he became a teacher around the time I was born and this was an essential part of the way I thought of him well into my adulthood, I later realized that his teaching role was an interlude in his life as an artist. He had been born in that

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same neighborhood in which he later taught, into a working-class ItalianAmerican family. Becoming a teacher was a way for him as an artist to provide a stable, middle-class lifestyle for his family. He was a prolific painter, sculptor, potter, and jewelry maker, but my childhood memories are filled with Saturday classes in dance and drama at the South Bronx Community Action Theater, the organization he founded to bring the arts to children in the neighborhood in which he was born and which was now the poorest congressional district in the United States. He believed in the arts as a formative educational experience the way many others believe in team sports. He was a great proponent of the power of making things. From the ages of 8–10, I took Saturday classes at the Action Theater, studying African dance with a Nigerian choreographer and Flamenco dance with members of a Roma dance troupe from Spain. I learned to throw pots on a potter’s wheel and blend colors in a graphic design studio. Through these experiences, I caught glimpses of other cultures and got to explore a variety of art forms. I also got to see how the shared endeavor of rehearsing for a dance performance or a play could bring together children from disparate backgrounds and become a means of building community. My parents also sent me to a summer camp with strong art and theater programs. It was these early experiences that led me to become involved in theater in high school and then choose that as my major in college. I loved working with an ensemble to create imaginary worlds on stage. I had planned to pursue a career in theater, but instead found a place for my love of theater, poetry, and fiction in my own middle school English classroom, and then eventually coordinating the English Education program at Lehman College. Wherever I taught, it felt absolutely essential to build community through shared creative experiences. My father once told me that I could be an artist in the way I chose to live my life. I took that literally—studying theater and music in college and taking painting and drawing classes at the Art Students League. All of these experiences are part of who I am, but writing has always been my home, and poetry has always been the heart of that home. This is how I understood my father’s advice—that all aspects of life—work, relationships, making a home—have the potential for creative expression. I thought about my own education in kindergarten through high school. School for the most part seemed to me to be a mechanism by which to prepare children for a daily grind of dull routines. But there were occasional moments of inspiration—the trip to the museum, the

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science experiment, opportunities to write poems and stories. There were never enough experiences like these, but they were transformative when they did occur. As an elementary and middle school teacher, I tried to create as many opportunities as I could for students to write, draw, paint, and sing as part of their learning process. Now that I am an English Education professor, I often shape methods classes around the study of a painting, or a song, or a dance, or a photographic image, imagining secondary English Language Arts classes as not just about reading the adolescent canon of Catcher in the Rye and Romeo and Juliet, but as spaces in which students have opportunities to find and shape their individual voice. In graduate school, I encountered the work of Maxine Greene, an existentialist philosopher, is an essential voice in the field of aesthetic education. Building upon John Dewey’s writings about aesthetic encounters (1934), she encouraged us to reconsider the possibilities of public education. Greene encouraged us to “imagine things as if they could be otherwise” (2001, p. 98). Such acts of imagination should not be taken for granted. One of the challenges of integrating the arts into so-called academic subjects is that students sometimes resist because they have no reference point for valuing the products of their own imagination in this context, and many have had little exposure to the arts outside of popular culture. According to the New York City Department of Education, a student graduating from high school is required to earn a total of 44 credits. Only two of those credits are in the arts. Out of a total of nine standardized tests required for graduation, none involve the study of any art form (https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/in-our-classrooms/gra duation-requirement). Perhaps public school systems in the US tend not to treat the arts as essential because they, like most bureaucracies, prefer the measurable and the predictable to the creative and the imaginative. Since the 1980s, the American education system has devoted increasing resources to measuring competencies through standardized testing and accountability measures (Ravitch 2010, p. xxii). The value of education in a democracy has been oversimplified to what the Common Core Standards calls “college and career readiness” (http://www.corestandards.org/). Nowhere in these standards is there any indication that the qualities of curiosity, creativity, or collaboration are valued. The beliefs reflected in these standards are a continuation of what Maxine Greene called “the preoccupation with ‘competencies’ and behavioral objectives” (1980, p. 318). Because school

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administrators tend to be so preoccupied with the quantifiable, learning experiences full of “adventurousness linked to aesthetic encounters” may be considered “subversive of the ends of schooling” (p. 318). Prolonged inquiry around works of art can lead students to consider who they are in relation to their communities, and to name and interpret the times in which they are living. This is especially true when we ask them to respond with their own creativity. Works of art have the power to show us parts of ourselves that we might never have been able to name before. Just ask anyone who has ever had a song on repeat, or seen the same movie a dozen times, or stands transfixed in front of a painting. There is a rich opportunity in asking students to articulate that spark of connection between themselves and a work of art. Sometimes we may recognize some aspects of our own experience in a work of art. An immigrant might see a familiar reflection of her own ambivalence in Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States. Describing that painting can help the student articulate aspects of her own story in new and more powerful ways. This is one way in which we can help them to find and develop their voices. Voice, as Romano (2004) describes, is “the writer’s presence on the page” (p. 5). Of course, any kind of writing can help students develop voice, but what we have discovered through our work is that writing in response to works of art helps students articulate ideas that are beyond their own experience, and that in fact represent a connection between their lives and the wider world.

Molly Sherman: Placed in Worlds of Which I Had Never Conceived I grew up surrounded by words. Words in books, words issued from actors’ mouths on stage, the words that flew, clacking, from the portable Smith-Corona my father hauled around when crafting words for TV shows, movies, or The Portable Circus, a touring comedy troupe. My father was both a writer and a director and in my early years, I grew up thinking of all theater spaces as my father’s office. Cross-legged on a hard wooden seat, my favorite days were those when I arrived near the end of rehearsal. From the stage, actors emoted and embodied times and places that were far removed from the math workbooks and cursive writing of my young world. I watched bare-bones sets and leg-warmer garbed actors turn into denizens of fantastical worlds far richer than what I lived in my

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day to day as a school student. The actors who gathered in our apartment or in whose homes we were welcomed came from varied cultures and lifestyles. The vibrant world of the theater was where everything and everyone possible lived. To me, the most natural construct for exploration of the unknown is a creative community. From New York City, I moved to a largely working-class university town in Ohio when I was in sixth grade. It wasn’t until high school I paid enough attention to truly understand a lesson my parents had intellectually laid out for me early on in life. I discovered that the after school activities bus did not go out to a classmate’s township and her father couldn’t afford the gas money to drive her the half hour back and forth to participate. Throughout high school, I watched how our paths diverged as I participated in many clubs, sports, and activities and she dropped out and got married at 17. As a teacher, I often see the critical need to earn money or care for others in the house overriding any aesthetic, community, or personal value that might be experienced by a young person in an arts, perspective expanding, or personally empowering activity. The demands placed upon the poorest students in our communities often deny or devalue aesthetic or empowering experiences for those whose families are the least able to provide them. Due to the support of my parents, I was able to intern at a regional theater during college. I then lived in New York City, auditioning as an Equity actress and exploring the worlds of musicians, artists, and actors. I loved the theater, but I loved other things. Despite coming from a family that had years of financial struggle before settling into a comfortable middle class existence, I could choose to follow a dream and then change my dream. I was privileged, educated, and only needed to support myself. Through a friend, I began volunteering at the pediatric AIDS unit at Harlem Hospital. From the fiercely dedicated and loving nurses, doctors, and foster parents, I learned how little I understood about issues of race, social justice, and the larger world in which I lived. I learned about the fears that define and the stigmas that stick to individuals and communities. I learned the extraordinary effect love and care have upon traumatized people and that advocacy requires education and a powerful voice in disenfranchised communities. It was in Barcelona, when teaching English as a foreign language, I learned of cultures and countries that I had never considered beyond their relationship to my history classes. Art filled the spaces in parks and on the streets, guitars and music played live on park benches and in

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plazas, dancing reflecting centuries of culture occurred in the streets in the evenings, in almost every home and certainly anywhere alcohol was served. It was while teaching classes of over 50 high school juniors, and later seniors in a rather remote village in Kenya that I committed to a studentdriven inquiry through discussion and literary analysis. Discussion and shared learning had provided the greatest growth for my students. In Kenya, lacking most resources (we had our voices and a box of donated, faded blue books) we learned that to understand another person, you must learn their stories. My students came from a collection of tribal traditions and I was a white, Western woman, but by sharing stories, written and in discussion, we grew into a community where we worked to see that each voice had a place and a space. It took time and did not always work, but in a pedagogical environment that celebrated rote learning, I came to know, from necessity, the Vygotskian “qualitative transformation” of learning as a collective accomplishment (Connery et al. 2010). My students revealed themselves to one another and to me as I grew to do the same. Being a white American “other” carried enormous positive, privileged connotations in late twentieth-century postcolonial Kenya, but I also experienced the intensity of what it means to be a visual and cultural outsider. I did not see myself nor my cultural norms reflected anywhere around me. I was always welcomed in by those with whom I shared village life, but the truths about the land and students was gained through the words, stories, and discussions around literature and culture. All of ours. Student created inquiry and connections to text brought life to classwork and a shared creative and community experience that pushed each member to better understand and know one another. From my extraordinary college mentor Shirley Ariker, I learned the power of choice when designing learning. She curated a collection of literary works informed by my thematic and genre related interests that returned me to the passionate reader and creative writer I had almost forgotten I had been. It was while creating curriculum for and teaching in an afterschool program in New York City I discovered that by making learning creative, learning is not only fun, it actually sticks. It was in my Columbia graduate school program I learned that using glitter for a project was actually a genius way to revisit the text and express my understanding. I also learned by doing. By writing, by acting, by creating artistic expressions. I saw Vygotsky and community creation in action.

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It was in the South Bronx I learned that students often had no quiet place to read, not even the bathroom. I learned that they heard gunshots daily or weekly and each one knew someone who had been killed. They came from homes where parents worked multiple jobs, battled mental illness, drug addiction, and trauma with the few overwhelmed support services offered in disenfranchised communities. But these students, dealing with the attendant stressors and traumas that living in the poorest congressional district entailed, thrived with creative work; their capacity to express both what they knew and that which they imagined was deep and rich. Their voices and images continue to advise the work of my current high school students as well as the teachers and future teachers whom I teach. From the New York City Writing Project (NYCWP), I learned the potential of community and creativity to empower teachers and students alike. It was, in the midst of the ongoing commodification of students and education, a career-saving and spirit-rejuvenating experience. The NYCWP and National Writing Project (NWP) are communities with whom I still learn and create. From my students at Kingsbridge International High School, I learned the infinite capacity for humans to adapt, thrive, and seek joy. I ate food, heard stories, and learned the traditions of communities I only lightly considered while rushing around the city. I came to see that the strength and capacity I saw in them were not reflected in their own mirrors. I learned they often struggled with self-worth, hiding their sense of shame from one another. It was through expressing their truths and hearing one another that they found out they were not alone. My current high school students hail from all five boroughs of New York City and a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities. I again learned from them how powerful it can be to open ourselves up to those who are very different from ourselves. They remind me each day of the power of advocacy in youth voice. In discussion and in the written/artistic form, we share, we challenge perspectives and understanding, and we grow into wiser, more empathetic citizens and human beings. It is the Vygotskyian collective, one I learned from students in classrooms across the globe long before I read of it. It is the magic of community in shared aesthetic inquiry. A “methodology of becoming, in which people shape and reshape to themselves, to each other and to the material and psychological objects of the world” (John-Steiner, Marjanovic-Shane, Connery). Vgotsky states that “imagination becomes the means by which a person’s experience is broadened because he can imagine what he has not seen (Vygotsky 1930, 2004, p. 17).

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Why Voice Matters “The tongue can paint what the eyes can’t see.” Chinese Proverb

Voice always matters. It matters so much that in more than a few countries, entire government structures are dedicated to silencing it. Democracy thrives when all voices are heard and oppression reigns when only a privileged few are allowed to speak and are assumed to speak for all. It matters so much because one voice can change the trajectory of a place and time. Voice shifts who tells the story and how it is told. Voice is the revelation of hidden truths and, when we listen closely, can help us to reveal open lies. Voice gives life to ideas and ideas can be game-changers. Once heard, an idea can enact a transformation within individuals, communities, and society at large. If historically silenced voices are included in the conversation, the potential for inclusive positive societal growth exists. We tell our students they are the future of the world, but then we create a system of standards and assessments that devalues their personal expressive writing. We limit their options in order to better “prepare” them. We minimize creative expression work “for their own good.” For testing. For the “real” world. We do all this without questioning whose vision of the world we are asking them to internalize. We decide which of the multiple languages they speak is acceptable in school. When educational leaders actively work to silence historically silenced/oppressed students, these young people often are left with two options: to check out or to act out. If only one kind of student voice is honored and others are unrepresented or even overtly diminished, students don’t see and hear themselves and eventually they get the message that they don’t have anything to say, especially when educational leaders are telling them that over and over again. When addressing an audience of educators in New York State’s capitol, David Coleman, who is often described as the “architect” of the Common Core Standards, said the following: Do you know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today?…It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with these two forms of writing is as you

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grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a sh*t about what you feel or think. (Ohanian 2011)

We beg to differ. We must first value what our students think and have to say if we honestly wish to support open discourse in a multicultural world. We should continue to create opportunities for them to imagine and create, so that they can imagine and create a better world. It is the metaphorical thinking of artistic expression that allows for big ideas to become a part of national and international dialogue. And it is through the arts, where we are most asked to consider who we are, our fragility, our strengths, and our humanity. Edward Hopper is attributed with the observation that if he could “say it in words there would be no reason to paint,” which reminds us to allow for the transcendent in its many forms. When encountering art, attending a play, or getting lost in musical expression, we naturally connect to it personally as well as, perhaps, intellectually. Through art, we can create communities of individuals that question, challenge, and generate new ways of seeing and being.

Art as a Portal to Voice Each of us in our own way have always approached teaching with the belief that the ability to engage with works of art is an essential element of literacy and of a well-rounded education in general. Our collaboration focused on the practice of using art as a lens through which students might view their own lives. Molly’s students had recently immigrated to the United States. The works of art we chose addressed the themes of immigration, identity, and home. Through our exploration of Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, George Ella Lyon’s poem Where I’m From, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and other material, we invited students to describe what they saw, question what it meant, and then finally to write about how the ideas contained in the images or text under discussion have resonance within their own lives. John Dewey writes of the imagination as the “gateway through which meanings derived from past experiences find their way into the present” (1934, p. 20). When students “lend a work of art their lives” (Greene 2001, p. 7), the art can become a lens for understanding and expressing their own lived experiences. Such experiences can be transformative, as

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they can help disempowered people find their voices (Gulla and Sherman 2019). In our work, we are deeply influenced by Dewey, Greene, Paolo Friere, and other thinkers who have led the way in advocating for social justice through education that engages students’ voice and imagination. We believe that it is essential when looking to these foundational philosophers to constantly think about how to apply their theories to contemporary schools and their broader social context. In a rapidly changing world, we think of this as teaching to meet the moment.

Works Cited Common Core State Standards. http://www.corestandards.org/. Date Accessed June 8, 2020. Connery, M. C., John-Steiner, V., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2010). Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts. New York: Peter Lang. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin. Greene, M. (1980, May). Aesthetics and the experience of the arts: Towards transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322, 317. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gulla, A., & Sherman, M. (2019). Difficult, beautiful things: Young immigrant writers find voice and empowerment through aesthetic education and poetry. In S. Faulkner & A. Cloud (Eds.), Poetic inquiry as social justice and political response. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press. NYC Department of Education graduation requirements. Retrieved June 9, 2020, from https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/in-our-classrooms/graduationrequirements. Ohanian, S. (2011). Common core director to you: “No One Gives a S**t What You Think or Feel”. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from https://theline.edublogs. org/2011/11/02/common-core-director-to-you-no-one-gives-a-st-whatyou-think-or-feel/. Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books. Romano, T. (2004). Crafting authentic voice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Vygotsky, L. (1930). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. (2004, January–February). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97.

CHAPTER 2

Teaching to Meet the Moment

In which we discuss how we had to suddenly adapt to teaching conditions that literally changed overnight, and the lessons we learned about teaching and learning in challenging times (Fig. 2.1).

Teaching and Learning in the Upside Down---Amanda Gulla For many teachers, working with traumatized students is part of what we have come to expect. In the Bronx, where I received the entirety of my K-12 education and have subsequently spent the majority of my teaching career, poverty and its concomitant ills are all too commonplace. For many students, school is a refuge where there are friends, caring adults, and comforting predictability, so the loss of daily close contact with that community—even for those in stable environments—can be somewhat traumatic. Within the City University of New York (CUNY), as in many public universities, a significant number of our students are the first in their families to pursue higher education. Their path to a degree is often long and winding, as their lives can be complicated and precarious. A pandemic temporarily shuttering schools from kindergarten through university may seem like a singularity that we should all be able to put our heads down and simply get through. Nevertheless, the fact is that © The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_2

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Fig. 2.1 Word cloud 2

even under “normal” circumstances, we are almost always teaching traumatized students. Sometimes teachers themselves may be traumatized as well. Denny Taylor (2006) writes about teachers in places like Rwanda and post-Katrina New Orleans living in refugee camps or trailers alongside their students. When talking about the support teachers provided for children and their families, members of the community remarked “that’s what school people do,” and “Teachers know how to work with people. I honestly believe that we saved lives” (p. 13). But there is an emotional cost to all of this courage and generosity. Over the years as I have served as a program adviser, many novice teachers have sat in my office and wept, complaining of stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, scattered concentration, and poor health. This is partly due to the fact that even under “normal” circumstances teaching is an enormously challenging job, demanding that teachers attend to the intellectual and emotional well-being of students with a broad range of backgrounds and complex needs. A middle or high school teacher might be responsible for as many as 150 or more students in any one given school year. It is no wonder that the pressures of this job sometimes can seem unbearable. That is why it is so important as we prepare candidates by exposing them to content and methodology to help

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them build an effective teaching practice, that we also allow space for their humanity. This is not just about being kind, although the world could certainly use as much kindness as possible. Adopting a caring approach toward teacher candidates helps to create a space that frames teaching and learning as a shared human endeavor in which all participants have agency. Having a sense of agency helps students to take ownership of their learning. Teaching, generally speaking, is an optimistic vocation, especially when our students face adversity and continue showing up every day. We teach because we believe that with committed and compassionate nurturing and guidance, the next generation will be equipped to build successful lives in a complex and sometimes hostile world. The more adversity our students face, the more it behooves us to look past a skills-based curriculum to include ideas and materials that help them to see themselves as thinkers and creators. Fully engaged teaching is a relationship that calls for empathy and an interest in one’s students’ voices and identities. There has been a substantial body of research documenting the essential role of caring in K-12 education. Noddings (2005) describes teaching as a “moral enterprise” (p. 12) that is concerned with students’ “full human growth.” This need to account for students’ humanity does not end with high school graduation. In her book Connected Teaching (2019), Harriet Schwartz advocates for a pedagogy in which college teachers engage students in ways that “express care and convey enthusiasm” (p. 33). Academic advising in a teacher education program involves helping adult students cope with the challenges and tensions of managing their dual roles as teachers and students, alongside whatever other challenges their lives might bring. This semester in addition to being an adviser, I was teaching two methods seminars: a graduate capstone course in curriculum design and a course in methods of teaching writing that consisted of a mix of undergraduate and graduate students. Both classes were lively and intimate. Students seemed to feel comfortable incorporating their personal stories and beliefs into much of their writing, and were supportive and encouraging of each other. The pedagogical style of these methods classes can be described as experiential learning, which Dewey (1934) explains as “the large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world” (p. 278). In our classes, students respond in real time to creative works by questioning, discussing, analyzing, writing, and often making art that reflects their own lives and experiences.

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Integrating both language-based and non-language-based art forms into the curriculum of an English Education program places teacher candidates on a more even footing with their students who may be struggling readers, requiring that they attend closely to unfamiliar material and actively engage in a meaning-making process. The overlapping vocabularies of the various arts can help students gain a deeper understanding of the terminology of the Language Arts classroom. We can all recall standardized exams requiring multiple choice or short answers about tone and mood, symbolism, and metaphor in the context of studying canonical works of literature. We can gain so much more depth of knowledge through prolonged shared inquiry into the experience of tone and the significance of metaphor in paintings, songs, poems, and films in addition to books. The syllabi of those two courses was carefully crafted around these beliefs and values, and usually that meant that we would all gather around a text or a work of art (some unpacking of what we mean by “texts” and “works of art” in the next chapter) and undertake an involved communal process of inquiry that includes discussion, artmaking, and reflection. Suddenly in the middle of the spring semester, the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and our campus shut down. All students, faculty, and staff had to abruptly adapt to teaching, advising, and everything else online. My first question in preparing for this shift in my own teaching was how I could keep that energy alive when the only way we could gather was to view each other on our screens, in glitchy little rectangles surrounded by the distractions of home. For teacher candidates participating in their own education while they were also teaching online was an exercise in being in two places at once, not fully present in either. I was new to teaching online, particularly teaching live classes via web-based meeting platforms. Early on, I saw that the questions I needed to address were much broader and more urgent than how I might translate my syllabus full of workshop-oriented discussions and group activities into an online platform. Students were at best disoriented, at worst traumatized. Some found themselves living crammed cheek-by-jowl with family members or roommates who were now home all the time, taking up space and precious bandwidth needed for all of the Zooming and Googling required of them. As the semester wore on, more and more students were losing family members or getting sick themselves. Businesses closed, people were frozen in place at home. As the poet Wallace Stevens (1954) might have

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noted, the house was quiet, but the world was most definitely not calm. Practically everyone was locked down in a state of anxiety. All of our teacher candidates who had suddenly been thrust into the virtual world were contending with figuring out online platforms that were new to them and trying to make sure that both they and their students had access to the equipment they needed. At the same time, many of their students were in difficult situations themselves. Their parents were suddenly unemployed, or some parents were essential workers—doctors, nurses, EMTs, grocery or pharmacy clerks, postal carriers, and delivery drivers. So many families whose lives may have been precarious to begin with found their situations upended. I needed a metaphorical framing (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) to help me to grasp what we were living through, how I should be feeling, thinking, and acting, and how specifically to adapt my teaching to meet the moment. The philosopher Maxine Greene (1997) offers the understanding that “A metaphor not only involves a reorientation of consciousness, it also enables us to cross divides, to make connections between ourselves and others, and to look through other eyes” (p. 391). Such metaphorical ways of naming experiences helps us to form a contextual understanding. We can think “I know what this is, I’ve seen it before.” Right away, I began thinking of the multiple layers of catastrophe consisting of the pandemic, the lockdown, the hidden danger to all, the grotesquely callous and incompetent reaction by the federal government, the bizarrely aggressive resistance in some parts of the country to taking measures designed to protect the vulnerable, as the “upside down.” The term “the upside down” comes from a science fiction television show called Stranger Things, and it describes an alternate universe in which everything appears as a distorted, sinister version of the world in which we live. It was a term I used initially only in my own mind, but then I heard others using it too. The “upside down” was our new zeitgeist. This metaphorical framing of living in the upside down helped me shift the priorities of the course to suit the moment. Having a metaphor helped me begin to understand how to think about what was going on, how so many people seemed to be feeling and behaving. For Anne McCrary Sullivan (2009), metaphors are about “tying the abstraction to the concrete things that make it possible to know in the body what it means” (p. 113). The understanding that we were living in “the upside down” provided some guidance on how to proceed—at least as far as accepting the fact that whatever this was, it was not our normal lives.

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I found that I could not concentrate on anything for very long and noted shifts in my sleeping pattern. Even though I was safe and comfortable at home during this pandemic lockdown, I was not okay, and I quickly discovered that neither were most of my students. The best way to meet the moment, I thought, was with empathy, flexibility, and stability. Our classes would continue to meet via online meeting platforms at the same time and day as we had when we were on campus. We would stick to the original syllabus as much as possible (stability). Each class would begin with some check-in time, allowing students to talk about whatever they needed to, and I made myself available to students who needed to talk outside of class time. I would also make sure to keep the workload manageable and replace some of our class assignments with ones that acknowledged the realities of the moment (empathy). Several students reached out during the semester because they were ill, or a family member was hospitalized, or because they confided that they just could not break through their depression and anxiety that week. I told them not to worry about showing up to class, just make sure they checked in with me at least once a week and handed in the assignment when they felt able (flexibility). Once we made a shift to online classes, there was a drop in average weekly attendance from 90% before the lockdown to about 60% during the lockdown. On the other hand, the rate of on-time submission of assignments went from 70 to 90%. Students commented both anecdotally and in their written reflections that the shift in emphasis from formal study of lesson planning and curriculum study to writing that was more personal, reflective, and creative made the work feel manageable and even enjoyable. One student remarked that she looked forward to the weekly assignments, and that they helped her to feel grounded. Maxine Greene (2001) spoke of the power of art to heal and the important role the arts must play in education at all levels if we truly value “wide awakeness” in our citizenry. She wrote of the social imagination, the “capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools” (1995, p. 5). That capacity moves people “to hold someone’s hand and act” (1998). To trudge forward with my syllabus of lesson plans and assessments suddenly made no sense to me. The only thing that really did make sense was to bring into the center of my teaching specific works of art that would act as an invitation or a provocation to help the students access their voices in this time of isolation and uncertainty.

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While I was rethinking teaching, I felt the need to call upon my inner resources in order to be able to use my creative voice to process this unprecedented moment. I had always turned to poetry to make sense of difficult times. I wanted to read and write poems to heal myself, and to offer some balm to my students, which they might in turn offer to their own students. From the very beginning of this period of isolation and shutdown, I began thinking of Mary Oliver, whose poems live on my shelves and in my memory as old friends. It is her ability to explain the most universal aspects of the human experience through the lens of a wild animal, a shoreline, or a field of wildflowers that has always drawn me to her writing. Her thorough devotion to engaging the natural world in a dialogue illuminates universal aspects of the human experience through the power of metaphor. Her poem Wild Geese (1986, p. 111) had always been a favorite of mine, and now it played constantly on a loop in my mind, especially the line: You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves.” Each day I woke up and put on my quarantine uniform of soft, comfy gray pants, t-shirt, and hoodie—an outfit in which I felt like the human embodiment of fog. Never had I been so keenly aware of the sense of myself as a soft animal. I recalled an evening at dinner with a lively group of artists and educators at an academic conference, the kind of event that now seemed magically remote. I had been mocking myself for existing so much inside my head, that I sometimes had to remind myself that I had a body. I was seated next to dancer, performance artist, and scholar Celeste Snowber, who immediately turned to me and said that I don’t have a body, I am a body. The inarguable truth of that statement left a lasting impression. Now, while I struggled to find balance as the pandemic rocked our worlds, I was able to find some comfort in this astonishingly simple idea. I am a body. Words were failing me, so I would simply have to trust and allow my body to love what it loves, and to know what it knows. I took Oliver’s gentle command personally, even literally. In its straightforward and simply worded permissions to opt out of some of life’s harsh restrictions, this poem carries a sense of possibility. If only we can learn to forgive ourselves and let go of some of our burdens, we might understand that we all have a place in “the family of things,” and take comfort in knowing that the world goes on.

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Only suddenly, the world was not going on, at least not in its usual manner. From the perspective of someone like me, who was able to work from home in a safe and comfortable environment, this could be seen as a blessing within the catastrophe. What an unprecedented opportunity to be creative and productive! What an unheard-of gift of time! In reality, for the first few weeks, I was unable to sleep or concentrate. Even in my circumstances, tucked away with my beloved in a cozy cottage in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York with plenty of everything we needed, I had to acknowledge that the trauma of this pandemic was affecting me. The radio, newspapers, social media, all were wall-to-wall Covid-19. Everything else had ground to a halt. I thought constantly of the heart-wrenching final line from another of Oliver’s poems, The Summer Day (1990) Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Thinking of that line as time ticked away, and the mere passing of time without any productivity from me apart from teaching my classes, advising my anxious and bewildered students, and doing basic household chores, left me in a state of mild despair. I ached to write, both because my heart and mind ached for the ecstatic feeling of capturing a moment with language and because my personal and professional identity is bound up with my verbal output. I would walk around the house repeating lines of Wild Geese quietly to myself, whispering, “You do not have to be good,” writing my own lines in between the lines of the poem, trying to hold a conversation with the poem as if Mary Oliver were speaking these words directly to me as I told her of my despair, hoping that she might help me make sense of it. This dialogue I was writing with Oliver’s poems was a way of trying to rouse myself back to consciousness and corral my own attention. These poems were medicine, and in order for this medicine to have its full healing effect I needed to engage by writing back to those lines that truly felt like lifelines. Here is the first draft of that dialogue poem: What Will You Do With Your One Wild and Precious Quarantine? (an homage to Mary Oliver)

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The soft animal of my body loves to push its tangled head under the pillow, dip into this unimaginable bounty of time. Who among us hasn’t wished that we could stop our spinning planet for a moment? Just long enough to catch our breath.

Tell me about despair, yours… …I carry my breath and blood through death every day.

I’ll tell you about despair, mine… …What if I never want to leave home again?

Now we pause long enough to see the hands and hearts, the lungs and legs that move the engine that drives the world.

Let my dreams do all the excavating layers of tasks to find at the bottom this homely mundane beast shuffling through rooms touching objects in the proscribed universe of things it is safe to touch.

We live inside snow globes. We are beautiful when shaken.

Beginning with the images conjured up by “the soft animal of your body,” I wanted to commit to words the bodily manifestation of my emotional state. The knowledge of the grim reality of this deadly pandemic that the whole world was experiencing at once felt to me and many others who were tucked away at home like a surreal and endless snow day. I needed to sort out my confusion and dissonance, my shattered attention, through the vehicle of poetic inquiry. This need felt physical, as well as emotional and intellectual. Sullivan writes of the role of intuition in a poet’s work as “something biologically real, a cognitive process that arises from being

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finely attuned to the signals that our physiology delivers from unconscious perception” (2009, p. 112). My intuition told me that I needed some structural support to get me started. Those kind and gentle lines of Oliver were just what I needed. Doing that bit of writing set me on a path back to my writer’s voice. Maxine Greene often spoke and wrote of “lending a work of art one’s life” (2001, p. 128). This involves a reciprocal relationship, where one is not simply studying and cataloging the product of another person’s imagination, but engaging it in dialogue by “deeply noticing” (Holzer 2007) questioning, and artmaking. For Greene, to “engage imaginatively” with a work of art allows one to “discover possibilities in your own body, your own being” (2001, p. 80). As I was struggling to do my work as a poet, I was also searching for a way to engage with my students that would feel meaningful, that would acknowledge the current realities while still being true to the learning goals set forth in the beginning of the semester. The realities those students faced varied quite a bit. Some were still teaching their middle or high school classes online, while perhaps also having to care for their own children or elderly parents. Some were at risk or had loved ones who were gravely ill, others were safe at home but dazed and depressed, and some lacked adequate technology to be able to teach or learn online. Because we had been engaging with works of art all semester, it made sense to figure out ways to continue in that mode with shifts in the logistics of presentation and discussion to adapt to our new circumstances. Before our campus had shut down, the graduate students in the curriculum course had studied the paintings of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and the songs from Rhiannon Giddens’ album Freedom Highway, in which she performs songs she has written that give a voice to historical events from slavery through the civil rights movement. The class had written poems in response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project —a series of articles, essays, photographs, and poems that address the lasting impacts of slavery on American society. Meanwhile, the students in the writing methods course had just written epistles modeled on Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Having established the practice of inquiry through creative response, it now seemed time to cut through the multiple layers of distress by teaching them to engage in dialogue with images—some recognized works of art, some of their own creation. Even better would be for those who were teaching or would eventually become teachers to be able to guide their own students

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through this process that might offer them some clarity and perhaps even solace on the way to developing their skills as writers.

Inside/Outside This assignment, crafted for the student in the writing methods course, required them to take a photograph of something inside of their homes, shining a light on the widely shared experience of sheltering at home to avoid spreading the Covid-19 virus. I asked them to choose any object that might have a story connected to it. Those who were still venturing outside had the option of taking pictures outside of their homes as well. Here is the actual assignment as it was sent out to the class: This assignment requires that you take a photograph of something inside your home. These should not be pictures of people, but of objects. It is okay if there is a person in the picture, but the main subject of the picture should be the object you choose to write about. Likewise, with animals– if your cat wanders through the picture that is fine, but it should not be just a picture of your cat. Choose any object that you can find something to say about. It can be something that has sentimental value because someone special gave it to you, or it can be an object that you use and carry all the time and so you might write about all of the adventures it has been on with you, or maybe it’s an object that just looks odd or interesting or beautiful, or maybe it’s something you have walked by hundreds of times but this is the first time you are really noticing it. Your writing might simply tell the story of that object and its significance, or you could choose to write an imaginative story or poem about the object. The object you choose to take a picture of can be something beautiful and elegant, or simple and humble. Whatever image captures your attention is fair game. It’s all in what you see, and how you allow your imagination to operate. You may choose to tell a simple and straightforward story, or you may choose to be as creative as your imagination will allow. Either way, I am looking for a short piece. It need not be more than 500 words. Your writing may take any form you choose- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or invent a new form if you feel like it. Then take the time to polish your writing and make it beautiful. Please, have a bit of fun with it. Don’t let it be too dry. As the line from Doctor Who goes, “We are all stories in the end. Make it a good one.”

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I followed those instructions with an example of my own, to give them something to respond to along with the sense that they did not have to go for something grand. Rather, I wanted to encourage them to see beauty in the ordinary. Here is the result of that search for the extraordinarily ordinary image and my quest to find meaning in it, in the form in which it was included with the assignment (Fig. 2.2):

Fig. 2.2 Onion goddess

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I took this photograph yesterday while cooking dinner. I was chopping an onion and saw this little figure slip out of the center and tumble out onto the cutting board as I was just about to slice it in half. It immediately reminded me of one of those ancient goddess figurines that are found in archaeological digs all over the world. Vikings, Southern Europeans, Africans, people in South America and Siberia all had these small palmsized figures, usually made from clay or stone. They are understood to be fertility figures. Bringers of life. I began to think of this small sliver of onion as “she” rather than “it”. Here is my meditation on this humble little sliver of onion: I am staying home to stay alive, and cooking soothes my soul. As my reward for living in suspended animation, a tiny fertility goddess makes her way into my kitchen. She is there to remind me of all of the ancient stories I have read and places I have visited. Places of great mystery. She was born of a humble vegetable but like all things that have been alive, there is a connection to all other life, and that connection reverberates down through history. She was not just a layer of the onion, she was its very heart. I knew that I had to capture and keep her image. The heart of the onion was connected to all of the other onion spirits who had flavored my ancestors’ cooking. She was there to remind me that we are part of the natural world, and that life always wins. With this knowledge, I put the onion, including its heart in a pan with olive oil, garlic, and tomatoes. I think now I understand what it means to cook with love. It is to channel your ancestors through your senses. The smells and tastes that take us back in time.

This writing led me back to the original conversation with Mary Oliver’s poems, which were still tugging at my sleeve. The goddess inside the onion became the vehicle through which I could articulate my experience of this moment. I followed my own assignment to this next draft.

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What Is It You Plan to Do with Your One Wild and Precious Quarantine? (an homage to Mary Oliver)

Home is the inside of a snow globe, we are beautiful when we are shaken. Shuffling through rooms touching all that we can in the proscribed universe of things that are safe for us to touch.

I am staying home to stay alive, soothing my soul by conjuring a beefy red sauce in my grandmother’s cast iron pot. Clop of the knife as it lands on the cutting board halves the onion and out tumbles the heart, a tiny fertility goddess, bringer of life, makes her way into my kitchen.

I am a time traveler peering into my ancestor’s window, seeking refuge at her hearth.

This allium’s heart is connected to all of the onion spirits who flavored dishes made by hands that held you when you were small. The onion and its heart now steaming away in grandma’s pot, as the soft animal of my body is lost and found in the scent and the sound of the sizzle.

I sent the instructions for the assignment along with my example by email, and when we met in class via an online meeting platform each student took a turn to share his or her screen and read their work. Here are some of the students’ responses to the assignment. This first example is from Eunice, who is a social studies teacher. By focusing on an object that had

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Fig. 2.3 Ghana beads

such a strong relationship to her cultural heritage, she saw possibilities for new ways of integrating writing into her own teaching: Ghana Beads by Eunice Nti (Fig. 2.3). Ghana beads I chose the Ghana beads in my room because they hold a lot of meaning in my culture and to me. Beads play a big role in Ghana. Many of our festivities include the wearing of beads and the history beads have in my culture, is very deep and sentimental. They were first used as the King’s currency for the exchange of slaves, textiles and alcohol. But Later on, they became popular in the ancient coming of age rituals for girls. Most mesmerizing is the colors of these beads. The colors of Ghana beads have meaning. For instance, in certain parts of Ghana, white colored beads evoke fertility; blue colored ones are associated with purity; while golden ones are a symbol of wealth. Some produced exclusively to be worn by Ghana Chiefs. Once you know what the colors of your beads symbolize, wearing them becomes a much more personal experience. In today’s world Ghana beads are used in different ways such as artistic expression, as a spiritual object, or simply a fashion statement. Click click click

My Beads scream cultured, and cultivated. Proud and strong

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Deep in my roots Unapologetic of my views.

My Beads hold memories of the joys of yesterday of blissful scenery of laughter and stories of unforgettable sounds. An appreciated legacy My Beads speaks She stands out in a room Chevron, glass or brass Red, white or Brown Green yellow or blue. My beads will always speak to you.

CLICK CLICK CLICK

Matt, who is also a Social Studies teacher, chose an object that is the very embodiment of warmth, security, and comfort. His story evokes the power of paternal love in the desire to shield his little girl from a sense of loss, even when their house was literally burning down. He writes with lighthearted humor of the great lengths he has gone to in order to preserve Mr. Bear. On the same day that he submitted this assignment, he emailed to let me know that he would not be able to attend our virtual class meeting because his grandmother had just died and he was too upset, remarking: “This virus is making it impossible to mourn in the ways we’re accustomed to.” So many people were having that same experience, and he expressed it with simple eloquence. When I asked permission to use his photograph and story in this book, this was his response: In our abbreviated time together, I used several of the methods of writing we discussed in class during my lessons. Our class discussions and your approach gave me the confidence to explore new ways for my students to write and express themselves. In the short time I had in class with these approaches I received work that was moving, introspective, and even enlightening.

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The pandemic may have radically changed the semester and our world but I will carry forward with what I’ve learned, optimistic that we can all return to school safely and soon. Thank you for making my classroom a better place. Mr. Bear by Matthew Huza (Fig. 2.4). This is Mr. Bear, he’s not mine. He is my daughter’s most precious possession. My daughter will turn 13 in June. This is not the original Mr. Bear, he was lost a year and half in, in the Macy’s parking lot in Parkchester. Do not tell my daughter. I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I just said she must have left it at grandma’s house and went to a store to buy another. Couldn’t find one, had to order it online. Thankfully. Years ago when my daughter was 8, we had a fire in our building. Everyone was sleeping but me; it spread to our apartment. We made it out because I heard noise from the kitchen and was going to yell at whoever wasn’t sleeping like they were supposed to. When I was outside with my wife and children, and waiting for the fire department, my first thought knowing everyone got out was “damn, I didn’t grab Mr. Bear.”

Fig. 2.4 Mr. Bear

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Mr. Bear lives! After a few baths. He’s her comfort, her past, her love. She still sleeps with Mr. Bear, often right up in her face. I love Mr. Bear because of the joy he has brought her. I get more and more sentimental about that bear as the years have gone on. I hope she brings him with her to college, but boy-oh-boy if she loses that bear…. Brandon, whose job in a grocery store made him an essential worker and kept him in contact with the world outside of home, chose to photograph this record album nailed to a telephone pole that he had seen on his way to work. Just as I had taken my inspiration from Mary Oliver, he chose several lines from the song “Conjugal Burns” from one of his favorite bands The Mars Volta as inspiration to get himself started. The poem is wry and agile, expressing regret and sensuality with cool, dark undertones. Something about that record nailed to a wooden pole, destroying the very thing you wish to sell, contained for Brandon a metaphor worth exploring. Records for Sale by Brandon Mendez (Fig. 2.5).

Fig. 2.5 Record

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All of this time. All the ways you looked at me and scratched in under my surface. Bed-sore containment.

Where are we now that the music has faded? I know I always fell asleep first. Leaving you alone in the hook.

But whenever I’m awake, I dance to what I expect to hear from you. Along the grooves of your sides and verse on your cheeks. I hold onto the ghost to fit the shape of our peaks.

The part of us reminds me of all the times I let you down.

Skipped over on the scratches and missed the best part. What makes the whole record worth having. Now you set yourself to default and leave me with the ghost.

But I need to sell it to hold out for more.

To last until I can learn my next dance to keep. Fill up and clean off the record after every use, to keep it healthy.

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Learn from my missteps and have a perfect story to tell.

Until then. I have records to sell.

Somehowly---Molly Sherman “Somehowly” was a part of the particular postcolonial vernacular used by the Kenyan students I taught and many of the adults I grew to know. To me, it was a perfect word, capturing a sense of optimistic determination seasoned by centuries of hard-won cultural wisdom when faced with irrational or untenable realities. There is both a sense of weariness and of optimism implicit in the word. This translanguaged descriptor well captured the state of disequilibrium in which Amanda and I, and the world, found ourselves as the Covid-19 pandemic raced across the globe. As Amanda and I worked on this book, the world around us and in our classrooms began to wobble as global pandemic took root. Where the day before had been classrooms, staff rooms, class schedules, now there was nothing. Nowhere to go, no one we could see. And from this sudden dayintonight sheltering-in world in which we found ourselves, educators had to recreate schools. In one week. Nothingness into something. If anyone can do this work, it is a teacher. And we did. Building a plane in the air and then being told to not use certain parts. But we dug in. Building a somethingess out of nothingness. Just as we began to norm to the new, everything exploded. Black Lives Matter protests sprang up in cities and towns across the globe in response to the ongoing and historic systemic oppression and murder of Black Americans by police and white supremacists. What did this look like in classrooms and staffrooms? Let’s begin in the beginning. And in the beginning, there were two words and the words were “pandemic lockdown.” Classrooms and lockers across the globe remain, at the moment of this writing, as time capsules to the day before, the last day of school as we knew it. The beforetime, as my co-worker and I refer to it. Most of us found ourselves in the unknown of the aftertimes. In this space of not knowing, teachers across the globe gathered together on Zoom (and then no longer allowed to meet on Zoom), through texts and on social media to build a place for our students, and ourselves, to reunite and

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continue the work of inquiry and education. Some of us had extraordinary administrators who led us with courage and the ability to question and advocate care as we built systems and established priorities. In the week after the pandemic lockdown in New York City, the world went from ordinary into a timeless, spaceless “nothingness.” In the brief period of a week, educators were expected to learn technology platforms and practices as they engaged in a weeklong reimagining of education. Teachers were rebuilding our national education system as they cared for their own young children, friends, and family with emotional, physical, or developmental needs as well as concern for elderly family members and neighbors. Teachers hastily downloaded Zoom and met to brainstorm and teach one another the technology needed to create and run a classroom. Schools shut their doors and teachers opened theirs, making their homes, their sanctuaries, into safe and creative learning spaces for their students. Classrooms became windows into one another’s intimate and until recently private worlds. From the nothingness of our separate dayintonight rooms, we build new norms. As we began to meet virtually, students set their own norms. They redefined the definition of bed head and longtime advocates of pajamas as school wear finally got their day in the sun. More than once, a student analyzing material for the class was also preparing breakfast. We introduced pets of all species and developed a familiarity with lessons interrupted by screaming babies, loud conversations, and even disconcerting sirens. Initially, my peers and I advocated that all students show their faces so that we could somehow feel a sense of our classroom community again. More and more students voiced challenges to this, citing faulty technology, shame at how they looked or their homes appeared, concern over the interruption of class by other family members or loud nearby discussions. Many students in the high school where I teach had previously shown up to school each day in their urban teenage armor able to curate who they were going to be that day. As I stared into the sea of squares, I was reminded how these pajama clad young people were the same young men and women who tried on evolving identities at school and could reinvent themselves as they crossed the threshold of our building. Our staff soon accepted that many students did not have the technology, emotional stamina, or social–emotional confidence to be fully seen and heard. We acknowledged it all as OK and part of our new normal. The community that existed had to be reinvented, revised, for

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the needs of all of its members. From nothingness to screens filled with faces and black squares with avatars who could present them in the way they wished to be seen. We gathered in this deep space environment on the dark screen each day as the silence of the city was shattered only by the sirens that resonated through us all. Nothingness was not just the loss of schedules and spaces. The structures we had built in classrooms and workplaces and counted on disappeared in a day. Our challenge was how to sustain that intimacy in a time of sudden separation and shocking isolation. Schools are social centers. Millions across the country began to gather in these virtual spaces, connect, and be less alone. Students who had not been as eager to be in class began showing up, admitting the structure and connection supported them in the chaos of the pandemic unknown. Others disappeared as sleep disruption, anxiety, and depression were triggered. We kept seeking out our students and ways to hold ourselves in community because when we are deprived of that, it rocks us. These groups allow us the power we feel in connection, especially valuable in times of crisis. Like our students, educators need community. As my peers and I were asked to do this reinvention of education, I found myself losing focus, disoriented, overwhelmed. It was conversations with friends, family, and peers, who often reached out just when I needed it, that let me know I was not alone, not failing, and that we were doing good work no matter how messy and unboundaried it felt. We reinvented learning communities all while rewriting or creating new curriculum, keeping up with marking, encouraging students to attend or participate, conferencing with those who aren’t in class, and the endless, endless, endless emails. Then we wrestled time to care for our loved ones and hopefully, ourselves. I know I was not alone in feeling my heart rate rise as I turned on the computer to check my email or my texts. For students experiencing “fight, flight, or freeze” (Souers and Hall 2016), the tidal waves of well-intentioned emails and reminders shut them down. Our staff had to rethink the requests we would make of students’ time and focus. The boundaries of existence, for many of us, became our own small spaces. Students, particularly those growing up in areas of poverty, had already been arriving at school wrestling with toxic stress, defined by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child as the “strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of the body’s stress management system” (National Child Traumatic Stress Network, Secondary Traumatic Stress Committee 2011) in addition to singular event traumas. This

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pandemic and lockdown in small, sometimes unsafe spaces triggered many of our most vulnerable students. They shut down and developed insomnia and/or an inability to fully wake up. These students disappeared slowly or suddenly from electronic and phone contact. Some had family who served as essential workers or who had lost jobs and had already been living paycheck to paycheck. Others took on care and education of siblings and lacked time or technology to attend their own school. Our academically rigorous school unanimously chose to focus on student first, content second. We continued to reinvent ways for students to engage and be engaged with community learning asynchronously and encourage conferencing and counseling. I had thought I might try to create small groups using the breakout feature on Zoom, but we were told we couldn’t use the platform after hackers plagued virtual classrooms and work spaces with a series of “Zoom bombings” and thus our structure for intimate, safe small community work was removed. This critical component of community and shared peer writing, small group discussion and support was going to look different in my classes. Complicated and different from everything I wished a young learning community to be. After a month or so, we began to get a footing, to believe we could manage this new normal. Then everything changed again. In the words of my son’s early favorite author Terry Pratchett “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded (2014, p. 1). Americans and citizens around the world were shaken out of their isolation by the murder of George Floyd and others creating a mass uprising led by Black Lives Mater. My peers, students, and I were already overwhelmed, distracted, unnerved by the pandemic and its impact on people of color and those in areas of poverty. Our Black students and staff and the BIPOC1 community shared that they were overwhelmed in new ways and exhausted from lifetimes formed by the fear and racist thinking of white people. As Christoper Emdin (2016) writes in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, “In schools, urban youth are expected to leave their day-to-day experience and emotions at the door and assimilate into the culture of schools. This process of personal repression is in itself traumatic and directly impacts what happens in the classroom.” The stress and distress these students had to “manage” in order to be seen as a “good”

1 Black and Indigenous People of Color.

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students or avoid being labeled as a “bad kid” throughout their education was huge. With the addition of remote learning, the sense of shame and failure when one lacks technology, lives in a complicated, loud home situation, a home that does not reflect or accept their chosen identities or are in shelters added to the sense of alienation for many of our students. The stress and the process of supporting so many students who were experiencing ongoing trauma impacts teachers, counselors, and administrators who might themselves have triggered trauma. The need to listen, support, and find solutions to untenable realities led me and many of my peers to experience the sleeplessness and anxiety that is only a shadow of how many of the traumatized and toxically stressed students throughout my career have navigated an ordinary day in school. A few weeks after the lockdown began, I was to begin a new class, a creative writing elective for the final quarter. I met new students online and a few familiar faces joined them. These students flashed their faces once, if tech allowed, and then many asked to be able to participate with the screen on the ceiling or with an avatar. Some never showed up for synchronous learning but did all the work we created to allow a student to succeed even if unable to attend class. Through outreach, students were set up to manage work asynchronously and have access to synchronous work. There was a learning curve, for sure, and we are still reinventing to meet the many needs of diverse student realities as well as those of our curriculums. Not all the students were trying to avoid being seen from shame or stress but from the growing sense of sensory overload from continuously scanning screens of faces and being aware one is always “on.” In a brick and mortar classroom, there is the illusion that only when one speaks to another or the class, is one seen. It was taking its toll on the adults as well. Even those students with secure environments and resources struggled. Research has shown a clear association between childhood experiences of traumatic events and impaired memory, attention, executive skills, and abstract reasoning (Beers and De Bellis 2002; Pynoos et al. 1995; Cicchetti and Toth 1998). Then the ongoing nothingness exploded into the civil uprising of BLM protests triggering new or previous trauma which impacted student focus, processing, and reactivity. Class experience and asynchronous work needed to feel simple, yet provide the opportunity for students to explore voice and language as they processed their lives and learning in individual ways. Film as Social Commentary class was the most successful, allowing students to escape yet also connect to themes and characters with whom they and the time resonated. The disorienting timelessness of the global

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pandemic lockdown was magnified as many of our students were part of families of first responders and/or members of communities making up the highest rates of illness and death in the country. Many of those students had gone silent. They were not showing up or invisible in class, living behind avatars on black squares. They needed to express to find their voice in a time that was silencing many through illness, stress, and fear. Voice, according to Tom Romano in Crafting Authentic Voice, is “the writer’s presence on the page” (2004, p. 5) and the page might be a place for my shell shocked students’ voices to whisper, question, detail and rage. I opened class each day with a screenshared document and when students entered they might have a prompt, an image, a quote or words, a short snippet from a mentor text (either a student or professional writer) to read from which to respond. They would respond or share bits of their work that could be archived. It was available to them later as a resource, both for the students who attended and, more importantly, as material for those who attended the class entirely asynchronously. Every student could make observations and note where the work had caught their eye and why, when they were able. It was far from perfect, but it was how to create low-stakes (Elbow 1997) shared work in a world in which the stakes were constantly rising. It was a way to share words and stories when we couldn’t even really see one another or much of anything in the world outside our windows. Like Amanda, I asked students to be inspired by images of their own or in the world, music, art, whatever moves them. I assigned writing prompts with the flexibility to “let them write where their pen takes them,” as facilitators in New York City Writing Project (NYCWP) workshops often say. Students read and annotated mentor pieces and came prepared to discuss either authorial tools or the characteristics of a short form genre to be explored. Student attendance numbers were relatively stable but the students who attended were not always the same ones each day or week. Considering the limited stamina of students, we used short texts and visual prompts for writing. As I looked for a way for students to create a community expression of this time of nothingness and newness, I realized that the word cloud would be an effective tool for the kind of communal gathering of thoughts and language that teachers often use to get a discussion going. I sent out a homework assignment asking all students to share five sentences or even five words that express or capture their experience of what many call Quarantimes. This was both an opportunity for overwhelmed students to be heard and to achieve a completed task.

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The word cloud allowed for community to be concretized as a work of literary art which then created a gathering space for us to walk through (synchronously and asynchronously), making observations and connections. The Word It Out cloud is formed from the students’ words. The larger the word in the image, the more often it appears in the submitted work. Take a minute to simply observe the student experience as expressed in the word. What do you notice my students were experiencing? How were they talking about it? (Fig. 2.6). After our noticings and questions in class, students were asked to use this as a starting point for a Pandemic Poem brainstorm. Below are some excerpts from the work that resulted. These are a few of the first draft poems that the students could choose to revise for their portfolio or not. I just wanted them to write. As previously noted, the sudden loss of schedules and time structures created a dissociative quality to the first weeks of the pandemic. Students (and teachers) struggled to keep sleep schedules and manage anxiety. Marilyn captures this aspect of her experience perfectly in a piece she wrote in her writer’s notebook. It is unrevised and an example of the role art plays in making sense of the world around us.

Fig. 2.6 Internal word cloud

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Curse or Blessing? By Marilyn Cadena

4 walls. Barred Windows. Curtains shining shimmers of light. Nothing to consume our desperation. Trapped in endless boredom.

Sleepless nights, rolling over and over Sheets ruffled, humid pillow. Tired but can’t close our eyes. Naps at 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm and more. Wake up and the cycle continues.

Another student reflected on loss of structure and community in a piece that clearly drew from his love of dystopian literature. This excerpt demonstrates how his use of random capitalization captured the sense of alarming existential chaos he was seeing in society and feeling in his newly isolated world. March 13th was the Last Normal Day Everything was shutdown and the world was in Disarray

Aecitou2 is a student facilitator in our school’s restorative justice community. She lives in an area of New York City that has one of the highest percentages of Covid 19 cases. She has family members who leave to work each day. She does not sleep well and has expressed her deep anxiety for the health of those she loves as she witnesses neighbors and friends become infected with the virus. Aceitou is also outraged and overwhelmed by the systemic racism she is seeing day after day on social media. Her personification of the coronavirus alludes to a sinister, 2 Pseudonym.

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taunting authority from a system that fully feels its privilege to claim for itself what Aceitou and her family’s. Like racism, there is no escape from the fear that the virus brings, even when in the sanctuary of one’s home. I am on your water bottle I am on your door knob I am on the screen of your phone You will never find me because I am undetectable. Call me special agent Rona.

In this excerpt from a piece she was playing with in her writer’s notebook, Kilsy’s allusion to childhood fairy tales adds to the infantilizing quality these 11th and 12th graders felt, one minute flexing their near adulthood as they began to claim freedoms in the world and the next under the all watchful eyes of the adults they might well love, but whose requests for their time and attention grate. Once upon a time I was allowed to go outside You might ask “Are you getting younger?” Nope It’s just a pandemic

The excerpt below is from a student who had to continue to live in the house where her beloved grandmother passed away. Stephanie3 had shared her inability to process without the rituals and support from a community of loved ones and the anxiety being “locked in” to the place that echoed with her grandmother’s voice. She captures the sense of being trapped and the need to grieve as she struggles with a family that was too busy trying to pay the rent and stay alive to dwell on the pain that for her was all encompassing. Waiting for the day The day we can leave I need him to say You’ll be fine once you grieve.

3 Pseudonym.

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The pandemic lockdown triggered quite a few students’ anxiety and/or depression around the isolation it created or the fear of death everywhere, invisible and waiting. After two months of this disorienting and nerve wracking time came the explosion. The video of the last 8 minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd’s life ignited a fury that led to massive widespread protests all over the country. The uncharged murder of Ahmaud Aubrey flaunted on social media by the racist ment who killed him, the weaponzing of black skin by many white women being viewed, shared, and commented on increased stress and distress. Social media made clear the weaponizing of black skin and ran nonstop footage of enraged racist, homophobic rants, assaults and vitriol spewed that BIPOC and Black people, in particular, experience in the small daily interactions of life and systemically. Screens glared onto young and old faces at all hours of the day and night, the pandemic creating an amorphous, timeless world in which “reality” was found on a screen. Like many in America, our Black students and Black staff members expressed emotions that overwhelmed them: hopelessness, anger, heightened, but always present, fear for themselves and their families. In our community circles and personal conversations, BIPOC staff used words like hopeless and helpless while demanding action rather than words from white allies who could no longer intellectualize the reality. Black peers identified the heightened, particular racism they faced. We met in community circles both as staff and with staff, students and parents. We formed a white antiracism group as our peers of color were exhausted from always having to lead this work and teach us as they processed what a friend described as “sudden large waves of emotion.” Our Black students echoed this as they led meetings with staff and called us all to accountability and action. This work is difficult but is “not just a social justice trend” (Love 2020). Our students rose up to challenge and educate us in this work. We look to the words of Dr. Bettina Love as she calls on us all to create a school and society in which “no one is disposable, prisons no longer exist, being Black is not a crime, teachers have high expectations for Black and Brown children, and joy is seen as a foundation of learning” (2020). As we engaged in these conversations my Black coworkers daily described feeling numb and unable to focus as they worked to process with their own children, families and BIPOC students. The original trauma of the pandemic had already triggered Black people, already often members of the highest risk communities and exhausted from ongoing and historical systemic oppression and fear of death. The images and media fed our lockdown world as it exploded with dehumanizing images streaming more

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and more rapidly, flooding our isolation with an impossible to ignore rising tide of systemic brutality and inequity. I asked my students to write a response to the times as the darkest days and nights of the pandemic stay-at-home orders seemed to be winding down in New York City and the protests against the systemic oppression of BIPOC were ramping up. Kilsy is a junior who I first met online this final quarter of school. I have never seen more than her face on a grid of faces and avatars, but her writing has helped me feel as if I know her a bit. Kilsy wrote from several perspectives while processing the many experiences of the new normal. Sometimes she was a frustrated teen missing her freedom and developing identity, sometimes scared for herself and others, sometimes hopeful, often writing around the sense of disorientation. This piece came from her writer’s notebook where she gathered thoughts, phrases, questions, connections, and language. Kilsy’s take on this time calls on her personal experience but speaks to generational internalized prejudice and societal impact of colonialism and colorism. Blacklash 2020

By Kilsy Baez

“They are delinquents” “They are animals” “They are uneducated” “They are poor” “They are the ones who will offer you drugs” “They are gang affiliated” “They are always angry” “Always aggressive” “Always looking for trouble” “They have no future” “They are bad people” “They are so ghetto” “If you want your kids to have beautiful hair don’t marry a black guy” “We need to be scared of them” “They are not to be trusted” “They won’t be successful” “They are dirty” seventeen lies I’ve been told for seventeen years of my life about black people

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I was taught to ignore that part of my Dominican heritage that we share alike with African Americans my country has bashed Haitians for years meanwhile they share the same island

But why? Why try so hard to be like these white supremacists Who are ignorant and cruel to black lives? Why try so hard to fit in? Why not accept yourself as a person of color? Is it too much of a shame to do so? Why try so hard to exclude them from my life and more of my descendants to come?

Now that communities and states have united Protesting chanting singing marching dancing in the streets, including the white people you wish we were born to be, Now Black lives matter? Now they deserve to be treated with respect? Now you stand by their side? Now you accept the truth about your bloodline.

As I read over the students’ words in this chapter and in my Google Classroom, I am reminded of an observation by a former student, Asha,4 at that time a recent immigrant from Guinea. She wrote that “reading one another’s poetry was like learning something new about the world.” She added that they “teach a person something about those places and the other country that will help you with the communication between you and those people.” She worked with students from three countries in her writing group and she knows that of which she speaks. Asha’s words are particularly timely as we are learning to learn about each other through new spaces and new perspectives. The last few weeks 4 Pseudonym.

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have highlighted why I love inquiry-based learning through the arts. It opens hearts and minds through images and words designed to evoke. It is connection. It allows for voice when silence is everywhere. It created community in a time of isolation as it provided the bridges out for some and others built theirs to be crossed. This work supports students to develop deep connections to theme, content, and even skill building, but more importantly it can create opportunities for compassion, connection, and empathy. The change is far from over and school will look different again in the fall. We looked to many experts, but particularly to Greene, Emdin, Vygotsky, Friere and Elbow to support the journey from “nothingness.” As we put our digital platforms in place, Amanda and I considered resources that would connect with our students, inspire inquiry into their experience and lead to creative responses. Our practice of inquiry-based learning through the arts left us ready for this work and an unexpected benefit of having in place resources that promoted reflection and expression in an emotional and chaotic time. We continue to design and prepare for a new hybrid or even completely restructured concept of school in September. In these next chapters, we will discuss some of the texts and works of art we have used to teach, provoke, and engage our students.

Works Cited Baez, K. (2020). 2020 Blacklash (unpublished poem). Beers, S., & De Bellis, M. (2002). Neuropsychological function in children with maltreatment-related posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(3), 483–486. Cadena, M. (2020). Curse or Blessing? (unpublished poem). Cicchetti, D., & Toth, S. L. (1998). The development of depression in children and adolescents. American Psychologist, 53(2), 221–241. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Duffer, M., & Duffer, R. (2016). Stranger things. Los Gatos: Netflix. Elbow, P. (1997). High stakes and low stakes in assigning and responding to writing. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1997 (69), 5–13. https:// doi.org/10.1002/tl.6901. Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood—And the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Race, education, and democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Giddens, R. (2017). Freedom highway. Burbank: Nonesuch Records. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

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Greene, M. (1997). Metaphors and multiples: Representation, the arts, and history. Phi Delta Kappan, 78(5), 387. Greene, M. (1998). Maxine Greene addresses the topic of imagination: From the museum of education’s readers’ guide to education exhibition. Retrieved June 15, 2020, from http://www.ed.sc.edu/museum/Guide.html. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Holzer, M. (2007). Aesthetic education, inquiry, and the imagination. New York, NY: Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Love, B. (2020, July 28). An essay for teachers who understand racism is real. Retrieved October 6, 2020, from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/ 2020/06/12/an-essay-for-teachers-who-understand-racism.html. National Child Traumatic Stress Network, Secondary Traumatic Stress Committee. (2011). Secondary traumatic stress: A fact sheet for child-serving professionals. Los Angeles, CA, and Durham, NC: National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. Noddings, N. (2005). The challenge to care in schools (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Oliver, M. (1986). Wild geese. In Dreamwork. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press. Oliver. M. (1990). The summer day. In House of light. Boston, MA. Beacon Press. Pratchett, T. (2014). Lords and ladies: A Discworld novel. London, UK: Gollancz. Pynoos, R. S., Steinberg, A. M., & Wraith, R. (1995). A developmental model of childhood traumatic stress. In D. Cicchetti & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Wiley series on personality processes: Developmental psychopathology, Vol. 2: Risk, disorder, and adaptation (pp. 72–95). New York: Wiley. Romano, T. (2004). Crafting authentic voice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Schwartz, H. (2019). Connected teaching: Relationship, power, and mattering in higher education. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Souers, K., & Hall, P. (2016). Fostering resilient learners: Strategies for creating a trauma-sensitive classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Sullivan, A. M. (2009). On poetic occasion in inquiry: Concreteness, voice, ambiguity, tension, and associative logic. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishing. Stevens, W. (1954). “The house was quiet and the world was calm” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf.

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Taylor, D. (2006). Children, literacy and mass trauma teaching in times of catastrophic events and on going emergency situations. Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, 4(2), 1–62. Feature Articles | Children and Mass Trauma. WordItOut. (2020). Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://worditout.com/ word-cloud/create.

CHAPTER 3

What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic Poetry

In this chapter, we explore our choices of the various types of content we bring into our respective classrooms in high school and in the teacher education program (Fig. 3.1). The choice of materials in teacher education methods courses needs to take into account multiple considerations. While we tend to choose content based on the goal of engaging with ideas, stimulating curiosity, and providing models for student writing, the teacher candidates we work with may not have the same freedom of choice. American schools vary widely in curriculum requirements. Even within New York City, some schools have rigidly scripted curricula while others give teachers free reign to choose books and materials. We do our best to address all of these possible scenarios. Even for those who are required to teach from bland short story anthologies produced by the same corporations that also create and administer high-stakes standardized tests, we teach inquiry-based learning through the arts in the hopes that with enough commitment and imagination, even teachers who are so constrained can find the cracks through which they might be able to slip some creativity. Learning standards for American schools introduced in 2011 as the Common Core Learning Standards and revised in 2017 as the Next Generation Learning Standards have been challenged and criticized because they “devalue literature as art” and that they “devalue © The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_3

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Fig. 3.1 Word cloud 3

historical context” (Strauss 2016). Our inquiry-based approach teaches reading, writing, and thinking skills by emphasizing engagement with ideas through creative expression. This sometimes requires being open to processes and results that are less predictable than following a template for writing an argumentative essay, for example. Allowing students to engage with ideas across multiple modalities creates entry points for different kinds of learners. In the curriculum development class, we create and examine a semester-long unit of study on African-American history that includes works of fiction, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, and music. It only makes sense to include assignments that invite students to process their interactions with these ideas and materials through the same range of modalities. We begin the unit always with the explanation that we cannot truly understand history in any meaningful way until we learn the stories told by voices that have previously been silenced or marginalized. The graduate students who were invited to respond to texts in any creative way they might choose had a range of different responses to that assignment. We recognize that for some, we were asking them to step far outside their comfort zones. There is always a risk when asking teacher candidates to step outside the boundaries of traditional school work that some will react negatively. In writing about the innovative Creative

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Arts Learning Program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts McNiff (2004) writes that: Teachers accustomed to detailed lesson plans were challenged by the dynamics of the creative process that requires a relaxation of controls, acceptance of uncertainty, spaciousness of thought, a belief that discovery emanates from the unknown, and most of all, that the final outcome cannot be known at the beginning. (p. xi)

At one end of the spectrum, there were students who were reluctant to take risks and apologetically (or in some cases defiantly) offered staid PowerPoint presentations as their creative responses. At the other end, students wrote and performed songs and epic spoken word poetry, created short animated films, built models, and painted scrolls. In my own experience, writing poems can be a way of engaging in a dialogue with something I am trying to understand. Sometimes responding to a text or work of art that addresses the idea or question one is grappling with can serve as a catalyst for that sense making process, hence my own example of interacting with the poem Wild Geese in Chapter 2. The process of creative art making in any form is very often a process of discovery, in choosing the perfect form and structure through which to channel one’s voice. In middle and high school English classes, the teaching of writing in specific genres often begins with the close study of a mentor text in that genre (Gallagher 2014). Thoughtful teachers use mentor texts with students to interrogate how the author uses their craft to evoke a response in readers. English classes at the college level tend to be focused primarily on reading and analyzing texts and writing literary analysis, while in K-12 classrooms reading and writing are taught in a way that is integrated. High school students will study sonnets by reading and analyzing examples of Shakespearean and Petrarchean sonnets, often along with some more contemporary versions. Rather than being restricted solely to writing analytical papers about novels and poems, students’ experience of writing their own sonnets is an important part of the process of understanding the form. The same, of course, is true of many other forms and genres of writing. As educators, we know that true understanding “is concerned with discovering the nature of the production of works of art” (Dewey 1934, p. 11). Through their own creative expression, students enter into a transaction with the work they are studying.

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The voices of those who create the mentor texts we study in class become part of the classroom community. Through expansive discussion and questioning, the students engage with a text and learn language to talk about its specific form. They learn the language of color, shape, space, and dimensionality, mood, and tone; and the language they acquire through these discussions becomes part of our ongoing conversations. In the inquiry-based classroom, a good deal of the questioning and discussion process involves understanding the choices made by writers as well as artists working in other forms. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the word “text” throughout this book to stand in for whatever form we may study. A text can mean a book or shorter work of literature, whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. It may mean a painting or sculpture, a photograph, a film, a dance, theater, or music performance, or a piece that combines several of these forms. We often have students respond in a variety of ways to works of art, as we did with Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Students wrote poems, made collages, and created research presentations. Each of these different creative responses brought its own dimension of understanding to the relationship with the series. (More about that in Chapter 6.) A mentor text can be any piece of literature that is used as a model to teach students how to write in that form. In the inquiry-based learning through the arts classroom, we also use visual art, music, dance, and theater. When we choose mentor texts for our classrooms, we consider both the ideas conveyed by the content and the way those ideas are presented by the form of the text. When students interact with a text that moves and speaks to them, they may recognize their own stories in the expressions of others and realize that they are part of a community that transcends their immediate surroundings. Having this recognition is an essential first step in finding their own voices as writers. There are many different ways to use mentor texts in a classroom. Our approach is to begin with an inquiry into a text or work of art, to question what it is about and what strategies and devices the author or artist employed to get that message across. Through this inquiry, our students arrive at a central idea or a thesis that the text explores. The goal then is for our students to create their own texts through their own explorations of the central idea, thesis, or theme that the text under study is expressing. This process, which involves observation, questioning, and art making, is in keeping with Maxine Greene’s notion of aesthetic education (2001) which is characterized by “conscious

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encounters with the arts” (p. 5). This approach helps students develop the capacity to discuss a wide range of forms of expression including literature and the arts and is not dependent upon prior knowledge. Because we begin with what students can observe and proceed up a ladder of questioning, there are multiple points of entry for students regardless of their backgrounds. We use a combination of print materials and visual art in these examples. We also have used music, video, and various modes of performance. In general, when we use the word “text” we may mean any or all of these forms. Recognizing that analyzing a work of art requires essentially the same teacher and student moves whether it is literature, music, or painting, we help students to expand their fluency in figurative language by exploring a variety of art forms. This increased fluency is a form of cultural capital that authentically contributes to career and college readiness while the open guided discussion broadens the cultural repertoire of all participants. For example, when Molly mentioned that her high school English language learners were struggling to grasp the concept of “tone” in literature, we came up with the idea of giving them examples of how changing tone affected the way music may make the listener feel. The model that was used was the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow, using the original Judy Garland version followed by the one by “Iz,” Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole. The students noted a sense of longing and sadness in Garland’s version, whereas Iz’s version had a lightness and buoyancy to it, as one student noted, “It sounds like he is already over the rainbow.”

Creative Responses to Texts In the inquiry-based classroom, we study the form and diction of a text, and we also discuss what the essence or “heart” of that text is saying. Dewey (1934) states: “The term ‘essence’ is highly equivocal. In common speech it denotes the gist of a thing; we boil down a series of conversations or of complicated transactions and the result is what is essential” (p. 305). It is not necessary for the entire class to come to a consensus about this essence. When we study and discuss a text in community, it is possible for individuals to have their own responses. Louise Rosenblatt (1978), describing the act of reading as a transaction, said, “The ‘poem’ comes into being in the live circuit set up between the reader and the text” (p. 14). Such transactions would not be possible were it not for the

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active imagination of the reader, able to give voice and layers of meaning to words on a page. Any form of writing can be a means of discovery, but poetry in particular allows us the freedom to use words, sounds, lines, and their arrangements on the page to shape thoughts and discover what hidden mysteries lie beneath the surface of consciousness. Prose may explain what the writer is thinking about but poetry invokes it. One of the techniques we both regularly employ in both our high school and teacher education classes is Ekphrastic poetry, which: locate(s) the act of viewing visual art in a particular place and time, giving it a personal and perhaps even an historical context. The result is then not merely a verbal “photocopy” of the original painting, sculpture, or photograph, but instead a grounded instance of seeing, shaped by forces outside the artwork. (Corn 2008)

In a certain sense, writing ekphrastic poetry is about responding to essential themes of the human experience such as coming of age, love, loss, and the cycle of life as they are voiced by artists and writers in endless possible versions. When we respond to art with poetry, we enter a conversation that has been taking place across human history. It is natural for works of art to speak to each other. Take for example, the multitude of retellings of the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Ovid lays out the story in agonizing detail, Daedalus anxiously toiling while Icarus chases feathers. Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus contains every minute and specific detail named by Ovid, but the foreground of the painting is occupied with bucolic life while Icarus plunges into the sea in an obscure corner of the canvas. This is the story of how I (Amanda) came to develop a relationship with a particular mentor text. My love affair with the falling Icarus began when I first saw Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I knew the story well, or thought I did, having read the usual collection of Greek mythology in the sixth grade. This painting, though, made me see an unspoken dimension to the story that is a common theme—the idea that when we take the spotlight off of the events and the characters and pull back to view the larger world, it becomes just one story in the midst of a swirling mass of events. Each story is a self-contained tableau and these tableaux may brush up against one another or overlap, but each one has a nucleus.

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In this painting, Brueghel barely acknowledges Icarus. We first see the red shirted ploughman, front and center, placidly tilling his terraced land. There is a shepherd leaning on his crook, mysterious pale mountains, an “expensive, delicate ship” (Auden) and a fisherman in the lower right corner, pointing. Our eyes follow the trajectory described by the fisherman’s pointing hand and we see a pair of white legs, flailing helplessly in the water, surrounded by floating white feathers. There have been many paintings and statues depicting the story of Daedalus and Icarus. In these various depictions, Daedalus instructs Icarus, affixes the wings, or Icarus is shown soaring toward the sun in a moment of oblivious ecstasy. In narrative works of art, the artist chooses a moment in the story to represent. Any given moment in the narrative stream that the artist chooses to capture can be thought of as a metaphorical framing. The moment that is frozen in the painting or sculpture is a story within the story. But this painting is all about that moment in which the worst has happened, and we are left to wonder whether Daedalus knows it yet. As viewers we are looking down at the scene so we may imagine that we are Daedalus, still in flight, and Brueghel is giving us Daedalus’ moment of realization. His only boy is lost, and he is the cause. When we read the story in school, it often comes across as a cautionary tale. The stories we read in Bullfinch’s or Edith Hamilton’s Mythology descended directly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as Daedalus warns Icarus to “keep to the middle course” (p. 271). In other words, do not fly too high or too low. It makes sense for children at the brink of adolescence to receive such warnings—aren’t we all on the verge of flight at that age? We can just as easily imagine Daedalus fighting back the tears as he hands Icarus the car keys and we read this story as we do all tragedies with the smallest grain of hope that things will turn out well for the characters, but we know better because we know something about stories and we can smell the sorrow coming. But in Brueghel’s telling the tragedy has already happened. We don’t even get to see Icarus in blissful flight. It is all about the fall, and yet this event takes up very little real estate in the painting. Brueghel has taken Ovid’s cautionary tale and twisted the knife—not only will hubris lead to tragedy, the world will be indifferent to your suffering. Seeing this painting for the first time brought me back to a vulnerable time in my life, many years earlier. I was in my twenties, not nearly formed as an adult, and I had just lost my mother to a long battle with cancer. It was at a time when I was still very much learning how to live on my own. I remember day after day waking up in the morning and feeling that

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the idea of having to go to work and do all the many daily things that comprise a responsible adult life seemed absurd and pointless. Crowding onto the subway, I was deeply aware of the effort it took to make it through the day, as raw as I was in a city that constantly rubbed me ever rawer. I learned for the first time that loss feels so much crueler when the world keeps swirling around you and will not let you stop. This is the idea I called upon when using Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to begin to experiment and branch out in my own teaching practice. Many poets have taken up this tale. The Brueghel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been used in many classrooms to teach ekphrastic poetry. W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams both explore the themes in Brueghel’s painting of the myth, reminding us that our private tragedies do not stop the world from going on. And what could be a better theme for a poem than to contemplate our own mortality against the backdrop of a perpetual cycle of life? The story of Icarus and Daedalus is rich in themes in its many retellings. What seems to have captured poets like W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams is both the poignancy and the rightness of the notion that the world keeps turning and life keeps swirling around us even as we watch helplessly while someone we love plunges from the sky (Fig. 3.2). Auden writes: In Brueghel’s Icarus for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry But for him it was not an important failure.

The notion of the world going on despite our personal tragedies brought me right back to the day that my mother died. “The World Goes on In Spite of Everything ” (Gulla 2010) may or may not strictly qualify as an ekphrastic poem because it does not actually mention a specific work of art. Nevertheless, this poem would not exist were it not for Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It is not strictly speaking so much about Brueghel’s painting or Ovid’s poem as it is about the connection that was made through my encounter with this particular painting. That point of

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Fig. 3.2 Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1558

connection or transaction between the work of art and the viewer is fertile ground for the poet’s mind.

The World Goes on in Spite of Everything My mother always told me wire hangers multiply in the closet while we sleep. Losses are like that too.

On my twenty-fourth birthday Outside the hospital I’m holding a plastic bag, mom’s slippers and glasses. Shade my eyes against the brilliant sky. Walk through the street fair, sock and sausage vendors unaware that I’m freshly motherless.

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Now that you are my family, what if the world comes apart again and I can’t find you? What if the ladder slips beneath your feet, the wood tick plunges you into fever dreams, the interstate’s locked in a killing glaze? What if the nighttime rise and fall of your breath gives out?

What if telephones fail Traffic turns to stone Subway’s extinguished Emergency kit’s empty Water is dry Passport’s expired Batteries dead and I Can’t Find You

What if we’re stumbling, sodden and dumbstruck, shoe leather worn to the quick?

I’ll meet you at the bridge. We will carry each other home.

Although my mother had died nearly thirty years before and I had written many rambling narratives and journal entries about that monumental loss, I had never been able to write a finished poem that I could share with the world about her long illness and death and how those experiences continued to play out in my life and relationships. Brueghel’s painting tells us that the world cannot help but keep spinning, no matter what happens to any one person. When I understood (with the help of W.H. Auden and several other poets) what the painting was saying about life and death and our place in the world no matter how dramatically we may leave it made me feel less alone. For my entire adolescence and early adulthood, my mother had been poised on the brink of death, and then she did die on my 24th birthday. This poem helped me to articulate the ever-present sense of loss that is the constant faintly heard background music of my otherwise happy and comfortable life. For young people

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struggling to come to terms with devastating challenges as many of our students are, the opportunity to recognize their own experiences through the eyes of an artist can help them find their voices and articulate their stories, which can be tremendously helpful in allowing them to integrate painful memories and process trauma. Practically every semester I have taught what I came to think of as the “Icarus suite.” This included Ovid’s poem, Brueghel’s painting, and poems by Auden, Williams, and other poets as well, including Muriel Rukeyser’s Waiting for Icarus, along with an assortment of the many representations of the story. It was an echo chamber of ekphrasis. I would ask students to search for other representations of Icarus and Daedalus, and they found them in Renaissance paintings, heavy metal songs, and political cartoons. As we discussed what about this tale makes it so compelling a subject for artists of all kinds, the students wrote poems about their own memories of the world going on in spite of everything. One student who had been severely ill with COVID-19 early in the pandemic and was still struggling to fully recover and process the experience months later emailed me after our class discussion of the Icarus story to say this: “I just wanted to express my thanks! I feel I was put in your path for a reason. I realized how the story of Icarus helped me to speak about my experience with COVID and I am grateful for that since I haven’t fully been able to share my story until you gave us the poem assignment” (Kodra-Gashi 2020). Just as the work of inquiry-based learning through the arts values the practice of prolonged encounters with works of art through discussion, questioning, “deeply noticing” (Holzer 2007), writing, and art making, I found myself seeing more and more in the painting each time I taught it. It was intriguing how faithfully Brueghel had executed and placed every detail of the poem. Part of the work with students became a kind of treasure hunt, looking for lines of Ovid’s poem as they might be represented in the painting. The story of the escape from exile in Crete, the wax wings, and Icarus’ fall were all very familiar. At the end of the poem, as a grief stricken Daedalus buries his son, is a curiosity: but while he labored a pert partridge near, observed him from the covert of an oak, and whistled his unnatural delight.

Why was this partridge whistling his delight? He was Perdix, a bird who had started life as Daedalus’ nephew, and had been sent to him at the

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age of twelve to be tutored. He was a gifted youth, inventing the saw and the compass. Daedalus, in a jealous rage, pushes him off the temple of Minerva, but Athena, “goddess of ingenious men,” saves him midfall and turns him into a partridge. Now Perdix stays low to the ground and mocks Daedalus at his lowest moment. I thought about Brueghel’s intentional placement of the hero of the story in a barely noticeable corner of the picture, while the farmer and fisherman are so prominent. Every detail was meticulously captured and arranged to convey the same moral message. I realized that the story of Perdix was too important for Brueghel to have left it out. Sure enough, an unassuming brown bird appears perched on a branch, next to the pointing fisherman. It is easy to think of the story of Perdix simply as the reason Daedalus is getting his well-deserved comeuppance at the expense of the hapless Icarus. There is another story, though, about how we are shaped and scarred by events. Perdix can only survive the trauma of his uncle’s murder attempt by being utterly transformed. On the face of it, he is now a timid brown bird who hides in shaded places by the leafy trees its nested eggs among the bush’s twigs; nor does it seek to rise in lofty flight, for it is mindful of its former fall.

Yet he also laughs and mocks as his uncle buries his cousin, embittered by his fall and the price he had to pay to survive it. This is a story about being unforgiven or “The tale that invented Schadenfreude” (Gulla 2012). Perdix finally has the satisfaction of seeing Daedalus suffer, and as Auden begins his famous poem, “About suffering they were never wrong” (1940). I suddenly found myself both repelled by Daedalus and empathizing with him. I thought of Daedalus as a guilt-ridden, grieving father, and as a man who was petty, narcissistic, and violent. The human drama of this seldom taught but essential detail was impossible for me to resist. I had to write this poem, and tried to imagine the overwhelming sense of regret, as he notices the mocking partridge and knows that it must be Perdix, he understands that he is getting just what he deserves, as he comes to terms with the choices he has made that led to the loss of the one and only thing in the world that he truly loved. I imagined Daedalus as a father whose crimes had cost the life of his child.

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Daedalus Is Held to Account for Building the Labyrinth and Other Crimes If I were crushed under a thousand books and lost my mind or words to speak If time flew out of my hands If I could just kill time forever If I could crawl into the mouth of the cave underneath all time If I could unspool the labyrinth, tame the beast, slow the speed too delicious to heed the middle path.

You, a boy who fell— Plummeting into the landscape Unobserved except by a chattering partridge, all that is left of young Perdix, the boy I hurled off Minerva’s temple and watched spin slowly, drawing a circle like the compass he’d invented, the clever little bastard. No steering clear of the stars for him. I coveted his light so tried to snuff it out but Athena broke his fall with a nice pair of sensible brown wings. He mocks and chatters as I dig your grave, alone.

Poor Icarus, chasing feathers as I bent to the task that would end you. If only I could have carried you above the sun, beneath the sea, between my crooked shoulder blades.

I did what fathers do:

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fly ahead of the toddling brood. If only we’d sat down over a cup of coffee, had a serious talk about wax wings.

But I still was not finished with Daedalus and Icarus. Returning to the question of why some stories compel us to tell and retell them in a multitude of different voices, I thought of Joseph Campbell, warning of generations lost because they have no guiding myths (Campbell and Moyers 1988). I imagined that some stories are rivers that have been flowing since the beginning of time. An endless succession of generations swim in that river, subtly changing its current, rearranging the stones. One night I dreamed that I was swimming in the river of stories, and I watched story birds fly up out of the river. In the dream I knew that it was important to follow those story birds and find out where they landed. When I woke up the title announced itself to me.

Storytelling and the Years After What happened to your lost stories? Even with fine wax wings they disappear from the horizon. A white limb, a ripple on the sea. Remember Icarus.

Daedalus must have wondered at the round breasted partridge perched on a low limb chattering, rustling short spanned wings as it watched him bury his only son.

Enter Ovid’s telling. Inside, you’ll meet Perdix, boy inventor who fashioned tools of teeth and bones.

Daedalus, murderous builder of labyrinths cast him off a precipice Saved by metamorphosis …

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Pallas transformed his flailing arms to partridge wings. It’s the tale that invented Schadenfreude.

Listen to your story, a June bug hurling its thick brown body at your window. Inside the living room of forgetfulness the thud and scrape jars you awake.

You didn’t believe me about the June bug. Its name is as pert as a toddler’s sundress but every year it crashes toward your light, calling you out into the night or driving you under cover.

Drop those twine-bound bales of notebooks crammed with words no eyes will fall upon ever.

When words cease— quivering, restless, immobile, the volume fallen behind the shelf is the very one you’ll need.

Go outside. Now is the fertile time. Stretch out your arms, allow the air to move through you. Stories will streak across the sky. Let them fly toward the sun. Watch them land like birds on a wire.

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Works Cited Arlen, H., & Harburg, Y. (1939). Somewhere over the rainbow. New York, NY: Leo Feist Inc. Auden, W. H. (1940). Musee des Beaux Arts in Another time. New York, NY: Random House. Brueghel, P. Landscape with the fall of Icarus (Public Domain). Image Source: WikiArts (1560). Retrieved June 12, 2020, from https://www.wikiart.org/ en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/landscape-with-the-fall-of-icarus-1560. Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. (1988). The power of myth. New York, NY: Doubleday. Corn, A. (2008). Notes on ekphrasis. Academy of American Poets. Retrieved June 12, 2020, from https://poets.org/text/notes-ekphrasis. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Gallagher, K. (2014). Making the most of mentor texts. Retrieved June 9, 2020, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/ apr14/vol71/num07/Making-the-Most-of-Mentor-Texts.aspx. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The lincoln center institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gulla, A. (2010). The world goes on in spite of everything. In A banner year for apples. Woodstock, NY: Post Traumatic Press. Gulla, A. (2012). Storytelling and the years after. The English Journal, 102(2), 137. Holzer, M. (2007). Aesthetic education, inquiry and the imagination. Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. Retrieved June 12, 2020, from http://2014.creativec3.org/data/AE_Inquiry_and_the_Imagination.pdf. Kodra-Gashi, K. (2020). Informal email communication. McNiff, S. (2004). Teaching for aesthetic experience: The art of learning (G. Diaz & M. B. McKenna, Eds.). New York, NY: Peter Lang. NY State Education Department. (2011). The common core state standards initiative. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Lit eracy/. NY State Education Department. (2017). New York State Next Generation English Language Arts Learning Standards. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/curric ulum-instruction/nys-next-generation-ela-standards.pdf. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Strauss, V. (2016, August 18). The seven deadly sins of common core—By an English Teacher. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/18/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-commoncore-by-an-english-teacher/.

CHAPTER 4

Imagining the World as If It Could Be Otherwise: Preparing Students for Solving Problems and Seeing Possibilities (Writing Poetry as Evidence-Based Argument)

Education without imagination is mere “schooling” at its most pedantic (Fig. 4.1). Greene (2001) makes that distinction clear, as she juxtaposes “unexplored possibilities” with the “predictable and quantifiable” (p. 7). By placing guided inquiry through observation and questioning at the center of the curriculum, inquiry-based learning through the arts empowers students to notice deeply, think critically, and connect the ideas they see expressed in the arts to their lived experiences. This form of inquiry encourages students to question their assumptions and their reality, which allows them to imagine other possible ways of being in the world. Central to these experiences, which Maxine Greene saw as “integral to the development of persons–to their cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development” (2001, p. 7) is the students’ own artmaking because it fosters a “distinctive mode of literacy” that Greene believed “must be grounded in actual experiences with the materials of at least one of the arts” (1980, p. 319). By involving artmaking as a mode of inquiry into texts, we establish a reciprocal relationship, or what Rosenblatt called a “transaction” (1978, p. 16) between the reader and the text. When we engage our imaginations in the process of creating,

© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_4

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Fig. 4.1 Word cloud

then our bodies, our senses, and our voices all become vehicles for articulating our inchoate reactions and understandings. For Greene, engaging the imagination is a “mode of grasping, of reaching out that allows what is perceived to be transformed” (Greene 2001, p. 31). Rosenblatt (1978) makes her transactional theory vivid when she suggests that a poem cannot be fully realized until it “comes into being in the live circuit set up between the reader and the text” (p. 14). Vygotsky (1930) posited that the ability to learn requires imagination which “becomes the means by which a person’s experience is broadened because he can imagine what he has not seen” (p. 17). Curating opportunities for learning experiences rooted in aesthetic inquiry in the classroom involves carefully organized steps that include observation, questioning, hands-on artmaking, then deepening the inquiry through further questioning and analysis. This process in itself is transformative, teaching learners to look and respond to the world in new ways. The writing community that develops through this practice

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brings together diverse learning styles and personalities. The opportunity to share their writing and artwork provides concrete validation of the students’ hard work and growth, demonstrating what is possible when both young writers and teacher candidates are guided to find and use their voices.

Found Poetry in Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey In this chapter, we will discuss what happened in a graduate seminar in Studies in Poetry. All of the students in that class were enrolled in a program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. Students admitted into the Fellows program have been recruited by the New York City Department of Education to simultaneously teach in a public school and earn their Master’s degree in an accredited teacher education program. The Fellows travel in cohorts, and there is an unmistakable camaraderie about them. They study together, commiserate together, bring each other snacks, walk each other to the train, offer each other comfort and support, and share in-jokes with each other. This is particularly rewarding to witness because they are one of the most diverse groups we have seen by every possible measure of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and personality type. Their support for each other allows them to be adventurous learners, willing to take risks in front of each other in our graduate seminars. Students in the graduate secondary English Education programs take elective courses in their discipline as well as education courses. Amanda was invited by the English department to teach this poetry seminar for Teaching Fellows. The fact that the course was in the English department offered a bit of freedom from having to translate everything into a standards-aligned lesson plan, and to place the primary focus on the craft of poetry. The fact that this course was an elective meant that students had chosen it because they either liked or feared/hated poetry and were eager for the opportunity to learn about ways that they might integrate it into their classrooms. Because there is no requirement to teach poetry in the middle or high school English classroom, many teachers who have not had good experiences in the past will go to great lengths to avoid it. This is unfortunate for these teachers and for their students because, as William Carlos Williams once so eloquently said: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there” (1938, p. 10).

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In selecting works of art to include in the course syllabus, I look for work that is complex, provocative, and engaging, and that they might be able to use in their own classrooms. I considered a series of paintings by the artist Romare Bearden (1977) called Black Odyssey, his visual retelling of Homer’s epic tale of the return of Odysseus to Ithaka after the Trojan War. I was particularly interested in this series because of Bearden’s innovation to use the vehicle of Homer’s Odyssey as a metaphor for the experiences of Africans being stolen and transported in slave ships, a nightmare of American history referred to as the Middle Passage. In addition to my own interest in the work, Molly’s students at Bronx International High School had studied the series as part of our collaborative project. In choosing Black Odyssey, I wanted the class to explore how some stories are retold through the ages through a variety of voices and lenses; hence, the choice of a story originally told in poetic form, retold in paintings. This would allow me to introduce the topic of ekphrastic poetry that I had become so immersed in through working with Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. Reason (2012) describes ekphrastic poetry as “texts that seek to evoke another nontextual art form, and creative products that potentially manifest the experience of the spectator/author to the reader/researcher.” This contemporary take on ekphrastic poetry opens the work to poets who see metaphorical connections that can be explored by moving beyond description of the art to a poetry that originates from an essential truth the art is telling. It is this seeking to evoke that makes ekphrastic poetry a form that facilitates an inquiry process. The writer seeks to capture and interpret his or her encounter with the work of art and find what is essential in that relationship. Bearden’s (1977) take on The Odyssey “invites the viewer to consider the artist’s Homeric collages not as rarified explorations of Western antiquity but as evocations of familiar seekers of a welcoming place to stay” (Bearden 2017). In searching for versions of Black Odyssey to use in the class, I came upon the book Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (Dawes and Shenoda 2017). Walcott (2017) in the introduction to this book says of Bearden that he was “inventing collage techniques that he used as paths to narrative” (p. x). This book presented an opportunity to have students experience multiple iterations of ekphrasis, as this was a book of poems responding to Bearden’s paintings, which in turn are a response to Homer’s epic (Romare Bearden Foundation, n.d.). The poems continually reframe Odysseus’ wanderings

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as metaphorical lenses through which to view the stories of captured and enslaved Africans. The painting I chose for our study was The Sea Nymph (1977). In Bearden’s painting, we see a black ship bouncing on treacherous waters stirred up by an angry Poseidon. Odysseus plunges into the sea and is rescued by the goddess Ino. The painting faithfully references Homer’s Odyssey, but adds an additional layer of meaning as Ino can be seen to represent African American women who have traditionally taken on the role of healer in the community, especially when men are threatened by authority figures. The poets responding to Bearden’s collage/paintings drew connections to people and events from African American history. One of the poems responding to this painting is “Blues: How Many Sat Underwater” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (2017). In this poem, Jeffers frames this scene in The Odyssey as a metaphor for one of the more tragic scenes of the relentless horror of the Middle Passage: “And centuries after that story was written/in the land of Not Make Believe/a crew of slaveship sailors/threw one hundred and thirty-two/Africans into the Atlantic Ocean” (p. 39). The line “the land of Not Make Believe” reminds us that while Odysseus’s story is mythical and allegorical, the violence experienced by Africans brought on slave ships was all too real. The spelled-out number “one hundred and thirty-two” suggested that the poem was referencing a specific incident, so a bit of research revealed this headline from the PBS (2019) website, taken from their series on the Middle Passage. The story titled “Living Africans Thrown Overboard” references an incident in 1781 in which the captain of a slave ship made the decision to chain together 132 African people and throw them overboard over the course of two days, because disease had broken out on the ship and food and water supplies were low. The captain reasoned that this way, he might be able to make an insurance claim for the dead Africans as one might for lost livestock. After being almost immobilized by the shock of such cruelty, continued searching turned up a New York Times article (Marriott 1994) titled “Remembrance of Slave Ancestors Lost to the Sea.” This article described a gathering at the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn to pay tribute to African Ancestors who did not survive the slave ships. The article ended on this bittersweet note:

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Yesterday, hundreds of blacks gathered bundles of flowers and baskets of fruit in their own kind of memorial. They walked solemnly into the ocean and cast their offerings into the water, grave to millions of blacks unknown but not forgotten. (p. 25)

This collection of artifacts—the painting, poem, and two articles—held great potential for an aesthetic inquiry that was complex and multilayered. Any one of them would have provided rich and interesting material for the students to respond to, but taken as a whole, they presented a variety of creative modalities grounded by the historical information provided by the two articles. We began in class by looking at Bearden’s (1977) “Sea Nymph” painting, describing the color, form, movement, and relationships of the figures in space. Then we read Jeffers’s (2017) poem and discussed the meaning of the title. Students understood immediately that “How Many Sat Underwater” had to be referencing something other than Homer’s Odyssey. They seized upon the “Land of Not Make Believe” line as evidence that this mythological story could be seen as a metaphor for real life events, which led to questions about the meaning of the explicit reference to “one-hundred and thirty-two Africans.” At this point, I distributed the article from the PBS (2019) website and asked the students to read and annotate it silently, followed by discussion. The choice to read the PBS article silently was deliberate, based on the traumatic nature of the material. It seemed more humane to allow the students to take it in at their own pace, then have the opportunity to discuss it together. This article was followed by the much more hopeful New York Times article (Marriott 1994), which we did read aloud as students also annotated; in both articles searching for language that stood out to them for any reason. Once we had discussed the facts contained in the two articles, we circled back to the painting and the poem, and discussed the interrelationship of reality and mythology through the lens of these two stories (one mythological and one factual). The discussion was lively and passionate, enriched by the perspectives of students of very diverse backgrounds who were from Africa, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Italy, rural upstate New York, as well as those who had been born and raised in New York City. The culminating assignment was for students to combine language that they chose from the two articles and the poem to create a found poem of their own. According to the American Academy of Poetry,

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Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

In Kristine’s reflection on her process of writing “In the Land of Not Make Believe,” she described her process of underlining words and phrases and searching for common themes among them, and asking herself “What are all of these telling me and why, and how do I connect them in order to make them mine?” That desire to understand history by taking ownership of the language in which the story was told, to internalize that language by connecting it to some part of her own story is the very embodiment of active and engaged learning. Here is her poem:

In the Land of Not Make Believe Compounding the problem, there was an outbreak of disease In the land of Not Make Believe. enslaved africans! The audience applause and yells of approval Threw one hundred and thirty-two Africans engulfed by a sea, Entangled by myth’s past tense overboard. Our history and our greatness Before whiteness was invented, Unveils bundles of flowers and baskets of horror. Ultimately defiant slave experiences sat underwater In such a way as to give them the impression They were helpless people. Yet Centuries after that story was written, Africans have to communicate with little more than their tears. Heave-ho to souls Who died at sea, Who were so great Sharks learned to follow Poppycock-swallowing white hope.

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As more blacks come to realize, more are able to draw Strength, Never imagining It permissible to kill Slaves, Equal to killing animals. Oblivious to the carnival atmosphere that radiated, Now angry, now benevolent. No matter how hard things get these days, It is not as bad as what they faced on the slave ships. We all deserve our maker’s love - we are people, one destiny. a chant for heroes Whispered names of relatives and friends, And people. And laws. And kin. Preserved the castles with no more Than a touch of the motherland. No plague, memorial, day, ritual, or hour Casts Memories Into the water, grave to millions of blacks unknown, but not forgotten

The experiences around reading these highly sensitive materials and processing individual understandings of them by writing poems became an ongoing theme of exploring their own identity and broader questions of identity and American-ness in relation to the work of many poets over the course of the semester. Their own writing was an integral part of taking ownership of not only individual poems, but of the subject of poetry—a subject often avoided even by English teachers because they find it difficult to comprehend. As the semester progressed, the poems we studied (as well as other texts and works of art, newspaper articles, even their teaching textbooks) became lenses through which to examine and express their beliefs and their understandings of the world and their place in it. I also asked them to write a reflection describing their composing process. The students had free rein to use the language of the three texts in any way they chose and to add their own language as well. It did not have to be a purely found poem. With every assignment that required creative work of the student was always the admonition that if they had an idea that caused them to deviate from the guidelines of the assignment, they should go with their idea rather than worry about adhering to rules and explain their process in their written reflections. They also had complete agency regarding the topic. The idea was more to use the

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language of the texts to capture the essence of what they said as a whole. For Naomi, this was the essence of the intersection between the story of Odysseus and the story of the fate of 132 Africans.

We Hold On How many blacks were lost at sea a sea of confusion. Hazy blue. How many blacks were held in captivity? How many died, and how many lived to Die? Between 100 million and 200 million. How many were birthed through canals just to turn to dust. To burn in the blazing sun, how many fought to survive? With prayers, speeches, and song. A sea voyage into Slavery. Cargo of 417 slaves. Ripped from their homes in savagery. To be seen as less than animals. Since it was permissible to kill animals for the safety of the ship, they decided, it was permissible to kill slaves for the same reason. Only for the benefit of what benefited them, They decided that the Africans on board the ship were people. We still hold our ancestors names on our lips We still hold our ancestors pain in our grips hanging heavily. Like those swinging from trees a century after with such enthusiastic audiences 14 million people perished. With prayers, speeches, and song. Lifted their spirits straight up to their Savior’s gate knocking loudly Not too proud but proudly. Not knowing as they were Flying home to freedom That they would be such a big part of what is known as our history. They are what help us know our history and know our greatness. We wear our blackness like the sun wears her rays. Swaying with a heat so radiant. So full of Power. Only if they knew how much power they had and how much they have influenced us. With prayers, speeches, and song. We hold on.

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The words that appear in bold are taken from the two news articles, and the rest of the language is hers, interwoven with the New York Times (Marriott 1994) and PBS (2019) articles. She chose not to quote the poem, but kept it focused on the story of the slave ships and the associations that held for her. In writing this way, Naomi defied the letter of the assignment while adhering to its spirit. While the direction was to write a found poem, the underlying purpose of the experience was for the students to gather a variety of materials all dealing with the same subject— in this case a painting, a poem, a newspaper article, and an article from the PBS website, and synthesize them into something new. That act of creativity is often not appreciated as such, but I always make a point of saying that each of our minds contains a unique repertoire of influences, many of which are the products of other people’s imaginations. We cannot unsee what we have seen or unknow what we know, those things are part of us. Often creativity comes from the ability to see connections between some of these experiences and influences and make something new from them, which Naomi has certainly done with her poem. This is also from her reflection: Towards the end I used the sun again but this time I gave it a positive connotation to say, yes, this might have been what killed us at one point (working tirelessly under the blazing sun) but now we are as powerful as the sun. Nothing can stop the sun from shining just as nothing can stop black people from shining.

When I emailed Naomi to ask for permission to use her poem and reflection in this book, she answered that she had written a new poem in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This horrific event had followed shortly after Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was shot and killed by police in a no-knock raid on the wrong apartment, and Ahmaud Arbery was killed by vigilantes while jogging in his neighborhood in Georgia, and a long string of other acts of violence perpetrated against Black Americans. She sent me a six and a half minute video of her powerful performance of this spoken word poem. Watching the video, I was struck by the calm and even tone of her delivery, her direct gaze at the camera, her deliberate pauses. Naomi pauses after the line “Don’t be intimidated by our melanin” followed by a pause lasting four full measures and… “It’s melanin.” The language is economical and eloquent. The full poem is much longer, and in choosing

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only this small section I am leaving out some powerfully vivid parts, but I included this brief excerpt to highlight the way she again uses the sun symbolically as a tribute to her ancestors who would “skip in its fire” and “rejoice in its magnitude” despite all of the cruelty they had experienced at the hands of those to whom the sun “cannot be applied…without consequence.” Day in and day out dig in and dig out the soil, kissed by the sun our skin, kissed by the sun Where you could not stand it! That must be why you mad huh? He was somebody’s son. The Suna force that carries life. The entity in which everything needs to be sustained Cannot be applied to your skin without consequence. While We skip in its fire and We rejoice in its magnitude. Oh that must be why y’all mad huh Don’t be intimidated by our melanin It’s melanin Oh Officer, we know you felt power of some sort as you inhaled, and exhaled where he could not as he lay there without fight begging for his human right to breathe.

Along with the transcription of the poem, she sent this message: One thing I want to say is that this poem was an impulse piece. I didn’t intend to write it; I didn’t sit myself down and decide I was going to write a poem about George Floyd or the clearly hateful and racist cop who transcended Floyd’s existence from living and laughing, to our new reason to fight for equality. The morning after I watched the video, as soon as I sat up in my bed, the words spun around inside me and I knew that they wouldn’t quit until I emptied my spirit from the devastating scene.

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I grabbed my phone because I did not want to risk losing the moment searching for a pen to write. I opened up a text message and my fingers wouldn’t stop choosing letters that turned into words and thoughts from all the feelings that I had. Here it was, my graduation morning and I was not feeling celebratory. I was feeling heavy, angry, and heartbroken. I needed my spirit to be heard. I needed to handle the situation the best way I knew how. By writing. I wrote and I wrote until I felt at ease again…even if only temporarily. (Lake, email communication 2020)

Naomi’s reflection is a perfect illustration of the necessity of poetry. Besides providing her with some temporary relief from the strong feelings of grief and rage, she was able to create something lasting and powerful, an occasion for others who might see or read her poem to be able to find a point of connection to help them feel less alone in a terrible moment such as this. Regarding poetry, Dewey quotes Shelley’s claim that it is “at once the center and circumference of all knowledge” (1934, p. 301). This is why poetry is such an effective mode of inquiry, the almost limitless possibilities of sound and structure allow us to use words to document and make sense of our experiences, capturing both factual and emotional truth. For teachers reflecting on these experiences, they see that writing poetry can be a means to respond to challenging and even painful material and experiences.

Works Cited American Academy of Poetry. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from https://poets.org/ glossary/found-poem. Bearden, R. (1977). Black Odyssey [Series of 20 paintings]. Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) national tour. YouTube video (2012). Retrieved June 12, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= j-0ZbWUaD-4. Bearden, R. (2017). A Black Odyssey. Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://www.sites.si.edu/s/arc hived-exhibit?topicId=0TO36000000Tz69GAC. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Penguin. Greene, M. (1980, May). Aesthetics and the experience of the arts: Towards transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

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Jeffers, H. F. (2017). Blues: How many sat underwater. In K. Dawes & M. Shenoda (Eds.), Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets respond to the art of Romare Bearden. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books. Lake, N. (2019). We hold on (unpublished poem, by permission of the author). Lake, N. (2020). George Floyd. unpublished poem. Marriott, M. (1994, June 19). Remembrance of slave ancestors lost to the sea. The New York Times (section 1, p. 25). Retrieved from https://www.nyt imes.com/1994/06/19/nyregion/remembrance-of-slave-ancestors-lost-tothe-sea.html. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). (2019). Living Africans thrown overboard [Historical documents, online]. PBS Resource Bank. Retrieved from https:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h280.html. Reason, M. (2012, December). Writing the embodied experience: Ekphrastic and creative writing as audience research. IATC Webjournal, 7 . Retrieved from June 12, 2020, from http://www.critical-stages.org/7/writing-the-emb odied-experience-ekphrastic-and-creative-writing-as-audience-research/. Romare Bearden Foundation. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://beardenfo undation.org/. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1930). Mind and society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walcott, D. (2017). Foreword in Dawes, K., & Shenoda, M. (eds.). Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets respond to the art of Romare Bearden. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books. Weekes, K. (2019). In the land of not make believe (Unpublished poem, by permission of the author). Williams, W. C. (1938). Asphodel that greeny flower and other poems. New York, NY: New Directions.

CHAPTER 5

Analyzing and Synthesizing Our Stories: Exploring Identity Through Art and Poetry

This chapter describes our collaboration in Molly’s classroom at Kingsbridge International High School, a school for recent immigrants that is located in the Bronx, next door to the campus of Lehman College (Fig. 5.1). In a co-taught workshop, we integrated visual art and poetry into the English curriculum of 12th grade students at Kingsbridge International High School in the Bronx. The students in these classes came from such diverse places as the Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Niger, and Albania to name but a few of their countries of origin. They are teenagers with all of the hopes, dreams, worries, and challenges of any other teenager, but their stories include experiences of displacement and of learning to survive in a new place with strange language, customs, and even weather. These young people had resided in the country for any length of time between one day and four years when they attended the school. According to the NYC Department of Education, 86.7% of the students were identified as English language learners (https://www.nycenet. edu/PublicApps/register.aspx?s=X268). Additionally, Kingsbridge International had one of the highest percentages of students identified as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE) in New York City.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_5

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Fig. 5.1 Word cloud

A student with an interrupted education might have a temporary interruption within a single year, ongoing random absences due to systemic or family mandates, or can involve entire years of missing education due to political unrest or migration/immigration process. When education is interrupted in a learner’s primary language, it will continue as a gap in learning. Many of these students had been exposed to violence and the ills of Third-World poverty. These young people are often living in tight spaces with relative strangers or even relatives that actually are strangers, often thousands of miles apart from family members and loved ones. These high school seniors were working to self-manage trauma, learn a new language (sometimes more than one), adapt to a new, often radically different culture as well as working outside of school hours to support themselves or their families. The onus of learning English both for academic success and to financially survive was unmistakable. Asim,1 1 Pseudonym.

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a refugee from Bangladesh, hints at the unrelenting engagement with his new language and sense of shame he experiences having not yet succeeded in the following excerpt from one of his poems Now I practice the vowels In front of the mirror I practice and practice to get it right Saying break and steak But it’s bleak and streak.

Without a common language and sometimes vastly different cultural values, the young adults both identified as refugees and those who fled life-threatening systemic oppression arrive in American public schools to find “social contexts can be challenging” (Finn 2010). Asim reflects this experience about his early days of school in the United States. I do not like it so much, Making fun of my name Pulling on my dress When they say I reek My eyes fill with tears and My heart fills with sorrow, I don’t show it affected me.

Students told me that after arriving in America, they often felt as “if they no longer existed.” Imagine feeling as if you no longer existed. Why even try to learn algebra, chemistry, or history? Why read novels or write essays when you feel unseen? Roy Diaz captures the experience of a young person leaving the only home he has ever known for a “far away, big shiny dream.” My feet flew away from my homeland my head left in the air floating in the middle of nowhere. Far away, a big shiny dream was waiting for me with open arms.

The sense of floating in the middle of nowhere, in nothingness, reflects the disorienting, disequilibrizing experience of leaving all one knows for some great imagined love. He evokes the sense of being acted upon, the self led by the feet before being (hopefully) received into the supportive

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arms of a shimmering love. What many of the young people I taught, and educators across the country, see is the crashing into a reality that is anything but dreamlike. Immigrants do not expect to come and be taken care of, quite the opposite, the dream is the chance to work hard for living wages and to provide for children a life that includes safety, health, freedom from violence, and the opportunity to work to build a foundation upon which future generations can stand and be a productive part of their new country. The shimmering dream is not an imagined free ride; it is being given the opportunity to struggle and eventually have one’s children move ahead in the world. It is the American Dream. For students beginning school in a country they have not begun to process nor understand, one that often welcomes them with threats and hate-filled images of those who look like them, this is overwhelming and, for some, traumatic. Even with all this, immigrants and refugees leave all they know and love to seek the hostile welcome of the United States and other First-World countries when home has become in the words of the poet Warsan Shire “the mouth of a shark.” It is this shattering and rebuilding of a/n (American) dream that led to my essential question, “What does it mean to be a hyphenated American?” As we designed a curriculum, we hoped to create opportunities for students to address the dream and the reality of immigration as well as honor and celebrate their hyphenates. Students felt their invisibility every day while images in the media and interactions in local communities made clear they were less than, undesired, and even a threat. Immigrants and refugees experience anxiety, frustration, and often shame around having to speak in “broken” English in schools and in the other institutions with which they must interact. The commonly used term “broken” identifies the speakers as damaged rather than capable of multilingual communication. It is the language assigned by the oppressor and too often internalized. Elizabeth, an undergraduate education student in my Teaching of Writing class at Lehman College wrote the following in her reflection of a poetry assignment. I remember growing up ashamed because I had an accent. I transferred from a bilingual class to an English class in third grade and I experienced tremendous anxiety when it was time to participate. My own mother’s broken English caused me shame. Here in the Bronx there are youth growing up who think the way I did.

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Both Amanda and I too often found that the students we understood to be multilingual and culturally rich, often had internalized the “brokenness” that the hegemonic structure assigned them. Janet Carmago, an undergraduate student in my reading and writing methods classes, sought to be an educator in the Bronx for this very reason. As a young learner, she had felt silenced and ashamed to write. She wishes to empower students to value the wisdom of their cultures and feel pride in their voice. Even with all that understanding, she admitted she still had a great deal of anxiety around writing, the effect of those earlier years in school. My voice feels quite small. It hides in the crevices of my tongue. It’s shy to come out. “Come out,” I say “no,” it whispers back.

Janet captures beautifully the wish and the will of a young person to speak but feeling too small, unable to speak up. With this awareness in mind, Amanda and I chose art and poetry that explored ideas about identity, heritage, displacement and its concomitant traumas, as well as some of the more optimistic aspects of the immigration experience and the richness of a multicultural identity. For the inquiry into what it means to be a hyphenated American, we developed this way of teaching in the midst of a presidential campaign whose rhetoric was increasingly hostile toward immigrants. Our purpose was to create a space for students to develop and communicate their stories and insert their voices into a threatening national conversation as a “who” rather than as a “what” by writing poems in response to works of art that evoked aspects of their lived experiences. This notion that works of art could be doorways to lead us into ways of expressing our own experiences is rooted in Maxine Greene’s belief that “cultural, participatory engagement with the arts” (2001, p. 6) could provoke “an initiation into new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving” (p. 7). These provocations have the power to engage what Greene called the “social imagination,” which she defined as the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, in the streets where we live and our schools. Social imagination not only suggests but also requires that one take action to repair or renew. (1995, p. 5)

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For students who are new to the United States, their previous education is too often haphazard and grounded in their personal economic status in their home country. The students at the international school in which we worked were often identified as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE). Most of these young people arrived in the Bronx traumatized by extended family separations, poverty, crime, war, oppression based on gender or political, religious, socioeconomic designations. These students had spent or were still spending so much energy on survival, that reflective, introspective thought was often too painful and repressed in the face of the need to survive and succeed and most simply, English. Most educators in the United States are not given training around how common psychological diagnoses like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affect immigrants, refugees, and children “growing up in poverty and other adverse circumstances” (Blair and Raver 2015). The immigrants, refugees, and young people raised in poverty or adverse conditions may be affected by symptoms of PTSD, be clinically depressed, have repressed memories of previous abuse, or display visible signs of emotional distress (Finn, p. 587). As the only white female teaching in a school with many teachers with their own immigration stories to share, it was imperative that I create an environment which was safe and “respectful of students’ culture (Emdin, p. 27) and understand how to “see, enter and draw from” the spaces in which my students resided. I was explicit that I wanted to hear their stories and see their worlds, ones I could not know without their help. I explained that for me the arts and poetry, in particular, allow the humanity of the artist/writer to speak to the humanity of the viewer. They could be seen and be heard through sharing themselves and having others recognize themselves in some part of a life or journey foreign to them. With the above considerations in mind and given the range of reading and comprehension levels in each classroom, Amanda and I agreed that teaching students to develop meaningful literacy would be best served by first learning to “read” visual art. Beginning with art enabled students to be free of barriers to engage in intellectually stimulating discussions about symbolism and creative choices that we hoped would carry over into subsequent discussions of literature, as well as into their writing. Furthermore, the symbolic imagery in the works of art students studied reflected their own experiences back to them in ways that they understood and wanted to express. Telling their stories necessitated finding/developing their voices, ones shaken by new languages and new cultural norms.

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Through their exploration and expression of self and identity, students would also hear the words and worlds of others. The goal was not only to inquire into the experience but to support students to speak up and express the complex identities that stereotyping and dehumanizing propaganda denied immigrants and refugees, to practice speaking back to a racist Presidential candidate and the Americans who craved and echoed his hate-filled rhetoric. It was through the exploration of fine art that the students were given the time in their overloaded lives to journey into themselves. The work of inquiry into learning through the arts allowed the students not only to recognize themselves in the words and images of others and to be seen more fully by one another but also to employ the tools authors and artists use. Refugees and many immigrants and undocumented refugees experience “three types of stress in the resettlement process: migration stress, acculturative stress, and traumatic stress. Migration stress is the result of a move from one’s home in a sudden, unplanned situation; acculturative stress is the attempt to function in a new culture or society, and traumatic stress have been diagnosed with PTSD” (Finn, p. 587). Many of these students arrive feeling shame, confusion, fear, and disorientation at a world that does not sound, smell, look, or feel in any way familiar and is quick to remind those who are newly arrived. Akim,2 a Bangladeshi student, shares this moment from his first days in an American school: I do not like it so much, Making fun of my name Pulling on my dress When they say I reek My eyes fill with tears and My heart fills with sorrow, I don’t show it affected me?

Akim wrote this three years after his arrival in the Bronx from a refugee camp. He had endured hunger and fear in the refugee camp, but his use of the English words “dress” for kurta and “reek” highlight his retention of the language of painful teasing/bullying. When I questioned him regarding the question mark, he explained it was because he wondered

2 Pseudonym.

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how (and how well) it was possible to hide the pain and sadness that felt all encompassing to him. For the Kingsbridge 12th grade students, recognizing their experience and situating themselves in the works and words of others was the way we began the inquiry-based learning through the arts work with Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932). Fine art is a medium that allows students with a limited ability for expression in a new language to engage in the rigorous work of analyzing through discourse in a richer, more complex, and low-stakes (Elbow 1997) manner. Indeed, the use of a work of visual art then serves as a way to welcome detailed and vivid “pictures” from all students, including those from underrepresented backgrounds—indeed, to privilege them, fostering inclusion, creativity, and engaged learning for all students as it also enriches the understandings of those from majority backgrounds (Thomas and Mulvey 2008). For immigrant communities and families, education is a high-stakes endeavor, one that has the power to shift cyclical poverty and build generational success. Students looking to succeed wish to get the “right” answer and be “good” students often only knowing how to fully engage in the rote memorization learning that is still common in many postcolonial Third-World countries. Amanda and I thought about how to focus thinking as a way to build awareness of the artist’s technique while allowing for personal connections and interactions with the painting. We created an aesthetic line of inquiry that asked, “How does Frida Kahlo use visual symbols to convey feelings about being ‘on the border.’” On the day of the work, Amanda introduced herself and shared her experiences growing up in the Bronx as well as her passion for poetry and the arts. We had designed the lesson to activate the student schema around the culture they identified with as the culture/community they called “home” or that they “were from.” In the Do Now, students were asked to think of a saying or phrase in their first language that does not quire translate into English. Students whispered the directions in common languages to peers who were beginners or for whom the vocabulary was unclear. Think of a saying or a phrase in your native language that does not quite translate into English. 1. Write the phrase on the paper and draw a picture of what that phrase means. 2. Share pictures and phrases in small groups (4 per group).

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As the students worked, we heard cries of recognition as some students figured out a way to capture an action or feeling. Others furrowed their brows and muttered among themselves, peering at one another’s papers. There were few complete drawings and many had simply started and then peered at a partner’s work. After they shared, we had a whole class discussion. Amanda asked, “What was it like to illustrate your phrase? Was it difficult?” “If so, what was difficult about it?” One student at each table shared out as per my class routine and then Amanda asked, “Did drawing the picture help you understand more about the phrase you were drawing? How?” I called on a few students who had either had an idea I had heard while circulating or a student who had finished the sketch. The student was the expert and thus, through these tasks, students not only activated the schema, but even the most reticent speaker was nodding and smiling as they shared their work in groups and then the larger class. We asked a student from each group to share out their discussion and then we had volunteer students (encouraged by peers and circulating teachers) to share out some of the words/phrases they had discussed as well as simply the experience of not knowing how to say what they want and saying it “wrong” when translating in a literal manner to English. After the pre-viewing activity, we projected the image of Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932). We relayed no information about the image and gave the students the following directions as we began the viewing workshop: We are going to look at a painting now, and I’m not going to tell you anything about the painting at first. I’d just like you to spend about a minute looking and then when that minute is up, I am going to invite you to ask questions about the painting. I’m not going to offer any answers right away, we are just going to collect the questions then we will get to the answers later.

We allowed about a minute for close looking, then students were directed not to ask yes/no questions, and Amanda modeled how to shift a statement into an open ended question. She observed: “The American flag is in the smoke.” She then modeled it as a question “Why is the American Flag in the smoke?” Molly reminded the students that we were not seeking answers, but only collecting questions which were captured on chart paper.

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Students who are struggling with language are by necessity, literal, and often seek the language learners’ holy grail: formal vocabulary instruction. It is well documented that out-of-context vocabulary learning yields little growth and deflects from the higher thinking that the learner could employ while engaging with the new language. The opportunity to ask open-ended questions that seek no singular right answer is hugely freeing for anxious speakers who must not only consider the concepts they wish to inquire about, but the language to express them. The open questioning encouraged students to think more deeply. They were being asked not to be certain, but to wonder. Instead of the usual school experience of being questioned by teachers, they were now the questioners, and their curiosity determined the direction of the discussion. The thoughtfulness, openness, and sophistication of the students’ observation and questioning lent an air of seriousness to the collaboration from the very beginning. They asked insightful questions about the symbolism in Frida Kahlo’s painting. Once a significance had been assigned to the cigarette in Kahlo’s hand, students began to notice other images of smoke and fire in the painting and to see connections between various symbolic elements. The more they saw, the more they went back for a deeper look and asked further questions about the details and composition of the painting. Elizabeth Thomas and Anne Mulvey explain how this works: Learning occurs as multiple interpretations emerge in dialogue and are weighed one against the other. Each individual student’s experience and understanding counts, but all interpretations do not count equally. Some early interpretations fall away, while others inspire and scaffold later ones, supporting a shared, more sophisticated understanding of the work of art and the problem at hand. (2008)

After a few of the more confident class members began sharing questions, the rest of the students quickly realized they only had to notice something and ask “Why did she put that there?” “What does that represent?” or “What could be the meaning of” questions about what they were observing. Students were encouraged to work in pairs to create questions and by the end of the question collection, every student had spoken. It was low-stakes work that empowered the state of “not knowing” as part of the process of learning. As they students asked questions, it became clear that students were using personal connections, cultural information,

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and academic knowledge to create questions around the image. The direction to simply view art, notice, and raise questions did not feel difficult and it was the beginning of their soon to be flourishing relationship with inquiry into learning through the arts. We took a few minutes to have students share their thoughts on any question students wished to address. We asked them to consider the following before considering an answer: 1. How does the author do what she is doing? 2. What is she exploring? 3. How do you know that? They were itching to “answer” but made it clear that we were not looking for, nor might there be only one right answer. Often students looked to physical characteristics and symbolism to make sense of what Kahlo was expressing. As they shared possible responses to the questions charted, they commented to one another with nodding or vocal agreement or asked a deepening question to better understand a peer’s reason for their interpretation. The students had begun literary analysis without ever considering the work they were undertaking. The knowledge that they were “just asking questions” and offering “ideas” based on connections, observations and prior academic learning freed students from the paralyzing search for a correct answer. I left all the chart papers of questions from all my classes up on the wall with a printed copy of the painting above them, for the students to continue to consider. We explained the role of the artist is not necessarily to answer questions but to get people to ask questions. Building from our initial inquiry students the previous day, I began class with the prompt: “Has there ever been a time that you have felt like you were on the border between two different places or two different situations? It might not be two countries, it might be two different communities, or two different periods of your life?” Students could jot notes in any language they wanted to gather their thoughts and then share out with their table. Each group shared out and students listened to one another attentively as they addressed both issues of tension within countries, culture shock as well as the surprisingly popular topic of the transition to adulthood from childhood. Students were directed to create a T-chart and write the two different places or states of being at the top or the chart, on either side of the center

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line. Below the line on each side, students were asked to make a list of people, places, and things they associate with each list. Drawing upon my own life experience, I modeled a list of symbolically representative items on the sides of the border between New York City and Athens Ohio, the small college town where I had grown up. I had been teaching long enough to know a fair percentage of the students would push their artwork onto the five or six gifted artists in the room and kick back for off topic discussions. I drew what I like to think of as my extraordinarily lifelike round stick figure cow replete with stick figure udders. Even those students raised in the corporal punishment school of education didn’t try to stifle their laughter. With the oversized reminder of my no excuses “cow” overlooking the room, students were more easily encouraged to draw their own work. Amanda and I wanted the students to use their observations and question to undertake the artist’s process of brainstorming, drafting, engaging the eyes and questions of others, revising and finally presenting their creation. This, like writing, is a recursive process, but the limited paper space allowed it to feel finite rather than undoable, although one student stapled three papers together. There is now a massive amount of evidence from all realms of science that unless individuals take a very active role in what it is that they’re studying, unless they learn to ask questions, to do things hands on, to essentially recreate things in their own mind and transform them as is needed, the ideas just disappear. (Gardner 2009)

Students were instructed to reflect on their observations around Kahlo’s work and use her strategies employing color and imagery and symbolism to evoke emotion. They were to look at the notes on the wall, talk together and consider how she conveyed a feeling about each place without using words. In pairs and small groups, students brainstormed symbols, items, and emotions of their two sides of the border. Then they began to sketch their borderline drawings. Across that year and others, students were influenced by the inquiry into Frida Kahlo’s painting. Luisa3 posed herself in a red top, blue ruffled skirt, red low-heeled dance shoes on the border, her head and body facing her homeland with her face turned forward, looking directly at the viewer. 3 Pseudonym.

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Her left hand is placed authoritatively on her hip and her right arm is in the air, waving the Dominican Flag. This choice was in direct response to the inquiry her class had done, noticing Kahlo held the Mexican flag with her left hand, but down below her waist with a cigarette crossing onto the American side. Many students used single flags or from both countries to reflect their personal cultural and emotional position through placement or absence. Luisa reflected Kahlo’s themes of nature and tradition versus the cold industrialized, capitalistic energy of the United States. She included snow and overcast skies along with McDonald’s fries and food stamps in the US. For the Dominican Republic (DR), she had a brightly colored house and sun rising above the clouds, fruit bearing trees, but also a water tap enclosed in the red circle with a diagonal line through it, the universal symbol for “no.” In a nod to morality, she had an angel with a golden halo floating about the brightly colored house in DR and then the same angel hovering over a fire hydrant in the US with her golden halo laying on the ground next to a large pile of feces. She drew lines radiating from both the fallen halo and the feces so that the image could not be missed. These were conscious choices she made as she revealed the challenges she and her family have faced in the so-called “golden land.” Her commentary on quality of life is clear but her choice to show the lack of water in DR symbolically is important, as life cannot exist without water. It is the only downside to the Dominican Republic in her drawing, but it is enough to cause her to leave. Life on the border is not an easy one but she is holding firm to her hyphenate as her dramatic and proud stance indicates. Students drew on the class inquiry reflecting on their questions and observations as well as possible answers regarding Kahlo’s artistic and thematic choices in the painting. Color played a key role in almost every drawing done over my two years at the school. There were often oversized clusters of buildings in grey lacking any human representation or windows filled with overlapping bodies some with a range of emotions on their faces, other students simply creating circle head bodies in windows to convey density on the side of the United States. Almost every student drew from Kahlo in their use of large, sometimes almost volcanic looking, dark chimneys spewing black smoke and clouding the environment. There were almost always crowds of people rushing on the United States’ side, with one student even writing the word work! over the head of each briefcase carrying body in the crowd, creating a cacophonous effect for the viewer. Often, there was open sky and grass and water on the side of

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the home country and musical instruments or notes playing in the air. Time was personified as flying in the USA or as a clock with a panting woman running with a briefcase in the middle of it with her arms marking the time. Others had symbolized the dance/struggle between time and money with themselves or others racing back and forth or trapped in the middle. Broken hearts were common or lonely images shaded in hues of blue on the United States side of the border. Language played a role with one student personifying English as a muscle laden endomorph whose angry face directly faced the viewer as the body of a teenaged boy flailed in the air his face turned toward the bully pleading to be let down. An arrow identifies the boy as the artist and the bully as the English language. Another student listed a series of homophones and similar sounding words beginning with the letter b in a dark grey cloud above her head from which snow fell and left her shivering. Students played with the concept of the borderline often creating a single line that demarcated the border through its shift from a brightly colored river or ocean into a highway or crowded, darkly colored elevated trains on the side of the United States. Some stood atop planes that straddled the borders. No matter how positive the representation of home was for the students, it often included violence, or a scene of hunger or broken/torn money and in one case, a series of marionettes labeled to reflect the leading government figures. Students understood the need to have crossed the border and for the struggle, but were clear eyed as to the chaotic and unwelcoming reality that exists for them across the borderline from home and those they love. Students had noted the challenge of curating the many items they wished to use and finding the ones that most “fit.” In preparation for the writing to come, I repeatedly and explicitly connected their creative process to the brainstorming, drafting and revision parts of the writing process to come. Students were very willing to add to, refine, or revise drawings based on peer discussions and I hoped this would carry over when the often dreaded use of words was applied. Amanda returned and we moved from the creation of a visual artistic response to the work of poetic inquiry. Poetry allows developing writers to experiment with form and language. They can choose the words and structure that suit their tone and message. Writers can even use a mixture of languages, interweaving them to broaden their linguistic palette. No other form of writing allows for such freedom and flexibility, and yet what poetry does demand is precision of language. Struggling writers working

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in prose sometimes hide in dense thickets of words. They make the rookie mistake of thinking that more words and bigger words make the writing sound more intelligent. Poetry demands an economy of language and because each word carries a lot of weight, the focus is on choosing the best possible words to express an idea or convey an image. This can only help developing writers in every other form of writing they undertake. In the misguided, or perhaps even sinister, push for scripted, testdriven learning materials to support urban and rural students by the measure of standardized testing, we have heard little discussion of the power and privilege that metaphorical thinking and expression endows upon people in our society. Parents who send their children to private schools demand curriculums rich with art exploration and creations as well as deep and wide immersion in metaphorical thinking and expression. Poetry as a genre is often misunderstood and neglected in discussions about the pedagogy of writing. When it is given any attention, it is usually either to discuss the importance of students learning how to read and interpret the main idea of challenging texts, or identify literary devices. Writing poems in the secondary classroom has come to feel like a luxury our test-driven culture can no longer afford. Indeed, David Coleman, one of the authors of the Common Core Standards for ELA, once famously said to a room full of educators in Albany, NY: …as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a sh*t about what you feel or think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me. It is a rare working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood’. (2011, qtd. in Ohanian)

A few thoughts spring to mind when reading this quote. First, what a sad, gray little world Mr. Coleman envisions in which the only writing that counts for anything is a “market analysis.” (And while we are asking, what exactly is a market analysis anyway? Does Mr. Coleman even know?) But even more to the point, Coleman’s statement reflects a lack of understanding of the fact that students’ writing skills are strengthened by engaging in a broad range of reading and writing experiences. Adolescence is the time for everyone to establish their identities and begin to explore who they are and who they want to become. Going

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through this process in a language and country that are new and unfamiliar can render English language learners (Ells) at this crucial stage of their lives mute and disengaged. The opportunity to make art based on their personal stories allows them to connect with others, to be seen as unique individuals, and to feel empathy for peers whose backgrounds and experiences might differ vastly from their own. In this current political climate of suspicion and sometimes downright hostility toward immigrants, making connections to others through writing means that those whose voices are heard can represent and therefore help to empower many others with similar stories. Our initial foray into the creative writing process was through an activity inspired by Sherman Alexie’s character Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Trying to figure out where he fit in as an “apple” (red on the outside and white on the inside) Junior looked at the small and large of who he was. The conversations often returned to the public discourse around immigrants and how alienating that could be. Conversation, especially for Ells, is very important in the creation of poetry or a writing task as the blank page taunts those already unsure of their skill with expression in their own language or another one. The following excerpt is from Karen, a student in one of my undergraduate methods classes at Lehman college. The words are from an assignment to respond to an article on voice by Tom Romano. Janet most beautifully captured the experience of many language learners and oppressed peoples in schools. Sometimes My voice feels quite small. It hides in the crevices of my tongue. It’s shy to come out. “Come out,” I say “no,” it whispers back.

In pairs and small groups, students brainstormed characteristics and looked to show a range of personality. They laughed together and shook their heads at moments of recognition as they read each other’s words and offered advice and asked questions to trigger thinking for students who were struggling. As we began, I reminded students this was their voice, their way to show who they were and not let another person define them. Students

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wanted to show the complexity of their identities to those who dehumanized them through caricatures. The power to connect to another’s heart through language was a conversation from the day poetry was introduced. In the process of writing their “Tribes” poems, the students described their lives both literally and metaphorically, which laid the groundwork for subsequent writing. Below are examples from two years of students as the work of inquiry-based learning through the arts continued. I am from the tribe of bachata is life. We always wake up dancing or singing bachata. If we could marry bachata for the rest of our lives, we would.

Another student, Juan Carlos,4 is from Honduras. He demonstrates his profound understanding of the antagonistic, symbiotic relationship of America to the immigrants that built and continue to build it. He will not accept the labels given him and his peers, by presidential candidates, and others. He knows better and voices it. It is literally funny how my tribes change depending on people’s perspectives.

He goes on to list how he is seen by many people and relationships within and outside of Honduras. He begins each stanza with the phrase “in the eyes of….” He writes through the eyes of strangers, structures and family. He writes from the perspective of those who define him for leaving, for arriving, and for carrying the hope of others. In his poem, he calls out the hypocrisy of the United States and the ignorance of wholesale stereotyping of humans. His nuanced understanding of human beings and perspective show through as his confidence in his identity is demonstrated through his choice to shift from I am from the tribe of to the refrain In the eyes of______ I am…. He ends the poem from his perspective. To my eyes, I belong to the tribe of witnesses where we can give testimony of what it means to be a “parasite” and how much this country needs us. I can tell you the feeling we all share the moment we leave the land where dreams began.

4 Pseudonym.

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Below is an example from Fabilisa, a student who was one of the more advanced English readers and speakers in the class but like her peers had not written poetry before this. It seems impossible when one reads this piece, which underwent little to no revision I know that to them I’m just an immigrant. Someone who is here to “have babies, take their jobs and money”. This is a misconception because I am more than that. Sure, I am an immigrant, but I am also a person who works hard and has hopes and dreams. I belong to that tribe. I belong to the tribe of those who vehemently dislike to ask others for favors. I belong to the tribe of readers because Quentin Jacobsen’s misfortunes make them forget, but still remember their own. And the tribe of those who cease to exist as the rain pours down. And the tribe of people who drink hot chocolate with the purpose of burning their tongue, just to spend the rest of the day feeling it with their upper lip. And to the tribe of El Ensanche Duarte in San Francisco de Macoris who are coming in and out of Dona Juana’s house because she had a stroke last night. And the tribe of people whose organs all sink down to their feet when they see that someone, because they wish they could sit in their underwear at 3 am in a kitchen counter with them and talk about the universe. And the tribe of people who wish to be doctors but sit in their room alone whispering to themselves over and over “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it”. And to the tribe of people who are happiest with the feel of the wind on their face and hair as they’re swinging back and forth in the playground at the park. And from the tribe of people whose favorite color is that of red roses when their petals turn a red wine at its base. And to the tribe of people who look out into the night sky and wish she was still sleeping next to me, but then, I remember that in the morning the flowers that grew over her will.

When I reached out to Fabilisa about using some of her work in this book, her response was “you want to use my Tribes poem? Sure!” I was surprised that was what she recalled as worth sharing. Her first work is less a fully developed workshopped poem than part of a spiraled learning experience to support resistant and struggling writers. Then I remembered how often I had repeated that poetry is the work that changes hearts which then can change minds. Until we began our inquiry into the

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borderline and the experience of being a hyphenated American, Fabilisa had not realized how she and others were being defined and dehumanized in the media and public. Her opening line in her Tribes poem is a response to a growing awareness of the America into which she had moved. She has just graduated college where, she said, her eyes have been unavoidably opened fully through experiences of racism and oppression in the world beyond high school. Assad showed his story in the first line of his tribes poem: i realized i was a lonely African boy, but when people look at me they see a dark man walking through a broken wood. i was different lost confused awkward scared alone, hurting seething beneath the surface searching for answers without knowing the questions.

Assad purposely selected a lowercase i to represent his sense of self in America. His use of imagery connects his darkness with the brokenness. I asked him what he meant by broken wood and he said it was when a forest is dark and there are fallen trees and a person cannot see the path out and keeps tripping and hurting himself. His next line listing feelings without commas highlighting the chaotic sense of the early days followed by the pain and anger that came later as the realities of the “golden land” faded into the shock of navigating, at best, indifferent systems, new family dynamics and the omnipresent fear of not being able to learn fast enough to survive and thrive. Those lines granted me insight into the deeply grounded young man who I knew as from the tribe of “leaders guiding people to the right path or helping the others in their activities,” as he wrote later in the poem. The reader can see Assad’s listing of adjectives as his capturing of the wave of uninterrupted, overwhelming emotion he experienced. By sharing this both in discussion and in words, he processed a bit of the experience so many young men, particularly from patriarchal cultures are trained to repress or about which they feel shame for being “weak.” The students were writing to speak out and speak up against the voices at work stereotyping and dehumanizing those seeking the refuge of American shores. Students were reminded that to use their voice through creative expression required and demonstrated a depth of metaphorical thinking and authorial skill that too often it was assumed immigrants and refugees do not have. I urged them to show those who would define and

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limit that they can’t while you show them who you are. Our purpose was to create a space for students who had been defined as “other” to develop and communicate their stories and insert their voices into a threatening national conversation as a “who” rather than as a “what” by writing poems in response to works of art that evoked aspects of lived experiences. Tribes had begun the inquiry into self and the complexities of identity and specifically hyphenated identities. Next, students studied George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From” (1999), in which she explores her own rural Southern upbringing and offers it to readers as a way of considering the ways in which our histories shape us. It creates for students, as Linda Christensen says, “space for their lives to become part of the curriculum” (2003, p. 15). In her poem, Lyon provides a litany of memories including names and places, sights and smells, and familiar phrases that evoke an image of a very specific place and time. When we read the poem together in class, the students listened carefully and wrote questions in the margins of their copies. When the poet mentions a forsythia bush in her poem, several students immediately wanted to know what that looked like. It was not enough for the students to be told that it was a yellow flowering bush. One student leapt up to the laptop projecting the poem and while Amanda was explaining the plant, he was googling it. As Amanda finished, up popped a multitude of forsythia bushes in a multitude of settings on the Google image search page. The student selected one and several others noted they had these in their countries, too. Taking these matters into their own hands was for these students a self-taught moment that helped them to enrich the linguistic imagery in their own work. This experience of wanting to see the bush helped me explain why they as poets needed to “show, not tell” in the work. It was a student-generated push in the direction of clarity and specificity, qualities that can make a poem memorable. I explained they would “be” the Google images (in words) for their readers, transporting them and evoking the images and emotions they wished the reader to share. Students began to brainstorm the sights, sounds, people, words and whatever came to mind, using mind maps, drawing, bullet points, T-charts, whatever worked for the student. There was a positive buzz in the room as students shared memories and laughed or nodded knowingly at a partner’s notes. As students began writing, we discussed the fact that the author’s memories as described in the poem might be very different from their own. After all, she was a white American woman from the South, growing

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up in the 1950s. They were to voice their own time and place and not try to sound like her. It was their turn to share and be mentor poets to one another. Students were instructed to write their truth and let their readers look up information and learn if need be. We had been having conversations since the first week of school about how immigrants and refugees and their experiences are defined by powerful others. This was an opportunity to speak back to a society that too often negatively defined where they are from by claiming their identity. Using the pen as a sword to beautifully rebuke the ignorance that dehumanizes entire cultures of people. While teaching high school in Kenya, and still new to education, I quickly learned that students used to a system based on didactic learning and rote memorization (as well as the implicit fear of and respect for educators) expected to be told what was right and wrong. It did not matter if they understood, only that they did well on exams. Mamadou5 was one of those students, like many immigrants, who prided himself on being a “good” student who “did all his work” (which he did do). In an effort to complete the task successfully, he skipped brainstorming and his tablemates began to talk around him as he wrote. He called me over and pronounced himself done. I read over the pro forma work that technically met the basic requirements of the final task but took no risk and lacked original voice. Mamadou muttered under his breath as I insisted we work together to revise one section to make it GWISAE (Great Writing Is Specific And Evocative). Mamadou had written the perfectly serviceable “I am from the smell of donuts and oatmeal.” I acknowledged that I could kind of imagine it, but not in a way that made my brain come “alive.” I added that I really wanted to feel the people in this scene, the relationships. Mamadou agreed to try. I asked the following questions: Who is cooking? Where are they cooking? What does it look like where they are cooking? When does this take place? What do you hear?

In less than five minutes, Mamadou had written: 5 Pseudonym.

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I am from Togo born after Communism the sound of donuts frying in the morning and oatmeal being stirred over the fire and under the stars in the extra large suferia. Mamas and daughters laughing and gossiping as they work.

The next day, I used Mamadou’s work as the model for revision. The smile on his face was notable as he was generally a down-to-business young man in class. He informed me he had been stopped in the hall by students from another class who praised his writing. I made him a revision teaching assistant and during every writing workshop for the rest of the year, he would ask questions of his peers to deepen description as well as talk through ideas with students who were struggling. We also see in Mamadou’s use of the word suferia an example of translanguaging, defined by Garcia and Wei (2014) as: an approach to the use of language, bilingualism, and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has traditionally been the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate languages. (p. 5)

The notion of a linguistic repertoire that does not demand that students replace one language with another allows for a richness and individuality that can only enhance students’ creative and expressive writing. Often my students were multilingual, not just bilingual. The rich palette of colors they have in their paintbox of expression is far greater than those of monolingual speakers, if only allowed they are to use them. Translinguistic speakers demonstrate artistry by seamlessly introducing untranslatable words and phrases into their speech repertoire in much the same way as a painter knows how to mix the perfect shade of red. By using the precise word suferia rather than a pale and imprecise translation such as “large cooking pot,” we as readers can have a small taste of Mamadou’s home and feel the language in our mouths as we speak it aloud. One of the principles that I used to guide the students in their writing was Rita Dove’s (n.d.) notion that “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” We discussed what that meant and practiced with shifting general words into specific ones and deepening specificity and imagery in description. We discussed choosing the language that best fits the emotion and energy of the moment when

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the “just right” word was not in English. The writing of these poems created self-guided language learning as they were engaged in the decision making around language choice and the crafting of metaphorical expressions using a student’s first language, other languages, and/or English. Ibrahim’s use of Arabic and words that resonated with the sounds of Sierra Leone. Ibrahim’s passion for his faith and family is shown clearly by both content and the linguistic selections he makes. While he is most clearly from Sierra Leone, his inclusion of the emphasized word please demonstrated a playful understanding of himself in interaction with America as he daily urged me to just “tell him the answer,” in response to which I often asked him a question, maddening him. He demonstrated his self-awareness and growth by including a humorous nod to this new American part of him, a piece of his hyphenate. When listening to him voice the poem, the entire class and I were transported by the sound of his Arabic and Sierra Leonean resonant language. I’m from the Fijian bee, from dried, once muddy soil. I am from where playing marbles is a way for kids to get the paper that buys goodies. I am from ducks and chickens shouting into people’s ears telling them it is already noon. I am from soursop plant which tastes like a million squashed candies and makes people wait for years and years for its young ones to ripen. I am from hit the books, from Solomon and Zainab, always telling me if I want to be a tree in this world and an angel in the next, I must eat knowledge. I’m from the planet of Abraham (Peace be upon him) and Muhammad (Peace be upon him), from the planet of believing the unseen. I am from Yahoo-Ka-Markaz, from school to studying Koran like a mother with her newborn, from Solomon and Zainab, from jooloo et jangoo. I am from Fajr to Isha, from prayer to the Lord, morning to dawn.

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I am from “Miss please, tell me I want to know!!!” I am from go to bed early and rise shine in the morning, from Fatmata and Alhadji Pathe. I am from jooloo et jangoo, from “ ,” believing that mankind and jinnkind came into existence to submit to the will of their Maker.

I am from jooloo et jangoo, from greetings of Eternal Peace.

Maria, a spirited and outgoing student, included the world of school as a part of where she is from. She offers a humorous, yet layered glimpse into the navigation of all powerful systems, language and even teachers who wish, ridiculously, for her to stay on topic. She is from these interactions. I am from theatrical faces when Ms. Sherman, my English teacher, says something that I don’t like or understand. I am from the moment when the school counselor said I had the lowest grades in the entire school, my heart ski..p..p..ed a beat, but thank God it was a mistake; she mistook me for someone else.

I found the words mistake and mistook haunting despite her relieved tone. It highlights how easily, and not uncommonly, an immigrant’s or refugee’s life, status, and future can shift beyond their control, and in Maria’s case, requiring a strong relationship with an intervening deity. One young man stood out, not only for his extraordinary height, but the portentous telling of his birth at the opening of his Where I’m from poem stays with me to this day. I was born in the middle of summer and heavy winds blew the roof off and I almost died.

Oral tradition and storytelling in African countries clearly is at play in this Ghanian student’s excerpt. He asked how he could write in “his language” as the laptops did not have the letters he needed. He then

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went online and found a website that showed him how to select the characters he needed. As he watched the words appear on the screen, a smile spread across his face and he read them aloud to me. It was the first time ever I heard him speak any language other than the English with which he was very facile. The fullness of the sound of his translanguage, including the simple John 1:9. No translation needed. He knows it inside and out. His selection of the “just right” words allows the complexity of his voice to shine through. I am from my grandma who when she see the full moon made us face the moon and tell the new moon all bad thing we had done in the past. John 1:9 SE yEka yEn bOne kyerE OnyankopOn a, OyE Onokwafo ne Otreneeni sE Ode yEn bOne bEkyE yEn, nawatew yEn ho afi nea EnteE nyinaa ho. And she made us believe the full moon would bring good luck in life.

A Ginean student, Vincent,6 whose writing reflects his gift with orality and storytelling, spoke three languages when he arrived in the United States from West Africa but learned Spanish and English concurrently within three years. This young man was a hugely social creature and so many of his peers spoke Spanish, that he managed to learn both in the time many students were still working at an intermediate level in one language. For all his sociability, many of his peers found out elements of his life along with me, his teacher. We learned that his mother was blind and he was responsible to be her eyes. I am from reading letters to my mom from Immigration I am from being an example pour mes petit freres I am from Mai Kouyate, a mother whose world went dark at the age of fifteen after which people became nicer.

This poet highlights not the hardship, but the unexpected kindness his mother received in her life. His positive energy can be felt through this as his responsibilities are contrasted by romantic descriptions as seen below: 6 Pseudonym.

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I am from netoiye la maison le matin my aunt said every morning before school when as she handed me the towel for scrubbing the floors I am from playing under the stars where children come out and play hide and seek; the stars are so bright that someone could drop a needle and find it.

This young man had difficulty staying still, not chatting and getting words on paper. But when he did, what a beautiful voice he had. Nelson wrote a love letter to his homeland and family left behind. It is full of the images, sound, and smells he would catch a “whiff” of from time to time. He was excited by the symbolism and metaphorical writing we explored in the poetry workshop. He wanted his world to live for the reader the way artists and poets had made theirs live for him. My roots extend under the broken concrete of the barrio de Santo Domingo to the burning sand of “Nagua” up through the gigantic Cotui mountains under the wind, that tastes like chocolate caliente. I am from going to the river and seeing the fish swim aimlessly searching for happiness. I am from scary nights while crickets sing and mice have gone to work after all the gunshots in the street had already ceased. I am from the delicious smell of coffee that came from my abuela’s kitchen that watered my roots and from sunny mornings hearing the roosters singing “Kikiriki” I am from agony seeing Santo Domingo sail away from my eyes. It tasted bitter. my throat turned into knots that I knew would never go away. I am from where the family is the government and I am the civilian. They make the rules; I follow them.

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I am from big brothers who love their little brother, I am from where the family helps me to be what I am today. I am from “Platano Power” from El Libro Nacho who saw me growing from 2 to 4 years old, teaching me how to express myself. I am from Juan Luis Guerra’s music making every child and grownup dance merengue “Me sube la bilirrubina” Dancing coconut tree limbs and avocado connect my heart to my culture. They are part of my roots. I am from the challenges of coming to the USA, leaving Abuelo Munoz and Tia Ana behind. I miss seeing them everyday before going to school, drinking coffee while discussing how society was getting worse in our community. These are the challenges, the beauty and people who made me a strong leaf from my family tree.

The work of poetry is powerful. One of the most compelling aspects of the work in which my students and I engaged was the coming to know and see one another. My assumption was that my students, like most high school students, shared stories with one another of common experiences. I came to see how very much I and others did not see of one another. Immigrants and refugees often have to hide: secrets, loss and trauma, anxiety for self and family. They also have to address identity and ordinary self-esteem issues facing nontraumatized teens. There was so much laughter in the classrooms and hallways of the school, I sometimes forgot that every student there was in some way marked by loss. Through his poetry, sweet, charming Brandon revealed a loneliness at which I would never have guessed. Brandon, whose poem is below, had never written poetry until this work. When the students started writing, they often build on literal spaces and places, as do most students across the country. Brandon’s innate aesthetic sense drew him to the metaphorical. This poem underwent very few revisions and is his heart speaking on paper to the world I am a broken toy

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in the factory where I am from. And the last thing a factory needs Is another broken toy. I am from a golden heart that is too heavy for my body. I am from don’t do that or this because We make our own decisions. I am from scary big things that make kids cry and hide behind their mother. From la vecina screaming: “Those kids are bad seeds!” I am from the small things that made us happy like the ice cream guy coming to our neighborhood. From delicate snowflakes hugging me during the nights. and falling on the hard ice. I am from the worlds of teenagers who can’t sleep at night because we are afraid of the future. I am from the dreamers who carry a will that people left behind, and the ones who keep ghostly promises I am from the bright side of the moon where my house placed in the street, I am from far far away where kids get scared in the park on night. I am an astronaut lost in the space with no more oxygen, am from I don’t want to go to school I don’t know these people or They don’t know me something to change I am from being late to school because “the bus was late” but the reality is that I get lost in my thoughts. With my head in the clouds

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and my feet in the ground. I am from a stolen childhood where I lost all my faith. I am from asking “Can you tell me where I am from?” Moving to one place to another without my own home I am from being lost in the storm from to two different timelines stuck in the past, living in the future I am from wishing to create a bright future from a dark past. I am from myself and nowhere else.

This poem leaves no doubt at the sensitive heart behind the quick witted boy who, through this project, shared that he was an orphan. The ability to not only express himself as a “broken toy” evoking the innocence of a childhood lost but to have the very adult understanding that “the last thing a factory needs is another broken toy” embodies the sentiment that appears again in his poem in the Migration Series found in Chapter 6. A close reading of Brandon’s “Where I’m From” poem would require a full page of discussion, so I will simply allow the reader to make their own journey into his poem. The needs of family interrupted his plans to go to art school, but Brandon continues to take art classes and is nearing publication of a graphic novel. I updated him on the powerful impact of his words on the students that followed him at Kingsbridge and on many, many future educators in the English Ed and English departments at Lehman. He responded, “I’m stunned I never thought my poems would have that much of a voice.” He added that he had originally wanted his poem to be shared so that more students, those who feel “blue or left out” might see they are not alone. He was thrilled to hear that other past the boroughs might hear his message. He added that the experience of writing poetry and exploring art was important to him and has stayed with him to this day. Brandon understands the power of shared expressive writing through our own workshop experiences. Ibrahim reflected that the sharing of the poems

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written by other students was like seeing the world from different angles. It was like travelling to another country for the first time. It was very interesting to see the imagery that my classmates used to describe their backgrounds and where they came from.

After the class had finished the Where I’m from poems, I asked a somewhat quiet student, in a class of strong personalities, if I could take her poem to a conference for other teachers to see and learn from the power of her words. This gentle girl stared intensely at me, almost as if I had said something upsetting. She began to cry. After I ascertained she was ok, I sat with her as she gathered herself. She said she couldn’t believe that I liked her work and thought it was worth showing anyone. “Before this I never thought I was good at anything.” She shared that for her entire life she had been told she was “stupid” by some family and teachers in her past and it had stuck. No matter how supportive and kind her teachers at Kingsbridge were, she struggled with frustration and shame around her inability to speak and write in English to express what she understood or imagined. I had no idea. Here is the opening of the poem she thought was “no good” in the opening of her Where I’m From poem: I am from eating dirt as a baby and playing dolls at the roof with my cousins Doralis and Elizabeth and guessing games I sometimes won.

The simple writing is nonetheless full of voice and creates a vivid sense of community and childhood fun. True to the complexity of identity her poem continues to shift, addressing the people, events and moments that have formed her. One element is her love of and passion for protecting animals, highlighted by her repeated, shouting voice. Then there is the harrowing disconnect between grandmother and the daughter and granddaughter. Both these women were almost killed at different times by the elder woman’s careless and perhaps violent hand is told simply, its heaviness present in the words left unwritten. I am from Stop Animal Extinction! I am from the innocence of animals like elephants, lions and whales. I from grandparents who were distant no matter how close they lived. And from the time my grandma left me alone in

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a tub so she could smoke and I almost died. And who almost killed my mother.

When I returned from the conference and told her of the response of the high school teachers and college professors who had seen and even voiced her work, she still did not fully believe me. Fortunately, we had a lot of writing ahead of us and her peers validated the power of her expression. She continued to grow as a writer and to accept positive recognition for her words. After she finished her Where I’m From, she became a teaching assistant in a class in which many students struggled with stamina and trauma in more explicit ways than other classes. This young woman demonstrated extraordinary patience, encouraging her reluctant peers to write more deeply, often the only one who could get a recalcitrant writer to return to the page. As teachers, we can appreciate how one successful experience can make a tremendous difference in a student’s overall sense of self-efficacy. Not long afterward, I heard her telling a classmate how she used to think she was bad at writing, but then she learned it was about revising, about finding the “just right” way to catch what you want to say. He began talking with her about his ideas. She was a natural. Before reading Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s We Wear the Mask, I had students inquire into Laurie Cooper’s artwork, Face Reality (female). This particular image begs the viewer to consider what has led the subject of the painting to this moment and where it will lead. Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment or an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow. (Lessing 1887, first published in 1766)

Following our routine of noticing and asking questions without seeking answers, students were quick to observe the taking off, or attempt to keep in place, a mask. They observed her closed eyes, look of exhaustion or grief as her hand appeared to hold in place on one cheek the white face cover that was disintegrating in tear-like sections. Her red lips and obvious beauty led one class to debate the issue of exhausting beauty standards for women versus men in our society. They were implying colorism, but did not directly understand it’s role. Others noted she was not happy and the mask was to protect her or taking it off was to free her. Issues of violence against women were raised in other classes. They all sensed that

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this was not an easy image. None though connected it to the “othering” and oppression of people of color the way American born BIPOC students would. It is not that these students hadn’t experienced prejudice and hatred and not that it didn’t exist in different forms in their own countries, they are still so busy trying to navigate American systems and structure, the immigrants and refugees in the room hadn’t yet fully connected to the history of BIPOC people in America. New immigrants often identify culturally and by country until American teachers and the world show them they are classified by a white, Christian, heteronormative patriarchal social structure. Masks and the need for them are familiar to them as well. After the students unpacked symbols, metaphors, and other literary devices through paintings and spoken word poetry, it was time to take on some more traditionally canonical works and writers to develop skills for college and gain cultural capital. The relaxed way these students engaged with these more formal forms of poetry is not to be taken for granted, as even many of the graduate students in the English Education program had expressed discomfort with poetry and asked for help in how they might teach it in their own classrooms. In all, the Kingsbridge students explored the words of Def Jam poets, BIPOC poets, Harlem Renaissance poets, and Shakespearean sonnets. Interestingly, the Ell students did not exhibit fear or frustration. Because they were able to understand the logic of language and structural choices made by poets, the students were able to recognize similarities to the kinds of choices they had made in their own work. By creating poetry themselves, they felt comfortable that they could recognize and analyze the choices made by other poets. One of the students in the class (one might say poetically) speaks back to David Coleman’s assertion that work such as inquiry learning through the arts is not preparation for the real world. This student went out of state to take his future college’s honors and placement exams. He found he was not asked to demonstrate the “real world” skill of writing an argument essay. He was asked to analyze and respond to poetry in an essay. This is the work for which private school and selective school students are often prepared. Happily for Mr. Coleman, this recent immigrant poet’s unintentional argument for personal inquiry-driven work is supported by evidence. During my (out of state) visit to my future college, I took a few tests. Guess what they gave me- Oh man! Two poems. I was surprised and

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happy at the same time. First, I didn’t think for a second that we will get that type of poetry. Second, even though it was poems that I hadn’t covered, but after all it was poetry and we had to write an essay based on both poems. And that required the ability to break down and understand the poem. I was happy because I was able to do that, with the hours that I spent with my teacher and peers in class. That was a great experience!

This student did well on that exam, but it is the confidence he demonstrates when asked to analyze poems he hadn’t “covered” that begins his argument. His “even though” reflects his emphasis on not needing to know the text to succeed. He again emphasized his ability to perform the skill the college is asking students to demonstrate “after all it was poetry” as he points out. The incorrect “after all” reflects his excitement at his comfort level with the college exams, not a common response, particularly for an immigrant. It is notable that in his reflection at the end of the unit, he acknowledges his peers. The growth that occurred with these students was primarily driven by their engagement with one another in their creative learning communities. It was a lot of low-stakes work (Elbow 1997) that spiraled over time to create deep and foundationally solid knowledge and gains. Of course, that meant less time spent writing the argument essays that many schools held as the holy grail of test preparation. One example of growth around the navigation and creation of poetry involved Ema, a Bangladeshi student who had initially been resistant to creative writing. This young woman was transfixed by and transformed by her independent reading book, I Am Malala and inspired by Malala’s story to write a poem about her own life. She incorporated insights related to the analysis of the painting Face Reality by Laurie Cooper, which students had “closely read” alongside Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem We Wear the Mask. Having already studied sonnets and iambic pentameter, Ema wanted to state her truth in the manner of Dunbar and Cooper, but she said that she wanted to “do something hard” and create a poem entirely in iambic pentameter. She sought symbols and language to express her feelings, not only of being an immigrant, but of gender bias in her culture and religious intolerance everywhere. She worked in my room every day during lunch for several weeks in order to produce her poem. This young woman was as happy as I ever saw her when furiously focused on her screen, tapping out syllables on the table as she worked to

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get her meter correct and researched ideas and language to both honor Malala and express her truth. How can educating girls be Haram? Is her mind more dangerous than a gun? Is God pleased by those who praise by killing? Quran, Bible, and Torah proffer love. Neighbors spot my hijab…a double-take. Eyes glancing like doves, woodpeckers and hawks. Judge others not, lest ye be not judged. Malala combated the faceless ghosts. Slithering into her home through airwaves. Her voice is a missile to millions of others; a shield protecting girls’ education against darkness petrified by knowledge. Her insistent eye turned evil to stone.

She was confident, determined to be heard. She had found and valued her voice. Ema’s transition from silent student resistant to writing reminded me of the final stanza of my undergraduate student Janet Carmago’s earlier cited excerpt on voice. Like Ema, Janet had faced insecurities with writing, but she took Tom Romano’s advice to listen to and notice her own voice. Here she captures the power of the work of inquiry-based learning through the arts in action, particular with those whose voices are traditionally silenced. A reminder that in every recalcitrant, reluctant writer there is a voice ready to speak up and speak out. But there are days When my voice feels assertive. She comes out of her hiding space. She pushes my tongue out between my teeth. “Speak,” she says. “Express yourself,” she sings. “SAY SOMETHING!,” she yells.

Works Cited Ahmed, S. (2015). Unpublished.

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Barrie, I. (2015). Where I’m from (unpublished poem). Begum, E. (2015). Unpublished poem. Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2015). School readiness and self-regulation: A developmental psychological approach. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 711–731. Carmago, J. (2018). Excerpts voice response poem (unpublished poem). Christensen, L. (2003). Reading, writing, and rising up: Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Dunbar, P. L. (1913). We wear the mask. In The complete poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. Elbow, P. (1997). High stakes and low stakes in assigning and responding to writing. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1997 (69), 5–13. Emdin, C. (2017). For white folks who teach in the hood—And the rest of yall too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston: Beacon Press. Finn, H. B. (2010). Overcoming barriers: Adult refugee trauma survivors in a learning community. TESOL Quarterly, 44(3), 586–596. Garcia, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism, and education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner, H. (2009). Big thinkers: Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences. Edutopia. Retrieved June 1, 2020, from https://www.edutopia.org/multipleintelligences-howard-gardner-video. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press. Lessing, G. E. (1887). Laokoön: An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry (E. Frothingham, Trans.). Boston, MA: Robert Brothers (First published in 1766). Lyon, G. E. (1999). Where I’m from. In Where I’m from: Where poems come from. Spring, TX: Absey & Co. Marte, N. (2014). Where I’m from (unpublished poem). Molina, B. (2014). Where I’m from (unpublished poem). Ohanian, S. (2011). Retrieved June 16, 2020, from http://www.substancenews. net/articles.php?page=2716. Thomas, E., & Mulvey, A. (2008). Using the arts in teaching and learning. Journal of Health Psychology, 13(2), 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/135 9105307086703. Valerio, F. (2014). Tribes (unpublished poem).

CHAPTER 6

Art as Exploration: Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration

The transaction between viewer and art contains many of the same considerations, steps, and moves as between reader and printed text. These transactions, which Rosenblatt defines as the “live circuit between the reader and the text,” (1978, p. 14) allow us to understand that works of art convey meanings beyond their literal subjects and help us to make connections to our lives and to the wider world. Inquiry into art provides a variety of learners an opportunity for engagement and an alternate entry point to the work of critical literary analysis. Art provokes rumination, conversation, investigation, analysis, and argument (Fig. 6.1). As Amanda discussed in Chapter 3, we are enthusiastic about ekphrasis: the “pausing, in some fashion, for thought before, and/or about, some nonverbal work of art, or craft, a poiema without words, some more or less aestheticized made object or set of made objects” (Cunningham 2007, p. 57). Our work with the 12th grade students at Kingsbridge International High School began with Frida Kahlo and between the elements Amanda and I designed and facilitated together, and I continued to employ fine art and poetry to create opportunities for students to practice the skills of close examination (noticing), questioning, analysis, and production of a work of art in response.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_6

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Fig. 6.1 Word cloud

The use of poetry and fine art to do the work of analysis and argument creates greater access to the complex cognitive work with which we wish our students to engage. It reduces the decoding work that often leads to disconnection in struggling readers and those students managing ongoing stress and trauma. Students who wrestle with language are often literal readers and believe that if only enough vocabulary is learned sense will be made. While expanded vocabulary increases access and comprehension, it is well documented that out-of-context vocabulary learning yields little growth and deflects from the richness and complexity of thought a learner could employ while engaging with the new language. It is through wide reading, discussion, or dialogue with peers and people external to the classroom that large swaths of vocabulary are learned, while learning words one at a time is relatively ineffective (Nagy and Herman 1985; Miller and Gildea 1987). This process of language learning proves equally true to students whose primary language is the one of instruction. Discourse around a written text or visual text allows students to build in their own connections to the language, words that might appear intimidating on paper, even to a student whose primary or only language is the one being read or in which discussion is held comprehension of a poem, story or film can provide the conceptual base for understanding new vocabulary (Nagy and Herman 1985; Weir 1991).

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A 12th grade student with an Individual Education Plan (IEP) with executive processing issues at my new high school is a perfect example of this. She had low self-esteem around academics and would rarely speak. Throughout high school, she would become increasingly absent as summative work approached, no matter how much support she was offered. While watching and analyzing Anna Deveare Smith’s Notes from the Field she discovered the word nihilistic. I had pre taught the word and left it on the board, but it was through the students’ impassioned discourse around Deveare Smith’s work, that her understanding not only of the word, but all that went with it came clear to her. She was a leader in that discussion and often thereafter. She wrote her literary analysis paper on A Raisin in the Sun focusing on the crushing nihilism that was driving the choices made by George Younger. She not only knew the definition of the word, she transferred the energy and consequences of it to another text which allowed her to more closely and critically read. The discussion on what nihilism was and how it showed up and where it showed up taught her more than any definition on a board or a piece of paper could. This is what Amanda and I found to be true in our work with the Kingsbridge students for whom vocabulary drilling and memorization was often their original way of learning in their home and, of necessity, seemed the holy grail solution to the challenges they and their families faced in the United States. Speaking and listening in discussion was a huge part of learning in the class. As we have discussed previously, the opportunity to ask open-ended questions that seek no singular right answer is freeing for anxious speakers who must not only consider the concepts they wish to inquire about, but the language to express them. I began to see the habit of inquiry and open questioning of text in all forms deepen as the year progressed. The students grew more comfortable with allowing that they did not initially have to be certain about anything, simply to wonder. They were interested enough in what they were asking or saying to speak even if they lacked all the words they needed in English. Students worked through their questions or observations or asked a peer how to say something in English and repeated it. It took time, but eventually most students cared about what they were discussing, not if they could say it perfectly. My students loved inspirational quotes and I posted Socrates’ quote: “wonder leads to wisdom” on the wall with images of all the art into which students had inquired. As the weeks progressed, students grew comfortable unpacking

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symbols and metaphors through paintings and poetry. They began to see language as an ally, not the enemy. Free to write in any language they chose, many students still wished to write evocatively in English. This growing sense of words as tools to create, not weapons aimed at them, went a long way toward their enjoyment of the creative process. Students took turns voicing Lawrence’s captions and made notes about what they noticed in each painting. I found a full set of picture books reflecting the Migration Series, allowing individuals time to rest with Lawrence’s work before connecting with and selecting their panel to interpret for their own artwork, the Immigration Series. They looked for a “feeling” or connection to the image. They were not to copy it literally nor write a poem about the original. After our inquiry, the students were asked to use their connection to create a new panel in art class and write their poems in my English class. I would often pop into whichever art class was meeting during my preps or after school. The art teacher, Teresa Rogers, and I would discuss her work with the Black Odyssey and my work with Lawrence’s panels. It was her request to have the students embrace the collage work of Bearden to capture the images inspired by Lawrence. I observed her Black Odyssey lessons so that I could understand what my students understood. When I was not teaching, I sat in her classroom with students as they created and shared their stories or creative questions. Those were some of the most magical days I have spent in any school. The students connected to many panels, each one bringing life to their part of the “Immigration Series.” Several students chose the same panels but produced expressions of that image that reflected their varied immigration experiences. The viewing and studying Bearden’s Black Odyssey and as well as Lawrences’ Migration Series illustrated for them the power of Black artists retelling whitewashed history. The opportunity to show their stories inspired by Bearden and Lawrence created emotional pieces and having peer support and the creative community in which to create was key to the power of the Kingsbridge International High School Immigration Series. The numbered poems correspond to the numbers of the panels in Lawrence’s Migration Series (Fig. 6.2). Maria captures her version of the dream of the “golden land” that many students told me they fully expected to meet. She was inspired by Lawrence’s panel #40 which is captioned “The migrants arrived in great numbers.” It is the moment of looking ahead, seeing the destination.

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Fig. 6.2 Maria

A new place with better opportunities and happiness smells like a delicious sancocho

Like Maria, Roy explored the time after arriving in the “golden land.” The illustration below is Roy’s interpretation of Lawrence’s panel #33 whose caption read: “People who had not yet come North received letters from their relatives telling them of the better conditions that existed in the North.” Roy’s image transposes the letter into wishful time travel, one in which his present self is sending comfort and news to the scared, lonely boy Roy had so recently been. He chose to place his younger self standing small and alone in a new room clearly provided with toys and showing he was cared for, but the beginning of his poem shares an experience almost every student in the class felt deeply (Fig. 6.3). #33 By Roy Diaz Four years ago I arrived in a place where there were no colors anymore all around me was black and white.

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Fig. 6.3 Roy

Missing the fresh tropical air on my face Afraid of looking ahead unable to take a step forward. Leaving behind all I once knew, the memories I had made it saddened me.

After viewing and discussing the Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series slideshow, students were making their initial observations and selections working at their tables, some talking in pairs, some with their heads deep in the books, taking in the images by themselves. I had asked them to reflect on the images and to make notes about panels that spoke to them. I was listening to two students discussing the way the panel made one of them remember the sounds of and smells of sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen when Andy had jumped up, strode across the room, waving the open book in his hand in my direction, and loudly calling to me,

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“Ms. Sherman, Ms. Sherman, this is me!” He widened the opening of the book as we met in the middle of the room. His eyes were alight with excitement, an experience I had never had of him in a classroom. “This is me!” He insisted and pointed at panel #24 which depicted four small Black boys bent under the heavy weight of baskets of cotton. The captions read, “Child labor and a lack of education was one of the other reasons for people wishing to leave their homes.” Not quite getting it, I asked if his family were farmers. He responded, “No. This is me, like this. I worked in the fields every day and couldn’t go to school. I had to work for other people or my uncle.” Suddenly I saw how much I still didn’t see. I suggested to Andy that he start brainstorming words and images, and he sat right down and began doing just that. A first. Seeing him on task was not common and to see him so focused and eager was wonderful. He would look up occasionally to ask a tablemate a question or how to phrase something in English. He was determined to write the poem in English, despite being reminded he could use any of his words in any language. Andy’s Spanish was often spelled phonetically, and now I understood why. I will never forget the look on Andy’s face in that moment he sought me out to show me himself in the book. Here is Andy’s poem, written almost in one draft (Fig. 6.4). #24 By Andy Burgos Working since I was a child in my uncle’s fields. getting up when the sun rose and coming back when the sun was going down. My heart throbbed with sadness because I could not get an education like my friends I could not have the same opportunity as them. Tired of planting the field weeding the field carrying bananas in a bag bigger than me. bending hundreds of times every day to get potatoes feeling that my back is going to break walking in shoes covered in mud.

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Fig. 6.4 Andy

I went to school without books, both the school and I didn’t have any and only one pencil and a piece of paper, walking into my class with everybody looking at my broken shoes.

Because of Andy’s absences (still needing to work and provide his family money) and his foundational level struggles with reading and writing, I had never thought he cared much for school. His use of the “broken shoes” speaks to his sense of brokenness in a world of heavy labor with little opportunity. Before writing this poem, Andy might have felt like an invisible hyphenated American, but a reader experiencing his expression of the immigration experience would likely be able to truly “see” him. When we sat as he wrote, he described how his family had to save to buy the one pencil so he could go to school. I thought of the thousands of abandoned pencils in any given school on any given day in the United States and was grateful to Andy and his words. A reminder of how much I don’t know the stories of others, but how important it is to try. Ema, from Bangladesh, had a similar take from a different perspective. The panel also took her to a place in her mind and heart she could never

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Fig. 6.5 Ema

forget. She used her words and her art to elicit a sense of empathy as the image of a child so dark he can barely be seen goes to work. A young woman most would identify as marginalized, shares her awareness of her privilege (Fig. 6.5). #24 By Ema Begum As I go to school my friends watch me with my books in my hand. They never have had the opportunity to step on the school porch. While I carry my books, my friends carry tiffin to rice paddies to the person who is working there, instead of bringing books to school. Monday morning, I watch my neighbor carrying a massive fishing net holding it over his shoulder and his ten year old daughter following him

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wherever he goes with a small basket. While I carry my books and go to school waving my hand to say bye to them.

Brandon Molina worked on the following poem in class, but also on the Saturday morning of the SAT exams. He had been attending SAT/Regents exam tutoring for math and English during our Saturday school. That particular Saturday, he was scheduled to take the SAT, but overslept. Rather than go home, he showed up at my room at around 10:00 a.m. and stayed for the next two hours, working on the following poem, saying that he wanted to be there doing something valuable, rather than just sitting at home. He sat off at his own table while I worked with a group of students developing reading strategies. He shared the completed draft after the other students left, and told me that the inspiration for the piece came from reading The Little Prince to his cousin. He had selected panel #5, which had the caption: The Negroes were given free passage on the railroads which was paid back by Northern industry. It was an agreement that the people brought North on these railroads were to pay back their passage after they had received jobs.

The black train is running through the night with a light on the front of the train shining the way through the dark to the golden land up north. Brandon often felt his story was a bit different than his peers as his choice to immigrate was just that. A choice. He was not running from poverty or war or crime. Brandon had lost his parents and felt he needed a place to belong. He hoped for the opportunity to build a life of which his late parents would be proud. Much like the little prince, he was off on an adventure alone in the universe. He was traveling to new worlds to seek a dream, his homeland alive in heart like the Little Prince and adventurously creating his own story. #5 By Brandon Molina In the middle of the world in which I lived every time I awoke I felt like something was missing.

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It wasn’t my clothes, it wasn’t my room but little by little it consumed me…. I thought I had control over this fire inside me, the fire that burns all of the walls around me, just enough courage to go and follow my needs, the adventurous soul of a child playing hide and seek. I’m a brave prince who left his kingdom behind, and there is only one of my kind. You look and don’t understand me; the world is trying to transform me, I feel better trying not to understand some things, it’s better to stop and rule the kingdom. Not ashamed don’t try to test me I know… who … I am. I’m a brave prince who left his kingdom behind, and there is only one of my kind. All I ever wanted is to smile and to be happy before I die. Destiny I want to dance with you I need to tell you that I not scared of you. in this uncharted place. I took the opportunity Nothing pushed me, it was my choice. the ticket my chance to fly and not let the will of my mom and her hopes die.

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I am a brave prince who left his kingdom behind, and there is one of my kind.

When we first viewed Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in class, Fabilisa Valerio spent a significant period of time with book open in front of her, silently moving her eyes from the image of #15 on the left hand page to the image of #16 on the right hand page. These two images arguably are the most fraught, reflecting the grim reality of lynching upon the lives of Black people. The red clad bodies are hunched over, weighted by grief. In both #15 and #16, Lawrence placed the bodies in spaces that spoke to psychic and emotional pain that took life from those still living. In #15, a person of color hunched on a rock stares over an icy expanse while an empty noose remains nearby tied to a tree with the caption: “Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.” This was the panel to which funny, bright Fabilisa chose to respond. As I told them in September, I had a lot to learn. She taught me again how little even well intentioned teachers of privilege truly understand the traumas of separation and loss for most immigrants and refugee students who show up each day in our classrooms. In my experience, this also has shown itself to be true for those neoindigenous students who fill many urban classrooms. Fabilisa had layered losses and trauma that she chose to reveal through this work. Her image evokes agony and emptiness as her words let us hear her share what life is like for the child left behind (Fig. 6.6). #16 By Fabilisa Valerio For some of us it happens like this: The woman who caressed your hair before sleep is dying of cancer your mom leaves to this alien place where she has no job, but somehow “everything will be better” The feelings of distress

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Fig. 6.6 Fabilisa

creep up to peck my bones and settle in them like owls After my grandmother dies I can’t cry the realization falls on me like a fat, round rock to my small toe “Now what” Then my mom leaves again. My days ever since have been s l o w paced afternoons My body is uninhabited.

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Devoid of organs or bones, not even air in that space. I sit in between I’m hot and heavy I have flatlined voices are far a

thin

line

of

away

noise.

The reader can see Fabilisa’s play with spacing and structure to create and capture distance both geographic and emotional as she communicate the ineffible struggles and depth of emotions that filled her young world. She spaces and stretches out lines in order assist the reader to have to sit with or be dragged along by an overwhelming sense of loss, of emptiness, of time and space slowed down. Assad is the identical twin to Momadou whose Where I’m from was briefly excerpted in Chapter 5. While they were shockingly similar in appearance, they had different temperaments. Assad was quieter, less patriarchal in his interactions with classmates, more openly sensitive. He slowly grew into sharing his voice. Like his peers, what he chose to express about his immigration experience showed how his losses were hidden under his ready smile. He expressed his profound sense of loss around his mother. Assad included his little sister in the image, who remained behind with his mother when he, his brother, and his father came to America. Assad selected panel #30 whose caption read, “In every home people who had not gone North met and tried to decide if they should go North or not” (Fig. 6.7). #30 By Assad Akaria Every Friday morning my mother woke up with joy glistening in her eyes, her black hair bouncing with each step. I woke up to hear Salat the call for prayer. I woke with a smile running like a car to go pray.

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Fig. 6.7 Assad Whenever I did something wrong she pulled my ears made me do squats or whipped me with stick or a comb. My mother loves cooking “watché” in silence, nothing bothers her. It tastes like cinnamon and caramel corn. I love seeing my mother dress up I love the way she dresses like a good Muslim her hijab on showing her beautiful smile showing others love treating everyone the same way as her child. Now

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I feel lonely like an abandoned house, a world with no birds, rank odor with no visible source I learn not to cry so much keeping silent praying to God.

Assad’s use of the simile of “like an abandoned house” layers the sense of loss of sense of home through “house.” He layers it with sensory deprivation or assault, adding to the sense he has nowhere he feels safe, even from the omnipresent “rank odor with no visible source.” Like so many of his peers, Assad’s final lines show the humanity and struggle of young immigrants and refugees, separated from all they love learning to “manage” losses as they continue with living, finding strength where they can. In Assaud’s case, he turned to his faith present in his life in both lands. Brandon Molina would return to the dreams his late mother had for him. Others spoke to their families’ sacrifices so that they would have the opportunity to become doctors or college graduates, options not available to them in their homelands. Immigrants and refugees all sacrifice and many of these young people must learn to live in a world in which they “learn not to cry so much.” Lawrence created panel #30 as an image of family gathered at a wooden table bowed down by the decisions they are forced to make to survive and the impact on all the members. What he saw when viewing the panel was the discussions that led to the separation of loved ones between two continents. He was home for a few moments and happily shared stories about his mother while creating it. The inquiry into images and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as an aligned study of Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey with their art teacher, brought to life the dates and names they were learning in US history their senior year. Students came to see that what they were experiencing even within their communities was entrenched in the enslavement of entire peoples by European colonial and American governments. Most had not internalized the racism of the United States although there were young men of color who seemed to understand all too well the America in which they now lived. These words and images by Harlen resonate still resonate clearly, especially when seen in light of the ongoing marches against oppression and murder of those who are BIPOC. Harlen Almonte, a Dominican teen, loved history and had earlier in the year wondered if Kahlo was making references to the Spanish American

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Fig. 6.8 Harlan

war in the painting that opened our inquiry work. He watched documentaries and read books that dove into historical events globally or in the US. His inspiration for his panel of the Immigration Series, came from Lawrence’s panel #22. It is an image of three Black men handcuffed together with their backs to the viewer and their heads hanging down. The caption reads, “Another of the social causes of the migrants’ leaving was that at times they did not feel safe, or it was not the best thing to be found on the streets late at night. They were arrested on the slightest provocation.” Whereas Lawrence was commenting on the Jim Crow South, Harlen’s words reflect the not so “golden world” of the North, that he and many immigrants of color found waiting for them (Fig. 6.8). #22 By Harlen Almonte It was an afternoon, around 6:00 pm when the sun goes to sleep, like a shark captures fish,

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a lion hunts his prey, There I was running down street followed by the men in uniform, feeling like a delinquent or even worse an assassin. I don’t know why I’m running from them, I don’t know why they want to catch me, Did I do something wrong? My eyes focused only on rough hands that grabbed me like a dog that has bitten a little girl and tried to escape, My head went down on the street dirt grinding into my ears and mouth, they put me in that dark room like a wild animal. What had I done?

Harlen’s questions, “Did I do something wrong? What had I done?” reveals the all too common experience of an immigrant or refugee who out of necessity often moves into the poorest neighborhoods with the greatest rate of police oppression of BIPOC. A word, a question, a look, and the color of his skin are enough to get in trouble. Harlen equates his neighborhood to a hunting ground filled with predators and prey, the image of a little girl in the jaws of a dog, capturing this teenager’s sense of helplessness and innocence around what is happening. He had been standing with some boys outside school when the police arrived and began questioning one of them as to why they were still hanging around school. The police told them to leave and one boy told them they couldn’t make them go. As one officer grew aggressive with a friend who said he had every right to be there, the other boys ran and Harlen, who had no idea what was happening, followed them. Being a group of Black or Brown boys on the street is often perceived as a crime itself and running away confirms it in the eyes of the system. Harlen’s expression

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of himself as prey and not even knowing why he is running captures the omnipresent trauma that is a particular crisis for Black or Brown young men who arrive in the United States of America. Fear and confusion are the price for simply being on the streets and stores of their “golden land.” For those without a command of English, interactions with authorities deepen the terror and confusion that simply living life now involves. The next poem includes another experience of random violence and danger that often faces immigrants and refugees seeking sanctuary from the same in their homelands. Many immigrants and refugees endure “multiple stressful life experiences such as family dislocation memories of violence, survivor guilt, poverty, unemployment, and humiliating relationships with service providers” (Behnia 2003). It is yet another trauma with which young immigrants and refugees as well as BIPOC youth face as they work to survive and thrive in America. Being able to process and share their experience is powerful both for the author and those who can see beyond media sound bites. Loraines connected strongly with image #46 not for its caption, but for what she saw in it that symbolically reflected her experience. Lawrence’s panel was of a narrow set of worn wooden stair representing the squalid, overcrowded living conditions of worker’s quarters provided for Black employees newly arrived to work for them. There is a claustrophobic sense to the stairs intensified by what could be either an open door looking at the moon or a closed door with a yellow doorknob. Loraines’ experience is not dissimilar from many of her peers. She worked full time after school and had English class at 8:20 in the morning. She tried hard to be on time, but sometimes arrived in the latter part of the class, sometimes not at all. However, she discovered she had a love of creative, expressive writing and always kept on top of her assignments. For a portion of the winter, it was so cold in those early am hours we wore our coats as the students worked. One day, Loraines informed me she had worked until after midnight at the store the evening before. Yet there she was, bent over her laptop with an intensity and focus that caught my eye at that early hour. I have a vivid memory of sitting with her in the early morning dark of winter, our breath still slightly visible as we exhaled, wrapped in our winter coats. She was distressed. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say in English. I just really want this to be right and I can only feel it in Spanish.” I realized she must have missed or been late to the class discussions on the power of using the “just right words in whatever language” they appeared. Upon hearing she could use Spanish, she

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Fig. 6.9 Loraines

exhaled, her relief apparent. Loraines quickly wrote the phrase that had to capture her greatest moment of despair as her heart knew to express it. She wanted to share her story to help others understand they were not alone and, as she titled the poem, Nobody Knows the Stories of Others. As a community, the students selected this title for their completed poetry book as it spoke to everything they had been waiting and wanting to say (Fig. 6.9). #46 Nobody Knows The Stories of Others By Loraines Hernandez In 2008 my family and I moved to the Sunshine State and there began our problems. I was 11 years old when my uncle shouted

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at my mother “I don’t want you to stay by my side. You and your family need to get out of my house.” That was the first time I felt scared when we went to a MOTEL Where there were small holes with cockroaches sooooo large that they can imagine eating rats. My father took us to a shelter but it just was the next step in our horror story. In the shelter my family and I slept with others families that smelled like garbage with dirty clothes that made me cry and bad breath that was multiplied by six hair uncombed but also with mental problems.

I felt confundia al estar en un lugar no común para mi, ni ningún miembro de mi familia que antes no había pensado estar.1

There were always arguments for no reason Fighting with each other, hurting themselves physically and emotionally. After I came and a woman accuse me of being a thief The owner of the ring that wasn’t real shaking her hands from side to side in my face yelling, repeating the same sentence: You are a thief and I don’t want you here 1 Confused to be in a place where I never thought my family and I would be.

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You are a thief and I don’t want you here I felt frustrated I just was a young girl of 11 years old that was the next step Then my father found a job things that were necessary to survive: food, clothes, a healthy place to live without any families that interrupt us In that moment we saw the light at the end of the tunnel we were at peace and it was perfect after so many problems. I felt hopeful.

The bolding is all her own. She has created her own mini poem within her larger one, highlighting her journey from the bottom of the stairs to where she could see the light ahead. Her voice is clear in all the writing. The young girl who had always had a home was now faced with the verbal assaults and threats of a mentally ill woman as she was housed in a shelter with adults. She looked down, almost ashamed as she shared that everyone stole in there and she had things taken while she slept and that her parents kept belongings under their blankets all night. Her “golden country” was anything but that. Her use of hyperbole and personification when describing the cockroaches as thinking about eating rats highlights the extremity of her disorientation and disgust, living in the world ruled by creatures equated with dirt and refuse. Her trauma was apparent when she talked about the mentally ill woman at the shelter and the bolded repetition of her words resonated both literally and with the sense that Loraines is hearing America speak to her. Like Harlen, she doesn’t understand why she is in trouble and being yelled at, but it is happening. Her final lines, so simple, are an unintentional rebuke to a world that dehumanizes immigrants and stereotypes them as lazy and greedy. Hope is born because her father found work (and later she did). Hell is when there is none.

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Nelson Marte was from the Dominican Republic and selected Lawrence’s panel #44 which shows a table with meat and bread on it and carries the caption: “Living conditions were better in the North.” He explained to me that his image was of him on his first day in America. He went out that first day in the Bronx and ate ice cream. His father, although college educated, had difficulty making ends meet and even though they struggled, Nelson had grown up surrounded by boys whose families couldn’t feed them regularly. Nelson’s father had sacrificed time and a life near with loved ones to take a job in America that offered his family an escape Nelson realized his playmates could not dare hope of. The images and sounds of the hungry boys with whom he sometimes played, who could not pay for the stability of education in a private school as they grew and roamed the streets more and more hit Nelson full in the face as he walked on the street in the Bronx his first morning. A street that to many, especially White, Americans would look less than inviting involved a sense of guilt at the bounty available to him. Bounty these other boys would never know simply for not having been born into his family. Guilt and survivor’s guilt are all too common experiences that immigrants and refugees who escape systemic violence and poverty must add to their list of challenges. As Nelson alludes, an escape is never fully made when one flees poverty and violence (Fig. 6.10). #44 Roads of Different Rhythms by Nelson Marte The streets were full of children whose stomachs sounded like drums. children loitered on the muddy streets, the rhythm of their empty stomachs drifting in the wind. Every night I pondered in my gigantic bed lives full of misery and hopelessness. In the morning, walking towards school babies cried and mothers’ faces were full of sorrow. The yearning was so enormous that families disintegrated like sugar in water. That day I woke up realizing that the rhythm was changing: guitar solos arose and rock music started to play as I boarded the plane to take me to

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Fig. 6.10 Nelson

the music festival of many different rhythms. In this new land, my thoughts battled with each other. I wondered if the place where I was born was ever going to sound like these streets.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect to this work in the one that cannot be experienced on a page. Kingsbridge had students from all over the world and they were all immigrants and refugees, but they still stayed close to those who shared their culture and language. Because there were so many students from Spanish-speaking countries, it took me a while to notice that students either clustered with peers from their culture or a similar one, or set themselves off a bit from their own culture, preferring to work independently, if possible. As the year progressed and students shared their writing, they connected to the words of those from other cultures and communities, either through lauded poets like Langston Hughes or

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through the feedback work with their peers. Often the choice to pair with peer was based on shared language, but as English was the common tongue, I encouraged students to do revision with a peer with whom they did not usually work, unless new to the country. I did have students who had been in the United States between a month and six months. Those students traveled with a mentor peer who could support their English, while helping them brainstorm in whatever language was applicable to finding the right way to express their connection to Lawrence’s images. Students began to see language, and even English as an ally rather than the enemy. Ibrahim reflected that the most enjoyable part of writing poetry was revising because the more I revised, the more I stumbled upon new words that were better than what I already used.

In the writing workshop, students had conversations in which they discovered their mutual sense of feeling alienated and being unable to communicate. For many, these were the first poems they had ever written in any language yet their voices were richly compelling, growing community and conversation across cultures. New relationships were built on a shared experience or emotion that connected them deeply, beyond culture, gender, religion, or ethnicity.

Works Cited Almonte, H. (2015). #22 (unpublished poem and collage). Akaria, A. (2015). #30 (unpublished poem and collage). Begum, E. (2015). #24 (unpublished poem and collage). Behnia, B. (2003). Refugees’ convoy of social support. International Journal of Mental Health, 32(4), 6–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207411.2003.114 4959. Burgos, A. (2015). #24 (unpublished poem and collage). Cunningham, V. (2007). Why ekphrasis? Classical Philology, 102(1), 57–71. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1086/521132. Diaz, R. (2015). #33 (unpublished poem and collage). Hernandez, L. (2015). Nobody knows the stories of others (unpublished poem and collage). Marte, N. (2015). Roads of different rhythms (unpublished poem and collage). Miller, G. A., & Gildea, P. M. (1987). How children learn words. Scientific American, 257, 94–99.

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Molina, B. (2015). #5 (unpublished poem). Nagy, W. E., & Herman, P. A. (1985). Incidental vs. instructional approaches to increasing reading vocabulary. Educational Perspectives, 23, 16–21. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Valerio, F. (2015). #16 (unpublished poem and collage). Weir, B. (1991). Making wordsmiths. Reading Horizons, 32, 7–19.

CHAPTER 7

Making Claims and Making Change: Creative Responses to the 1619 Project

For the past several years I have taught the Capstone Seminar, the final methods course in our graduate program, in which students develop a curriculum unit for their actual or hypothetical middle or high school English students. In keeping with the experiential, inquiry-based approach, the course is designed around a unit of study including works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. Often there might be theater, music, or dance performances as part of the unit as well. Inquiry is an essential process in achieving an aesthetic experience, which Donovan (2004) describes as “an exchange of information between artwork and perceiver…with the generation of meaning as an end result” (p. 132). This process requires that the learner take a stance of questioning and alertness, a willingness to take the time to look more deeply and to see what is to be seen. To engage in the inquiry process is to understand what it is to “awaken to the ways in which the arts are grasped by human consciousness” (Greene 1980, p. 317). This awakening is the means by which art becomes a force for transformation, opening the channels through which individuals are changed by an encounter with a text. Poetry and the various arts have long been essential tools for social change. They are persuasive. They inspire emotional responses. They help us imagine other possible worlds while we make sense of this one. Working in the English Language Arts (ELA), the art forms we turn to most frequently lean heavily on language and narrative. Especially when © The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_7

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Fig. 7.1 Word cloud

interpreting and responding to the visual or performing arts, we respond in writing. Since words are the currency of ELA, we make sure that students are exposed to a broad repertoire of writing genres and styles. To teach students persuasive writing “without teaching them about narrative and poetry is like teaching someone to swim using only one arm” (Christensen 2015). Writing poetry can utilize many of the same rhetorical skills and strategies as persuasive writing. We also engage in poetic inquiry as both the means for exploring our responses to art and the mode of expression of those responses. Poetry as a means of inquiry helps learners explore and express the connection between themselves and the materials and ideas they are studying, and brings their voices into a public conversation they might otherwise not feel that they are part of. For Monica Prendergast, “Developing a poetic voice prepares scholars to discover and communicate findings in multidimensional, penetrating, and more accessible ways” (2009, p. xxiv). The experience of writing poetry helps learners at all levels access and express their thoughts, and strengthens their writing in all modalities (Fig. 7.1).

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Fully grasping a work of art often requires curiosity, patience, and a willingness to challenge oneself to extend one’s perceptions beyond the comfortable and familiar. In many of her lectures and writing, Greene described the work involved in embracing and fully apprehending a painting or a symphony as “lending a work of art your life.” This notion suggests a reciprocal relationship between work of art and audience as Greene writes: “In some fashion, as one attends, one lends the work one’s life. Or one brings it into the world through a sometimes mysterious interpretive act in a space between oneself and the stage or the wall or the text” (2001, p. 128).

Antiracism Teaching: The 1619 Project In response to the seemingly endless wave of violence toward black lives and black bodies, I have felt a compelling need to do what I can to address that crisis by offering a model curriculum unit for education students that allows them to engage with a range of texts that speak to the issue of race in America. In August of 2019, The New York Times created a special edition of their magazine section devoted to examining the lasting effects of slavery on aspects of American life including housing, education, health care, labor, law enforcement, politics, the interstate highway system, almost every sector imaginable. It was called the 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the first slaves arriving in Point Comfort, Virginia. The project was massive, as was its impact. Educators everywhere began talking about how to best study this incredible treasure trove of journalism and art. It became immediately clear that no longer could anyone credibly claim to have thoroughly studied American history without understanding the lasting effects of slavery, including the societal and legislative efforts to keep its effects alive even to this day. The work argues that the year 1619, more than 1776, should be considered the real beginning of the American experiment. The more I learned from reading the materials I had chosen to teach, the more committed I became to an actively antiracist pedagogy. I recognized that as a white educator teaching this material—especially to a very diverse student body—I was swimming in somewhat perilous waters. I worried that if my teaching were too didactic, I would risk “Whitesplaining,” defined by the Urban Dictionary as “When a white person tells a person of color how to respond to or view a topic, usually when

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discussing race relations or inequality” (https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Whitesplaining). It felt important to tread lightly, because no matter how much anyone might have thought they knew about African American history, the 1619 Project is full of stunning revelations about how deeply every industry and every branch of government is to some degree organized around maintaining white supremacy. The pedagogy of inquiry allows me to teach alongside students, rather than lecture. An inquiry-based approach meant that I invite students to enter into a dialogue with the material on their own terms, and acknowledge that each of their individual inquiries takes place in the context of a community. This means that there are moments when a question or discussion arises where I will turn it over to the whole class rather than answer it, positioning myself as one voice of many in the room, rather than the sole authority. Thus, when in the midst of our discussion of the 1619 Project one student (a white man in his twenties) asked, “Aren’t you indoctrinating us?” I began answering that what they were reading was history, not propaganda, but then I stopped myself and asked the class to weigh in on his question. His classmates addressed the question seriously, whereas I was frankly poised to offer a more judgmental, dismissive answer. They turned the question back to him, asking what made the 1619 Project, as opposed to other material seem like indoctrination to him. One after another, students affirmed that they felt that all of the texts we were studying felt necessary, and represented voices that they had not heard much from at all in their education. “I don’t know about any of you,” said one student, “but I needed to learn about this stuff. I had no idea.” Finally, I said that I understood the impulse to have a “fair and balanced” curriculum that represented both sides and mostly stayed in the middle. I asked him to consider that if teaching about the legacy of grievous harm perpetrated against enslaved Africans and their descendants was at one extreme end of a spectrum of thought, the other extreme would have to be white supremacy or at the very least, complete denial of the effects of racism. If that were the case, what would be an acceptable mid-point for him between those two perspectives? What texts would he recommend as a counterpoint to the 1619 Project? When I first decided to take this subject on, I began with Isabel Wilkerson’s breathtaking account of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. The book is both expansive and meticulously researched, telling

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the epic story through the lives of three individuals, their stories interwoven with historical information and the anecdotes from the migration stories of a broad range of well-known figures including former first lady Michelle Obama, jazz legend Miles Davis, basketball star Bill Russell, and many others. We read this book in conjunction with studying Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, allowing us to access this sweeping narrative through both words and pictures. With each successive semester I experimented with adding new texts, choosing from a vast assortment of rich material. These texts were always placed in conversation with each other, and we invited students to express themselves in whatever creative modality suited their response to the texts we were studying. With each new text I would introduce at least one new method of responding. Sometimes students would pick up on specific strategies and choose to use them in lieu of informal responses. For example, I asked students simply to write a reflection on The Warmth of Other Suns. Jessica chose to write her reflection in the form of a blackout poem which she then transcribed. In her reflection, Jessica refers to “Rhiannon Giddens’ song” as well. That song is “At the Purchaser’s Option,” which I will elaborate upon later. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration The Stirrings of Discontent (Black-out Poetry) Contrived from: EDITORIAL, The Macon Telegraph September 1916: “Everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses. Cleveland, to Pittsburgh, to Chicago and Indianapolis, And while our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us, we go about our affairs as usual.” “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” said the white supremacy candidate in the 1903 Mississippi governor’s race. He saw no reason for blacks to go to school. The only effect of education is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook. Newspapers were giving black violence top billing the most breathless outrage reserved for any rumor of black male indiscretion toward a white woman,

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all but guaranteeing a lynching. Newspapers alerted readers to the time and placeSpectacles that usually went on for hours, Black men and women tortured and mutilated, then hanged or burned alive. The crowd chanted, “Burn, Burn, Burn.” While one father holding his son on his shoulders wanted to make sure his toddler saw it, saying, “My son can’t learn too young”. All Blacks lived with the reality that no black individual was completely safe from l y n c h i n g

Reflection While reading The Warmth of Other Suns, I was motivated to write a blackout poem contrived from the text itself. As I read through it, and started writing this poem, I kept thinking about how the same propaganda has played out throughout our history and still haunts us to this very day. I can’t help but think of Rhiannon Giddens’ song and video to echo this haunting. In her video, Giddens is sitting in a corn field, and as she sings, a human ghostly figure jumps back and forth through the fields where that very soul once broke themselves to line the pockets of the rich white men who owned them. Not much has changed. I truly believe that as a country, as a culture, as a world society, we will continue to be haunted by our past if we continuously deny it like many people in our society do today. The political climate along with propaganda continues to persuade the ignorant. We see this play out over and over again in our history, propaganda is successful when utilized to sway the ignorant masses. (Auletta 2019)

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The whole of the 1619 Project is not only emotionally challenging, it can be somewhat overwhelming to take in that sheer amount of information. If we read nothing else in a semester, we probably would have approached it piece by piece, but there were many other texts to engage with, and I wanted to give each its proper weight. One of the major assignments for the course involved students choosing an article from the 1619 Project and creating an artistic response that, to them, captured the essence of what that article was about, and then writing a plan for how they might structure the creative work they had done into an assignment that would work for their middle or high school students. Before diving in, I wanted to give students an example of what an artistic response to journalistic or historical artifacts might look like. I started off the course with two music videos from the Macarthur Award winning musician Rhiannon Giddens’ album called Freedom Highway, which consists of songs capturing various moments in African American history. The particular song to which Jessica refers is called “At the Purchaser’s Option” and was inspired by a newspaper advertisement for the sale of an enslaved African American woman who was the mother of a nine-month-old baby who could be had “at the purchaser’s option,” euphemistically referencing the reality that this baby could be ripped away from her at any moment. In the video, Giddens sits on a chair in the middle of a road surrounded by cornfields while ghostly black silhouettes dance back and forth across the road. According to an NPR review of the album Freedom Highway. “Giddens speaks for the truly silenced: slaves; people murdered during the 1960s struggle for civil rights; young men felled by police bullets in city streets today” (Powers 2017). We also viewed a video of Giddens’ song “Julie,” which Powers describes as: the chilling centerpiece of Freedom Highway, Giddens stages a dialogue between a domestic slave and her owner as the Union army sets upon a Southern plantation. Slowly, the song reveals that the love the white mistress professes for her maid is fatally compromised: she has sold Julie’s children to another family. “When I’m leavin’ here, I’m leavin’ hell,” Giddens intones, putting brutal stress on the word, showing the origins of white Americans’ delusion about black oppression. The propulsive banjo and bass in the arrangement pegs this song as a murder ballad: one chronicling the murder of hope.

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Our class discussion of the two videos centered on the aesthetic choices Giddens made in telling these stories, speaking in the voice of her characters to make the narrative clear, and to convey the full force of the emotional realities she was relating to her audience. Prior to embarking on this creative interpretation assignment, we had written blackout poems in class using the text of the Dred Scott decision. The 1619 Project also contains an example of blackout poetry written on the text of the Fugitive Slave Act. Blackout poetry can be a powerful technique for political poetry, allowing the writer to take a stance by claiming and altering a text to change or reveal its meaning. Students were enthusiastic about the technique, which dates back to the eighteenth century and is similar to the Dadaists’ cut up poetry approach. By giving students a text to work with, we eliminate the paralysis of confronting the blank page. Anyone can find patterns of language and ideas on a printed page and work with those patterns to bring forth a subtext, which is what blackout poetry is so good at doing. I explained the option to engage with the article of their choosing through blackout poetry by framing it as an example of differentiated learning, in which a teacher offers alternative assessments to meet the needs of a range of different learners. For anyone who felt intimidated by the idea of having to initiate a creative project from whole cloth, they could start with their chosen text and continue to interact with it, never having to leave behind the security of the preexisting text, while still being able to develop their voice by choosing words to shape a meaning. As one student reflected: Being given the autonomy to respond to the 1619 Project was a great idea. I do appreciate that we were shown one technique or method to respond to a reading. Providing us with the blackout poem example provided students with the opportunity to have a backup plan in case they were not creative. As a teacher, I think that this is great because it meets the needs of all students and will allow students who feel less creative to feel comfortable.

There were some students who were reluctant to depart from their familiar forms of lesson plans and PowerPoint presentations, but even with those I would point out to them the ways in which they had been “accidentally creative” in their thinking. Kourtney immediately made a connection to an article about the prison-industrial complex by Bryan Stevenson (2019) and one called “Is Slavery’s Legacy in the Power Dynamic of Sports?” by Kurt Streeter (2019).

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She synthesized the ideas in these articles with a moment that occurred in the middle school where she taught. Inquiring about a boy in her class, she had been told that the boy’s mother had died. While this news was being conveyed to Kourtney, another adult mouthed silently “She was a crackhead.” Whether that was to explain why the boy’s mother had died, or whether it was meant to devalue her as a person, it led Kourtney to write this poem, informed by the ideas in those two articles in addition to the work of a spoken word artist, as she explains in her reflection. A Galaxy of Sons We govern him. My student, whose mother is a dead-crack addict, is taught many things Except how to govern his pain. Taught to man up, go to class, sit up, pay attention— Taught to raise his hand for permission to speak, use the bathroom, leave the classroom But never given permission to cry for his dead crackhead mother. Is it a wonder why the boy wears glazed over eyes Crystallized by tears untaught? Does he know his power is greater than what he holds in his fists? Greater than the broken language that comes from his lips? Lips taut too tight to say, “Ms, Fullard, I’m off this week because my dead-crackhead mother’s birthday is rising up, but she isn’t.” “I’m off because I don’t know what to do with myself, let alone this notebook that you demand I write my Do-Now in.” “What am I going to Do Now with these feelings no one has given me permission or access to?” “So instead of writing in this book, I’m going to write on my untaught hands that don’t know how to raise and ask for help they really need.”

In the first half of the poem, her narrator explains what is happening in the life of her student who is the subject of the poem. After relating

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the circumstances of his life, and how the rule-bound institutional structure of school leaves him no space for mourning, she moves into a set of questions, beginning with “Is it a wonder,” but in the second half of the poem, the boy (whose name we do not learn) gets to speak for himself, addressing the teacher-narrator of the poem directly. The reflection Kourtney writes reads almost like a prose poem, further probing the themes of her original poem: The 1619 Project articles that inspired this poem were part and parcel of several inspirations. A spoken-word artist, by the name of Preston Perry, has a poem that analyzes the suppressed emotions of black men. The theme of his poem was the same theme I saw in the aforementioned articles. Throughout history, black men have been emasculated through police brutality, an unfair justice system, and the entertainment industry. However, this emasculation occurs early. I’ve heard how it has happened to my father. I’ve seen it happen to my friends. I see it happening to my students. As a black woman, this frightens and upsets me. The thought in the back of my mind is, “what will happen to my future son(s)?” My God-given goal and mission as a teacher is to advocate for my boys (who I see as my sons). I am gentle with them-allowing them space to exist as they are, not as society expects them to be. My sons have voices. My sons have universes existing within themselves that are more vast than any galaxy. And they deserve to shine brightly. (Fullard 2019)

In addition to responding artistically to the 1619 Project, the class was required to deliver a research presentation about a topic they had learned about from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (described in Chapter 6), and finally to create a unit of study for middle or high school students. While this was an English methods course, there was one social studies student in the class. The rhythm, structure, and content of the social studies classroom differ considerably from the English classroom. I have

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always enjoyed having social studies students in my classes because the blending of the two subjects into the humanities offers a richer perspective, focusing on the historical for one and the literary for the other. It is unfortunate that the social studies as a subject is, according to Daniel Stuckart, “atomized” and “suffers from a testing regime that favors memorization” (2018, p. xvi). In my experience social studies teachers often wish they had the luxury of spending time studying an idea or a historical period in depth, but there is a relentless grind of material to cover, leading to what I have heard one teacher call “drive-by teaching.” At times when social studies teachers have participated in inquiry-based learning through the arts classes, they have been excited to see ways that they could use the arts to engage students and teach through multisensory experiences, instead of words alone. When Elliott designed his unit plan inspired by the 1619 Project, he thought of creating an inquiry into sites in New York City that had significance in African American history. Here is his initial proposal, in which he has chosen a work of public art as a lens through which to introduce his subject (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3). It is my belief that in order to gain a true meaning or understanding of an era, you must take a look at the arts dedicated to that era. The art piece whether it be a painting, poem, photograph, or sculpture often shines light on different perspectives. As I focus on the impact of slavery in NYC I decided to choose a sculpture of Harriet Tubman in Harlem on 122nd street. The sculpture of Harriet Tubman also known as “Swing Low” was designed by Alison Saar to represent the “unstoppable force” that Tubman was in freeing slaves and bettering the lives of many. The Triangle which the sculpture is situated on has Tubman facing south representing her many travels back down south to help the runaway slaves find freedom in the north. The landscaping of the memorial has plants native to New York and Maryland, Maryland being the home state of Tubman. What I find most interesting about the sculpture are the faces and footprints on Tubman’s skirt. I’m sure the faces represent those she helped find freedom, and the footprints represent the on-foot journey from north to south. The skirt also has a “slit” that somewhat resembles the front skirt of a locomotive, representing the front cabin where a train conductor is positioned. That little detail had much thought given into it just to show that Tubman was the conductor of the Underground Railroad.

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Fig. 7.2 Tubman 1 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by Elliott Guzman)

One particular controversy I’d like to mention was the positioning of the sculpture and the direction in which it was facing. Many people felt that Tubman should be facing north rather than south as north was where she led her people toward freedom. The belief was so strong it gained popularity and received a petition and over 1000 signatures to the sculptor. In the end, it remained facing south and the artist Alison Saar explained that the sculpture was meant to face south as it signified the strength and courage Tubman displayed to return back to the south to bring freedom to others.

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Fig. 7.3 Tubman 2 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by Elliott Guzman)

An individual looking at this piece can gain an abundance of information just by looking at the sculpture and questioning what it is they are seeing. All the information I presented in this writing came from just observing the sculpture. Observing the art also creates discussion which helps the viewer own the message or the significance the sculpture is trying to portray. Overall, for any topic, the arts are a great way to solidify an understanding of an era that was before our time.

Elliott’s enthusiasm for locating historical sites around the city continued, as he continued research that would allow him to create a narrative around the various roles New York has played during and after slavery and in the years since.

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Students were very motivated by the social justice aspect of this course, excited to have materials and projects that they could bring to their students. Along with a detailed plan of how to teach to the 1619 Project, Ambar wrote in her reflection: The 1619 Project is a near-perfect curricular tool for educators like me, who seek to make learning relevant, historical, and overall engaging. I would love to incorporate it somehow into my curriculum. I believe it fits in perfectly with the scope and sequence for the entire year, and helps create a smooth transition into the second half of the academic course of study—which focuses on social justice. The project weaves fiction and nonfiction so seamlessly, that I think I would want my students to do a combination of the similar piece, instead of the policy brief that is listed. My students last year struggled with completing that assignment. This was largely due to the fact that there weren’t many exemplars that are studentfriendly which I could give to them as “inspiration.” Like I mentioned in class, I could definitely use most of the pieces in the project to help inform the unit plan—giving students a choice of what to read. Because these pieces are non-fiction/informational texts, it still could be incorporated into an already-existing learning sequence. The 1619 project includes poetry and journalistic writing that we can look at and analyze together. I envision my students recreating their favorite piece/assigned articles, synthesizing information into their own “mini-zines” of informational writing on a topic of their choice.

It was gratifying and affirming to see teacher candidates so inspired by their own creative adventures with this rich material that it helped them see new possibilities for their teaching. Working creatively across multiple modes and genres helps students to develop a deeper understanding of ideas and the many ways in which they are connected to form a worldview. When students create their own works of art in the process of inquiry, they come to understand how each artistic choice represents a way of expressing some idea that is larger than the specifics of any of our individual stories. The process of art making is itself an inquiry. Hands-on engagement allows us to work through how aesthetic choices and literary elements can convey narratives that provide the metaphorical frameworks through which works of art and literature helps us to understand the world.

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Works Cited Auletta, J. (2019). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration, the stirrings of discontent (unpublished poem and reflection). Christensen, L. (2015). Rhythm and resistance: Teaching poetry for social justice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Donovan, L. (2004). Unlocking the aesthetic experience: Exploring the arts in the classroom. In G. Diaz & M. McKenna (Eds.), Teaching for aesthetic experience: The art of learning. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Fullard, K. (2019). A galaxy of sons (unpublished poem and reflection). Giddens, R. (2017). At the purchaser’s option. On Freedom Highway. Nonesuch Records. Giddens, R. (2017). Julie. On Freedom Highway. Nonesuch Records. Greene, M. (1980, May). Aesthetics and the experience of the arts: Towards transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Powers, A. (2017, February 16). Review of Rhiannon Giddens’ Freedom Highway. Retrieved February 16, 2017, from https://www.npr.org/2017/ 02/16/515002345/first-listen-rhiannon-giddens-freedom-highway. Prendergast, M. (2009). Introduction: The phenomena of poetry in research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishing. Stevenson, B. (2019, August 19). Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment: Both still define our criminal justice system. In N. Hannah-Jones (Ed.), The New York Times 1619 Project. Streeter, K. (2019, August 19). Is slavery’s legacy in the power dynamic of sports? In N. Hannah-Jones (Ed.), The New York Times 1619 Project. Stuckart, D. (2018). Turning pragmatism into practice: A vision for social studies teachers. Lahnam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. The Urban Dictionary. Retrieved June 12, 2020, from https://www.urbandict ionary.com/define.php?term=Whitesplaining. Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration. New York, NY: Random House.

CHAPTER 8

Point of View: Stepping Inside the Story

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© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_8

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Singing America and the Underground Railroad (Amanda Gulla) Iron Age people understood the importance of perspective on a grand scale (Fig. 8.1). The Chalk Horse of Uffington is a massive 360-footlong horse carved in chalk into a hillside in Oxfordshire, England. It is so large that you cannot see it if you are standing right on top of it. In order to see the horse, you have to walk to the neighboring hillside. Visiting there when I was in graduate school, I had the experience of wandering haplessly while looking for the great white carved horse until I looked down and saw the thick white chalk lines underneath my feet. I laughed, realizing immediately that I was standing in the middle of a metaphor. So it is when we choose a point of view for our writing—what you see depends upon where you are standing. The perspective of the character telling a story is essential to a narrative. To Kill a Mockingbird would have been a very different book if Calpurnia had been the narrator rather than Scout. There have been quite a few examples of such perspective-shifting retellings, such as Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, telling the story of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved African-American characters, and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, written in the voice of Rochester’s wife Antoinette Cosway, a character who has a looming presence but does not have a voice in Jane Eyre. Often works in this genre serve to allow silenced and marginalized characters to reclaim and center their stories. Poet and essayist Martin Espada writes of the poet’s responsibility to speak for those whose voices are seldom heard. In an essay in the journal Southword, he writes: Speaking of the unspoken places means speaking of the people who live and die in those places. These are people and places condemned to silence, and so they become the provinces of poetry. The poet must speak, or enable other voices to speak through the poems. (2009)

Espada’s own poetry is all about lifting up the voices of those who are seldom heard. In his poem “Borofels ” (1993) Sonia and her mother ride the subway from Brooklyn, where “the mice were crazy with courage.” They were looking for “borofels,” and meeting puzzled stares until one comprehending soul finally responded, “You want the Board of Health.” Suddenly the communication barrier has been broken through, and

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“They could yell now/like banned poets/back from exile.” This is what poetry can do, with such an economy of language we truly see Sonia and her mother and can rejoice with them over finally being understood. Like Rhiannon Giddens does with her album Freedom Highway, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith in her book Wade in the Water (2018) makes poems of historical documents such as the letters and testimonials of African-Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and accounts of recent immigrants. Her poem “The United States Welcomes You” is written in the voice of someone conducting an interrogation that is tinged with absurdity because the interrogator blurts out the subtext of the interview with lines such as: What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies Drink up all the light?

In contemporary parlance we might call this “saying the quiet part out loud.” Wanting the students to understand poetry’s long history within social justice movements, I designed this seminar in accordance with Audre Lorde’s belief in poetry as: the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight. (1977, p. 37)

I suspected that if I could help teacher candidates who previously had an uncomfortable relationship with poetry to consider Lorde’s perspective on the role of poetry, they might be more interested in engaging their students in such revelations, using poetry as a vehicle to find their own voices and discover the voices of others with whom they might not be familiar.

The Trilogy of Singing America Poems In the same Studies in Poetry class in which we had studied Romare Bearden, we read Tracy K. Smith’s poem at the beginning of a unit on poems about identity, America, and Americans. One of the ideas we explored in this class was the question of how poets speak to one another when they revisit the same theme from different perspectives. A famous

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example of this is Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing ” (1860). For its time, the poem is expansive and inclusive. It rings of Whitman’s optimistic swagger, as we can imagine him walking around streets and boatyards watching the men and women of the workaday world, admiring the simple pleasure they take singing their ruggedly individualistic songs in the midst of their gloriously ordinary lives: Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

The students in this class, almost all black or Latino, reacted warily to the poem. One commented that it sounded like the white gentry regarding the working-class masses as the backdrop to his privileged life. “The people he sees are just scenery to him,” says a student. Others, especially some of the women, remarked that the end stanza about the “party of robust fellows” felt more menacing than picturesque, as their experiences of walking past parties of robust young fellows had sometimes not ended well. I offered some contextual information about Whitman, his fearlessly gay poems, and his volunteering as a nurse in the Civil War. That led to some interest in him as a man, but in the case of this poem, most had trouble getting past all of that swagger. This was not surprising, because for all of his charm, Whitman does write like a man who owns the world with which he is in love—at least he does in this poem. What read in the nineteenth century like a celebration of the common working man and woman could easily be read as tinged with condescension from a twenty-first-century perspective. To continue the conversation among poets singing about America, we read Langston Hughes’ “I, Too” (1926). Most of the students were familiar with the poem, but many did not know that it was a response to Whitman. The tone of Hughes’ poem differs from Whitman’s as does its structure. Whitman’s lines are long, and he delights in his rule-defying structure, almost like ordinary speech but with a cheerfully galloping cadence. Hughes’ lines are tight-lipped and coiled. His first line “I, too sing America” is set off by itself with enough white space on the page to allow the reader to hear the steely pause. Like many of Hughes’ poems, it is spare and direct, with short lines. While Whitman swings his arms and strides with abandon, Hughes is quietly constrained. Despite the

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simmering undertone, it too is optimistic. In the beginning of the poem he describes the present reality, while announcing his insistence that no matter how he may be perceived, he belongs to the family of Americans. He makes his entrance into the reader’s consciousness by stating: “I am the darker brother.” In contrast to Whitman’s blithely striding into the center of the party, Hughes offers the stark reality of his circumstances: “They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes.” As the poem moves forward into the bright future that Hughes paints as he laughs and grows stronger, he lets the reader know that he fully expects to gain his place among those who are valued, appreciated, and considered “beautiful.” Whitman is ostensibly invisible in his poem. There is an “I,” but only to serve as an omniscient narrator. The first person point of view is a neutral pair of ears, taking in the robust, joyous songs of America and amplifying them for us to hear. In this confident neutrality, Whitman projects a happy sense of belonging. In talking about America singing, though, he is talking about what he observes and admires, and perhaps his longing for those robust young fellows. The subject of “I, Too” is ostensibly himself. But in telling us about himself, the pain of being relegated to the kitchen and his defiant confidence that he will overcome this humiliation, it is clear that the source of his confidence is just as much a belief in America’s capacity to grow and change as it is a belief in his own ability to overcome the effects of racism. America will change because of his strength, and then, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed.” He ends the poem after another pause, then proclaims, “I, too am America.” Whitman, of course, does not need to tell us that he is America. Just as Hughes needed to assert his belonging, Whitman’s was never in doubt, and this is what the students understand and respond to. We rounded out the trilogy with Julia Alvarez’s “I, Too Sing América” (2002) a celebration of her Dominican-American identity and by extension, of the broader Latinx community who make up the “sancocho of inglés con español.” Alvarez’s translanguaging carries a subversive thrill as her poem contains a buoyant energy, the blended English and Spanish words dance rhythmically as she takes us “up the spine of the Mississippi” and to the “great plain face of Canada.” Like Hughes, there is a sense that she knows she will not be given a place at the table unless she demands it.

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Ay sí, it’s my turn to oh say what I see, I’m going to sing America! with all América inside me

And here the students observe the work of the accent mark to sing “America” and all of the sweeping vastness that suggests, as she contains the multitudes represented by “América.” We discussed this trilogy of poems as part of the tradition begun by Whitman and taken up by Hughes, and then the students wrote their own “I, Too Sing America” poems, highlighting whatever American identity or relationship to America that felt important for them to write about. Here are several examples. In the first, Joanna, like Julia Alvarez, uses the technique of translanguaging. Her first stanza rejects the stereotypes many associate with Latinx identity, while she goes on to celebrate her achievements, the use of “con mi” juxtaposed with English suggesting the “Spanglish” that is a seamless blend of both languages into a rich sancocho. Yo Tambien I, too not the maid not the janitor not the gardener

I, too with my brown skin know of Shakespeare, Whitman, And Poe.

I, too con mi high school diploma con mi Bachelors con mi Masters.

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Yo tambien … Latina. Yo tambien. Soy America. (Guerrero 2019)

Ramata also weaves her family’s native language into an autobiographical poem that encapsulates the familiar stories of immigrant families striving for success. When asked about the language in the poem, she replied that it was “Mandingo/Bambara (same thing). It’s not a written language. I tried my best to write what I wanted to express”

I Too, Am the American Dream I too, am the American dream holding the dreams of my mother in my heart The sweat and aches she endured Twelve hours of work a day… minimum wage Cooking, cleaning, and getting us ready Then twelve hours of work, again.

I too, am the American dream Forced to grab the opportunities put forth “Yi chu ta ka taka locolsola Ne te bagala, cou ilia kanake fouye” you must be better than us must have more than us

I too, am the American dream Grabbing what opportunity that was given to me Six hours and fifty minutes in school Hearing the words of my mother in its repetition Seeing the sweat turn into blood So, that I too, can be the American dream.

“But, mommy ilia sege binabma” I cherish the opportunities you gave me because I too, am the American dream. (Cisse 2019)

In this next example of student poetry, Skylar writes of his very specific corner of America: it is an area of downtown Manhattan consisting of

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just a few blocks, but with worldwide significance as the site of the Stonewall Rebellions that ignited the LGBTQ rights movement. His text is densely packed with colorful words, “Aggressively infused,” and “roars with vibrant colors.” There are also specific political references, not only to Stonewall, but the line “reclaim our time” can be read as a reference to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a much beloved champion of social justice.

Below 14th Street I, too, sing Lower Manhattan. Particularly, I, too, hear the village sing— Well, actually, this village roars Roars with vibrant colors, ambition and pride Aggressively infused with alcohol, Tina and lies From Stonewall to the Westside pier This is the space we can live in without any fear Rain, snow, sleet or shine Here, we collectively come together to reclaim our time Prancing down Christopher Street to West 4 Pumping the beat; vogue down to the floor We will not be shunned and our voices demand to be heard Faggot is not our name, just another derogatory word. (Houston 2019)

The final two lines are a self-assured declaration, insisting that, like Hughes, nobody will dare tell Skylar and his friends to eat in the kitchen. They are claiming this street as their own, just like Whitman’s party of robust young fellows from a century and a half before. Miriam’s poem seems to speak directly to Langston Hughes as she also speaks to “America.”

I, Too Sang America Black, a color associated with nothing positive so you place me in the same category. I tried to paint a different picture for you but my voice went unheard You color coded your laws And I stopped humming to your tunes I did not betray you! We betrayed each other! But you have already left the kitchen to join… them at the dining room.

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Where I once Sang America with you When you forgive me, please, Let me know when I can sing again too. (Sintim 2019)

As Miriam wrote in her reflection: I would have to say my favorite day in your class was when we spoke about “I Too, Sing America”. Who would have known unfelt anger would rise and allow me to formulate a piece that had little words but brought on a hundred thoughts? That is what your class does to me. Make me think of what next I could say because I see how powerful my words are.

The Underground Railroad In the curriculum capstone project course in which we studied the 1619 Project, we also read Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad (2016). This book employs the element of magical realism as it imagines the underground railroad to be an actual railroad with elaborately constructed stations. Structures and settings are important in this novel. They tell the reader what is important to the characters who build, use, or occupy these spaces. Spaces designed by whites for the purpose of inflicting pain and terror on black people are elaborately and lovingly constructed, but so are those spaces and devices that are essential to liberation. When Cora escapes with Caesar, the first railroad station at which they arrive is described as “springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus” (p. 67). The station is an engineering and aesthetic masterpiece. When Cora asks “Who built it?” the station master replies, “Who builds anything on this country?” (p. 67). That line became a rich topic for class discussion, reminding us of Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during which she said “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” With a single line of prose, Whitehead’s magical realism allowed him to drive home the tremendous realization that much of our country was built by enslaved people. There were two assessments required in response to this reading. One was an analytical essay in response to this question:

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How does Colson Whitehead use literary devices such as fantasy or magical realism, foreshadowing, and point of view in the novel The Underground Railroad to create a narrative that depicts the world of a person escaping from slavery?

The second assignment was similar to the freeform creative response to the 1619 Project, but a bit more structured and involved the metacognitive move of asking them to think simultaneously as teachers and as learners: Using any combination of words, images, and/or technology you choose, explore one of the following: Either a particular character’s perspective, a relationship between two characters, or one of the settings in the novel. You may use any art form including narrative, poetry, dialogue, visual art, multimedia, etc., but it should be your artistic interpretation of the text and subtext (what is being said or shown and what is not being said or shown but is implied, what do you think this character or setting might represent, etc.) ALSO write a couple of paragraphs on how you would frame this assignment for your students.

In the beginning chapters, Cora, a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, is ostracized as a “stray.” Other slaves resent the tiny vegetable plot she has inherited from her mother Mabel, who escaped the plantation when Cora was small. Cora fought her peers for ownership of that sole possession. Eventually she was relegated to the Hob, the living quarters to which they “banished the wretched” (p. 15). Whitehead’s depiction of the brutal violence to which enslaved people were subjected is unsparing. In class discussions, students noted the relish with which cruelty and violence were perpetrated. Whitehead’s characters are studies in untreated trauma. In an interview with the Guardian he notes: Everyone is going to be fighting for the one extra bite of food in the morning, fighting for the small piece of property. To me, that makes sense; if you put people together who’ve been raped and tortured, that’s how they would act. (2017)

In class discussions, students noted that Cora’s character seemed emotionally stunted and undeveloped, which led us into a discussion about how people are affected by living in environments where there was a complete lack of safety or nurturing. That Cora would have difficulty forming relationships was not surprising to many of the teachers in the room who

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taught students living in abusive conditions. Treasan Martindale (2019) chose this idea as the focus of her creative response to the novel. She introduces her poem with an explanation of the psychological condition she is focusing on, then she presents a poem making her case for the “crab mentality” including specific textual references. Her rhythmic structure almost mirrors the sound of a train, but is also reminiscent of the school yard jumprope rhymes that have their roots in the cotton fields: Crab Mentality Crab Mentality also known as crabs in a bucket is a rationale best described by the phrase, “if I can’t have it, neither can you.” This metaphor stems from the instinctual behavior of crabs who are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could escape from the bucket, its efforts are dashed by the others. This sabotaging of the other crabs ensure that the entire group remains trapped.

Crabs in a bucket, tether upon tether Many could escape if they all worked together. A light skin in the house slyly informs the suppressors Because unlike his dark-skinned brothers, he faces no oppressor? No scalding sun to bake his back No picking cotton and constant lack So, he thinks he has it better Not knowing that his chains run deeper than those in the field Selling his brethren to lap at the crumbs from the white man’s meal.

Crabs in a bucket, tether upon tether Many could escape if they all worked together. Snitch on the n**** doing better than you Steal her plot of land and housing too (reference to Cora and Blake)

Yesterday the runaways were returned with the help of her friends (Reference to Barry and Charlotte) pg 78) Who told slave owners the ins and out of the bends They carefully mapped out which paths to take They diligently referenced which roads to stake

Crabs in a bucket, tether upon tether Many could escape if they all worked together. (Martindale 2019)

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Following the poem, Treasan lays out her strategy for how she would frame the assignment for her middle school students. Framing the Assignment for Students Students are required to create a six stanza aabb poem about a character, a conflict or a theme present in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The poem must incorporate 1 simile and 1 metaphor or personification. Prior to assigning the poem I will need to unpack the following skills: • Literary devices • poem structure • Students will be allowed to analyze and annotate themes, places of conflict in the novel and literary devices. Meaning Behind the Poem In Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, we follow two runaways by the name of Cora and Cesar. It isn’t long before we find out that their slave masters are not the only ones they need to hide from. At the beginning of the novel Cesar and Cora are wary to even talk about their plans of escape within earshot of their own people. Afraid that an informer may be among them, in Georgia we learn that there are freemen who tend to inform on their own. The crab in a bucket is a metaphor for the people of the time who informed the white owners of a person trying to escape enslavement. Turning black people against one another was a tactic that had implications in the years to come. From the paper bag test1 (Urban Dictionary 2019) to the black freeman versus black slave man all the way to the wealthy black versus poor black. We still see the implications of slavery today. (Martindale 2019)

Treasan has thought of everything her students might need to be successful in completing the assignment as she has laid it out, giving clear instructions that mirror her example and explaining the thinking that led to her poem while also leaving plenty of room for students’ own interpretations. Antonio was one of the few students in the class who was not a Teaching Fellow. A rock musician turned English teacher, he taught in an all-male Catholic high school. In crafting his own creative response to 1 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brown%20paper%20bag%20test. Definition of the Paper Bag test.

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the book, he chose to write and perform a song narrating the escape itself, which he performed on acoustic guitar backed by a driving drumbeat that lent a sense of urgency to the song. Cora (Keep Your Voice Down) I. He said Keep your voice down. I’ve been asking around There’s a 3:13 to freedom, you’ll come with me and we’ll head underground

And she said, Keep your voice down. They’re tryin’ to kill you everyday Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, why make it easier by runnin’ away? Keep your voice down, keep your voice down

So, meet me at the station You’ll hear the rhythmic engine sound With your heart beat’s syncopation And the path will lead you ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round… Shhhhh! Keep your voice down.

II. Oh, Mama Oh, mother May-Bell I fell asleep upon your breast and when I woke I was alone here in this hell. How could you leave me? When I was only just a babe, There is no sympathy for youth, and no humanity when you are born a slave.

Keep your voice down, keep your voice down. So, meet me at the station You’ll hear the rhythmic engine sound With your heart beat’s syncopation And the path will lead you ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round… Keep your voice down, keep your… (beat). (Fariello 2019)

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In this framing, Antonio thinks through his process for designing an assignment that is consistent with the expectations and practices of his school, drawing upon a toolbox of techniques for presenting their work.

Assignment Framing As a teacher in a technology-heavy school, creative responses to major texts and/or units often include digital media in some form or another; from submitting a poem to a digital format to creating a full blown video project, technology is ever present in my students’ repertoire. As a class my students and I have engaged in creating video essays, audio/visual podcasts, “Where I’m From” poems with accompanying video and recitation, “I’ve got a secret” postcards (created digitally and otherwise), digital slideshows, one-pagers, posters, etc. Drawing on this (their) prior knowledge, I often impose a creative constraint in the sense that I specify what project the whole class will do, for example, the whole class will create their own one-pager on Animal Farm, or, each group will present an audio visual slideshow on a given character from The Canterbury Tales. While I firmly believed that giving each student the same assignment was the fairest way to assess their skill in literary analysis, I often struggled with if it was the best way to assess their creativity. While I still believe no student should be coloring a picture instead of writing an essay or composing a research paper, I have loosened a bit on offering choice when a creative response is the goal. I have experienced students struggle with particular elements of assignments such as, not being able to draw, being anxious public speakers, or even lacking skill in technological manipulation, among others. These struggles can work to stifle their creativity as they will work to improve upon what they aren’t good at and lose sight of what the primary focus was to begin with, thus neglecting what they are good at. In seeking to foster creativity, it is logical to provide students with a choice in what medium or format they wish to work. They may draw on the pool of their prior knowledge, having completed several different creative responses, or they may add their own brand of creativity to the mix. Having been given the freedom to choose my own creative voice to respond to text has afforded me the opportunity to be truly creative and has minimized the anxiety in “getting it right.” Affording this opportunity to my students will allow them the freedom to express their creativity through a chosen medium while minimizing the stress of getting

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the format correct, or how many pages, how long, etc. My creative assignment for this novel would be worded as follows: Having read The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, construct a creative response in any, or a combination of, mode(s). Draw on our previous assignments such as, one-pagers, video poems, six word stories (with visuals), poetry, etc. for inspiration. You may choose to focus on characterization, symbolism, setting, tone, etc. as the focal point of your response. Feel free to “hone in” on a particular moment or detail or to “zoom out” and approach it from a broader perspective. (Fariello 2019)

As both Treasan and Antonio have demonstrated here, a teacher’s own creative responses can enrich and inform the assignments they create for their own students. Antonio’s reflection on his process of writing the song and backward engineering his own creative experience into an assignment for his students demonstrates the challenge that many teachers face, to balance creative engagement with the demand that school assignments must be “rigorous.” Rather than insist upon the notion that if an assignment is expressive, engaging, or enjoyable, it must not be rigorous, and it is possible to achieve both. Furthermore, by allowing students to engage their imaginations through multiple modalities, we are providing opportunities for students who struggle with reading to deepen their understanding of literary analysis. As Greene (2001) writes: “We have to break, as much as we can, with the technical, the measurable, with the fearful idea of effectiveness and efficiency” (pp. 62–63). In this next section, Molly demonstrates through her own classroom practice how assignments that allow for nontraditional arts-based responses to text can be structured to demand sophisticated literary analysis.

Literary Analysis Through Performance: Molly Sherman When I taught eighth grade in the South Bronx, I included many inquirybased arts activities as formative and summative assessments. I chose to do this partially due to the Teacher’s College approach which encouraged such approaches and partially due to my experiences teaching 11th and 12th graders in a village secondary school in Kenya and creating curriculum for a diverse afterschool program.

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My previous experience with students for whom standardized testing played a life-altering role had been teaching at a secondary school originally funded and built by the village community in Kenya. I was made aware on my first days there of the importance of the national exam students would take at the end of their senior year. It would determine if they graduated and received the certificate that opened job opportunities that could support families running out of land and resources. I did not “teach to the test” as I was too new a teacher to understand how to do that. I never saw a copy of the exam until my students took a national mock exam near the end of their senior year. I did know that entire families had sacrificed to educate each of the students in the classroom and that the outcome of the national exam was critical to the survival and success of more than the student in the seat. It didn’t matter how ludicrous I thought the British style exams were, my students needed to pass. They needed the certificate of graduation to find the jobs that were vital as family land was divided into smaller and smaller parcels each generation. As a result of this awareness, when planning, I always circled back to asking myself what would students need to be able to understand, what would they need to be able to do to pass, even with limited language or reading stamina. I began my experience there in tin roofed, concrete block rooms that held fifty to sixty students per class. My resources were a pocked wall painted black and piles of faded blue books. Without knowing the work of James Britton, I began asking students to engage in the expressive response work of “writing to learn.” This form of writing emphasizes “the powerful ways in which language organizes experience” (Britton 1982). Through response writing, students reflect on and recognize what they knew. They shared and commented on one another’s expression developing an understanding of voice and style while internalizing information. I was a teacher with limited classroom experience in any form, faced with classes of 50+ students who had grown up in rural Kenya and whose way of learning was based on rote memorization and a great deal of copying due to lack of textbooks. To this day I am still a bit amazed at how well it prepared these students for the stamina needed and on-demand writing of the KSCE (Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education). When I learned I was to teach Romeo and Juliet and that it would be part of the KSCE, I got creative. “Reading” Elizabethan English would not do the trick for students barely managing to decode modern English. I decided we would act it out so the story and characters could live in

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their bodies. Having been around for over a year and being part of an eclectic and chatty staff room, I was picking up cultural and community information. Once I explained that they could look at Romeo as a member of their own Kipsigis tribe and Juliet as a member of the neighboring Kikuyu tribe, they understood the dynamic between the families. Students brought their own courting rituals into the discussions and made connections to community members when discussing characters. The discussion that ensued after that analogy opened up the play for students who struggled to read in any language. Once we got into the premise of the play, true to their teenage hormones, they loved acting out the Elizabethan words that would be, for some, a fourth language to process. They overacted the balcony scene and all fifty plus students in each class gamely put their hands to their cheeks and then read the line “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand. That I might touch that cheek!” (Act II, Scene 2) to understand how deeply and sensorily Romeo was obsessed with his new love. And thank goodness for that treasure trove of faded blue books. Students wrote point-of-view letters to and from characters as well as writing to Shakespeare himself. I had them write a short scene with dialogue in iambic pentameter. I led discussion on the craft, and they led discussion into character (they were big fans of Mercutio), plot, language and the themes of the play. We did all of this because I wanted to make sure that the characters of the play lived in their minds and in their voices. I had not yet learned these were pedagogical moves, but they seemed the best way to bring the students into the very foreign world of the text. Students were engaging with the reading and the writing using what Vygotsky defines as inner speech. Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech—it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. (1934)

To this day, I see Romeo and Juliet meeting not at a ball, but at the Agricultural Fair in Kericho, a big town that borders both tribal communities. In the end, every single student passed the KSCE English section for the first time in the history of the school. I know it is because they created

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and lived their understanding of Shakespeare and other authors we read and debated. I believe the lived knowledge of the play acquired through performance made that happen. Students were able to write analytically in a third language (English) about a fourth language (Elizabethan English) because they had participated in an embodied inquiry into the play. They could then process discoveries around theme and characterization through discourse and low-stakes prompt, connection, and response writing (Elbow 1997). These shared observations and experiences made room for academic discourse that highlighted opportunities for students to learn from one another’s content related analysis and expertise without having to focus first and foremost on expression in standardized English. My first job as an employee of the New York City Department of Education was teaching 8th grade in the South Bronx. Having learned what seemed to work from my students in Spain and Kenya as well as from reading Peter Elbow, Louise Rosenblatt and having studied with Ruth Vinz, I set students to low-stakes response writing as well as three reading responses a week that asked them to make text to self, text to text and/or text to world connections. These were to be drawn from their independent reading and include a sentence that summarized the connection they were making between the text and another source clearly. They would include a line from the original independent reading text from which they made their connection. Then students wrote a detailed connection to their own experiences, some literary/fictional character/plot or to a larger figure/historical or modern event. Twice a week they could respond with a drawing, a poem, a point-of-view diary entry, or letter. I had titled a wall Lit Art on which the class displayed a representation of a character, a theme, a motif or a moment from the text. More than once, students obtained a better understanding of a character, plot, or theme by studying their peers’ work on the Lit Art wall. We took time every week to share connections from the reading that were sometimes surprising, evocative, or advanced the thinking into an area of the text. Some of the personal connections ended up bringing to life denser texts, such as Black Boy or Fahrenheit 451, for students who struggled with reading these books. It was through these insightful, enriching moments of pair, small group discourse that I began to see that my desire to support students in their quest for the strong academic skills to do well on the potentially life altering exams was not enough.

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Christopher Emdin addresses how this experience plays out in American schools for neoindigenous students: In schools, urban youth are expected to leave their day-to-day experience and emotions at the door and assimilate into the culture of schools. This process of personal repression is in itself traumatic and directly impacts what happens in the classroom. (p. 23)

As a white woman, now teaching eighth graders in the South Bronx, I was still learning how to navigate my “invisible backpack of privilege” (Mcintosh 2019). I had selected Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy as the main class text for my 8th graders without fully considering its density and linguistic requirements. It seemed important to engage in the themes and experiences detailed in Wright’s autobiographical work, especially in a school of over a thousand students in which no child identified as white, but I failed to consider how to support student access and stamina needs in my zeal for “rigor.” Wright is a sophisticated writer and his language was a reach for many of my students. That said, it was a wonderful learning experience for all, most of all me because I utilized many of the inquiry into learning through the arts strategies I had used in Kenya with Romeo and Juliet. And students built strong relationships with the text, themes, and characters, once I stopped trying to “be smart” and let the students lead the way. We opened the study of the text with a preview of the first pages. I read the opening through Wright’s setting of the fire and then stopped, then asked them what they thought. The students had a lot to say and wanted to know what happened next. I handed out the books, sure that engagement would occur. The next day, after the first discussion of the homework assigned reading, I saw a future in which I would tell what happened as students listened and then had discussions. Reading wasn’t done by more than the hardiest of students, and I decided to revise the unit to allow for two months for students to process the text and to be given class time to the work of inquiry which required rereading. Thankfully, I had the backing of a principal who believed in the work I was doing. The arts can help to make visible narrow representations of identity, health, or normalcy that reflect the concerns and values of privileged or dominant groups, implicitly devaluing all others. Students had class time in which to engage with low-stakes close reading responses so that those

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who had noisy homes or responsibilities outside school could catch up or keep up while annotating. To encourage revisiting the text and building of a cohesive vision, class time was allotted at the end of each chapter for the creation of an ongoing project: the creation of “photo albums.” Students could write as Richard in the first person or create a thematic album selecting images in each chapter that expressed aspects of a theme in the book. Students selected a moment from the chapter that stood out to them and in either collage, drawing, or digital art created an image to literally or figuratively capture the moment as well as creating a caption or selecting text from the book which the image referenced. The students were engaged not only in revisiting the text as a builder of content and a deepening of understanding, they were engaging in the recursive experience. It takes time, stamina, and patience as well as the support of peers and the teacher. If a teacher wants students to deeply and authentically engage in inquiry, they should create the space for that work to occur, especially if serving in areas with high poverty as homes are often crowded and students take on childcare and financial responsibilities, even in middle school. The work the students produced was specific and evocative. In almost every album, each chapter’s image was detailed, not rushed. I made sure the class had the time and materials necessary to deepen their thinking and work on the project. One student created a full cover of the newspaper Richard sold, replete with articles promoting readable KKK doctrines crumpled next to an image of “Richard” sitting on the curb with his head hung in shame as a coin rolled from his pocket. Another student attached white lace curtains to a construction paper window and created black flames reaching up toward the white material. The symbolism was intentional and insightful. The final assessment for the book was a scripted talk show. Students were required to work in groups, write the script, and assign roles as a performer or a director. Arthur Applebee (1984) explains that writing involves a variety of recursively operating subprocesses (e.g., planning, monitoring, drafting, revising, editing) rather than a linear sequence. These students as individuals and in the creative community engaged in this process to create their scripts. Some groups elected to stage a talk show with a rambunctious format and others selected a more traditional format in which the host seeks a balanced inquiry into a topic. The students had to create a focus topic for the show and could have characters interact who had never actually met in the book to discuss key themes,

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relationships, and plot elements. The depth of understanding students displayed through extension and improvisation was stunning. In order to produce the final assessment project, students would have casually and formally discussed, debated, and analyzed theme, characterization, imagery, plot, setting, syntax, and all manner of figurative writing (not always easy for middle school readers) in order to produce an accurate and evidence supported response to their inquiry. Students’ performances were taped for each show and the rest acted as enthusiastic audience members. We held an Emmy awards show and students voted awards to favorite actors, best script, and the Wright award to the talk show they felt best represented the themes of the book. There were several different shows in each class, so I will highlight one with common themes to the rest. The group who titled their script Unchained Memories had their host introduce the focus of the show as “growing up in the Jim Crow South.” The guests were Richard Wright, his friend and coworker Griggs and the white man (who they named Kurt) who had offered Richard a ride then hit him with a bottle, leaving more than a literal scar. As the first guest, Richard, detailed his (text based) run-ins with the “white system” in the South. When asked what his life might be like if he hadn’t moved up north, Richard responded “Griggs tried to tell me to think before I speak, but I just couldn’t do it. If I had stayed, I’d be swimming with the fishes for sure.” This use of the colloquial “swimming with the fishes” demonstrates the students’ work to keep the characters’ language authentic to the time and diction of the text while also including modern terms like racist to allow a real-time conversation between Richard and “Kurt.” In the story the white man has been drinking, so “Kurt” appears with a beer in hand. He is asked if he considers himself racist. “I ain’t a racist,” he responds looking directly at Richard, “you just take my authority the wrong way. I was raised this way, to be on top of blacks.” The host asks Kurt if, after hearing Richard’s experiences, he would change what he had done. The students have Kurt take a swig of beer before responding. “I would probably have hit him harder. He shook his head. Y’all don’t understand. I was too nice. Look at him, he is like a monkey without a tail.” He laughs. “They ain’t the same. Honestly, we just hate ‘em like bears hate porcupines.” The students fully create the representation of and enact what in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere describes as the perception by oppressors of the “unjustifiable ingratitude” (p. 59) of the “generous gestures of the dominant class” (p. 59). Elaborating on this,

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Friere observes “the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they make them into inanimate ‘things.’” The students clearly understood this through their inquiry work. Not surprisingly, students who did similar work with Night in later years wrote similar discourse between Germans and their Jewish neighbors. Griggs is then introduced and he and Richard shake hands as Kurt tips the beer in his direction in greeting. The host asks, “Tell us a little bit about growing up as a Black man in the south.” He responds, “I’ve stolen and gone to desperate measures to survive in the Jim Crow South. I’ve felt like a slave following orders.” When asked by the host why he didn’t leave for the north he responds, “I don’t really know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I just never did. I have my family here. I grew up here and I want to die here.” There is more to this script and the others, some looking through a feminist lens as well as a critical race one. One cast included H.L. Mencken. One included the Jewish shopkeeper from Richard’s childhood, but they all demonstrated how Wright expressed the dehumanization of African Americans which created, in the words of Wright’s original title for the book, an existential and psychic American Hunger for Black Americans; one that continues today and existed outside the boundaries of the Jim Crow South. A few years later, one of my eighth grade students informed the class that if Hitler had gone to art school there would have been no Holocaust. I waited for dissent, but there was none. I asked who agreed and many hands rose. It appeared that in their social studies class, the curriculum pacing meant students were memorizing many dates of battles within wars but spent one day on Adolf Hitler and his actions and apparently art school was a focus of discussion. In response, I shifted my curriculum and selected Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night as a class text. We began reading aloud and it wasn’t long before students were deeply engaged. Students wrote found poetry and created blackout poems using Nazi propaganda fiction and nonfiction materials and the propaganda of the United States against its own citizens of Japanese heritage. While reading the text, students engaged in tableaus of scenes in the book and wrote found poetry. Yet throughout the experience, the tween bravado of “I would just shoot them and run away” still rose up in response to the ongoing oppression. I thought it might help to be active participants in the exploration of Weisel’s experience. I taped off the space of the boxcar and had the entire

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class stand in it. A few volunteer students with whom I had prepared the work, read aloud the passage in which the insane woman screams of the fire awaiting them. A note for such work: give trigger warnings. Exempt any student who asks to avoid violence, abuse, racism, sexual assault and don’t question it. In this case, I knew that fire would be a trigger as one student had lost a family member in a fire a few years earlier. As the students pushed against one another and the volunteer readers grew more agitated, there was a palpable stress until the students were able to step outside the taped lines that we had placed on the floor to indicate the size of a boxcar. Then they wrote. Then we talked. Then they wrote new found poetry from that chapter. They moved on to blackout poetry. (I call the combination of the two forms “lost and found” poetry.) They added color and art to the images which were powerful and evoked the fear and darkness of the time. In their writing and their scripts, they made connections to the racism they experienced in their lives and the prejudices they themselves enacted. Many said they hadn’t really understood why people didn’t fight back until we began voicing those who had experienced the genocide. After reading Night, students wrote a monologue that told the story of a real person who survived or was murdered by the Nazi genocide or, if they chose, inquire into a perpetrator of the Holocaust. The material came from the United States Holocaust Museum website. Kayla2 started with the simple phrase “They gave us two hours.” This came from her reading outside resources and the experiences of Elie Weisel in Night. Brian began his with, “Mama was serving the soup when we heard the shouting down the hall.” Other students ended monologues with broken friendships detailed lovingly throughout the monologue. Some spoke of the train journeys. Others of dreams. Others of detailed plans to survive, that we knew as an audience could not come to pass. Some students imagined broken romances, some vividly described “their” last moments with beloved family members. A few wrote from the perspective of survivors and those monologues often echoed Weisel’s assertion that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference” (Sanoff 1986). Several students told me they wrote their analysis essays on Night during the state English exams in high school as they had retained such strong sensory memories of the characters, moments and themes of the book. I heard that from

2 Pseudonym.

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other students related to other books with which we had done extensive inquiry through the arts work. Those middle schoolers referenced above and their peers in the years to come, scored in the top growth percentile by the New York City Department of Education’s own measures for many years. They consistently scored well, in fact, until I was given a scripted curriculum by a wellintentioned new principal who deeply believed that scripted curriculums and test prep focused teaching was the rigorous work students in areas of poverty needed. It is not and never was what any thinking student should call education. It is a mode of systemic quantification that disheartens, degrades, and discards those that fail to conform. Bloom’s taxonomy was revised in 2001 to more accurately define the hierarchy of cognitive work involved in learning. Evaluation was lowered a notch and replaced synthesis which was transformed into the verb “create”. Create did not land at the top of the taxonomy by accident. It is the work of building the future. Of imagination concretized. The work of inquiry into learning through the arts asks that all of the levels of Bloom’s be encountered in the process of learning, but most of the time in the process is spent in the more rigorous cognitive work near the top of the taxonomy. Students’ work culminates in the creation of something new and original from ongoing inquiry. That skill and thought process are indeed rigorous and what we hope students experience and take with them into the real world.

Works Cited Alvarez, J. (2002). I, too sing America. Writers on America: 15 reflections US Department of State. Applebee, A. (1984). Writing and reasoning. Review of Educational Research, 54, 577–596. Britton, J. (1982). Writing to learn and learning to write. In G. Pradl (Ed.), Prospect and retrospect: Selected essays of James Britton. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton Cook Publishers. Brockes, E. (2017). Colson Whitehead: “To deal with this subject with the gravity it deserved was scary”. Retrieved June 16, 2020, from https://www.thegua rdian.com/books/2017/jul/07/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad. Cisse, R. (2019). I, too, am the American dream (unpublished poem). Elbow, P. (1997). High stakes and low stakes in assigning and responding to writing. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1997 (69), 5–13.

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Emdin, C. (2017). For White folks who teach in the hood—And the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Espada, M. (1993). Borofels in City of Coughing and Dead Radiators. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Espada, M. (2009). I’ve known rivers: Speaking of the unspoken places in poetry in Southword: New writing from Ireland. Issue 17. Retrieved June 15, 2020, from https://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/17/Reviews/esp ada_essay.html. Fariello, A. (2019). Cora (Keep your voice down) and reflection (unpublished song and essay). Freire, P., Ramos, M. B., Macedo, D. P., & Shor, I. (2015). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Guerrero, J. (2019). Yo tambien (unpublished poem). Houston, S. (2019). Below 14th street (unpublished poem). Hughes, L. (1926). I, Too. Retrieved June 15, 2020. https://www.poetryfounda tion.org/poems/47558/i-too. Lorde, A. (1977). Sister outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Martindale, T. (2019). Crab mentality and reflection (unpublished poem and essay). Mcintosh, P. (2019). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack (1989) 1. In On privilege, fraudulence, and teaching as learning (pp. 29–34). https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781351133791-4. Randall, A. (2001). The wind done gone. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. London: England Penguin Books. Sanoff, A. (1986, October 27). One must not forget. US News & World Report (interview). Sintim, M. (2019). I, too, sang America (unpublished poem and reflection). Smith, T. K. (2018). Wade in the water. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Thomas, E., & Mulvey, A. (2008). Using the arts in teaching and learning. Journal of Health Psychology, 13(2), 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/135 9105307086703. Urban Dictionary. (2019). Paper Bag Test definition. Retrieved June 18, 2020, from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brown%20p aper%20bag%20test. Vygotsky, L. (1934). Thought, and language. MIT Press, 1962. Whitehead, C. (2016). The underground railroad. New York, NY: Doubleday Whitman, W. (1860). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46480/ihear-america-singing.

CHAPTER 9

Teaching as Transaction: Building Community Through Shared Inquiry

A critical component of our shared inquiries is that participants make personal connections with that material we study. The notion that artists and writers explore the same essential questions that have meaning in their own lives as students do central is to our process. When we have presented the work of both our adolescent and adult students at conferences or in professional development contexts, one of the most frequently asked questions is how we managed to persuade students to be vulnerable in their writing. It is not a question of persuasion, but of creating a space in which art, literature, and historical documents become the conduits through which students engage with ideas that are meaningful. That engagement often leads to deeply personal connections with the materials, as a painting depicting loss and grieving might lead a student to write about her own experience of loss and grieving. In this chapter, we will go into some depth about how the process of shared inquiry builds a powerfully supportive community in which students bond over ideas and mutual admiration for each other’s work and create new thinking. Students and educators broaden perspectives and celebrate or challenge one another’s “knowing.” This is especially exciting to see in middle and high school classrooms as we have seen students make connections across boundaries of race, ethnicity, language, and gender (Fig. 9.1).

© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_9

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Fig. 9.1 Cloud

Individual and collaborative expression can be a joyful and dynamic experience. The sense of camaraderie in a classroom community of creative learners is palpable. The intimacy of this work requires a foundation of respect and a sense of mutual benefit. Trying to establish a creative learning community without first laying this groundwork can be an uncomfortable and reductive experience that can potentially harm participants’ sense of self and voice. This can be the case regardless of the teacher’s good intentions. Students, some that will be detailed later, write about deeply personal or personally confusing topics and by working through them with a partner in the process of revision and clarity, not only come to a sense of where they are emotionally, philosophically, ethically located around the topic, they have not had to navigate it on their own. Over the years, there have been several students adamant they do not want to develop a piece or topic/theme with which they were working. After discussing why the student no longer wishes to pursue the topic, I say, fine, start again…it’s a process. More often than not, after trying a new piece out, these students discuss their new work with a peer, or sometimes me, and decide they do want to return to the first piece, sometimes they can’t explain why. Peers discuss what of the original piece/process was difficult or uncomfortable for them. It might be admitting something they feel

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makes them or others look bad and figuring out how to include nuances. It might be writing about something which caused shame or fear and in discussion with someone they find out their partner connects to them or the themes or simply is really impressed by the work and encourages them to try out both ideas. A learning community supports the work of social and intellectual growth. Lev Vygotsky explained this as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which is: the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. (Vygotsky 1978, p. 86)

Vygotsky further characterizes the “social or interpersonal” level of development (2004, p. 4) as a function of collective behavior, as a form of cooperation, or cooperative activity. (p. 202) The collective is critical to the development of individuals as it provides perspective, modeling, and the opportunity for personal insight through interaction and reflection with peers. Inquiry-based learning through the arts supports both the social–emotional development of a community and its members as well as the acquisition and processing of new skills and knowledge beyond what each member could do as an individual. It is what my middle school students and I used to call “The (fill in the class identifier) brain.” I would describe in detail a large floating brain to which everyone in the room reached up and connected. I modeled the processes of making connections, engaging with analysis and looking for just right language with a single brain. Then, I pointed out, instead of one good brain, each of us now has access to the wisdom, skills and social expertise of thirty plus other good brains. In general, all the students would enact the action of hooking up to the brain to activate it. When I returned to the United States from Kenya, I taught rhetorical writing to many returning adults at SUNY Empire in New York City. It was my first deep insight into the disconnection many of them had felt with their education as young people. Some of these students were in their early twenties, most older, and looking to make a change but were working full time, raising families and seeking to excel, not simply pass a class. They took the work seriously and each semester I was thrilled by the growth in the writing skills students needed for

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the high volume of writing SUNY Empire required, but that they also felt in command of their ability to express ideas with clarity, persuasion and evocation. The sense of shame many had internalized around their writing and language in academic and work environments was noticeably lessened as they learned together in peer feedback groups. By working together, talking through ideas, offering feedback to one another each week, every student grew both in confidence and skill. As the students drew from many walks of life, the discussions into rhetorical approaches often connected to their personal experiences and viewpoints. More than once I would overhear one adult say to another, I never would have thought that, followed by a more detailed exploration into the perspective. There are administrators who demand maximum skill building into all the available time of a class and will penalize what seems unquantifiable growth related to standardized testing. The seemingly off topic or nonskill discourse allows for the natural process of building trust and connection within a group. Students are often willing to be redirected, if they can complete a thought/share experiences. In middle school and high school students are expected to stay on task every minute of the class. New teachers are warned to beware of students leading them off topic. This is fair and I am not suggesting that students chitchat at the expense of work in a regular way, but in the real world, the college and career world the standards are created to prepare students for, there are moments in which conversations veer directly from the content to an idea or experience that is somehow connected for the speakers. Work gets done and even new thinking arises. These shared intimacies or moments deepen the connection between students who may or may not already know one another. If I demanded students stay focused while writing on only the writing or revision questions and not listen to one another and ask questions, then much of the growth and breadth of their learning, perspective, and writing development would not happen. These conversations, not implicitly targeting literary devices or revising techniques, develop inter student trust and the social awareness of community members. Sometimes part of one of these side conversations ends up in a writing piece. When I was teaching at SUNY and some undergraduate English Ed classes at Lehman, the small group sharing of prompt responses, writing pieces, and hearing of one another allowed for adults who often had shame around their written expression to give and take feedback as a positive experience that expanded all the members’ skills. Semester after semester, I would see the kinds of bonds and peer mentoring I experienced as an athlete in

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high school on my gymnastics team. When I started on the gymnastics team, many of us had little experience, but we ended up being the first team from our high school to ever go to the state championships in any sport. It came from our drive to improve not only as individuals, but as a team. I had rarely experienced that feeling in a classroom in my own generally didactic education. Many of the returning adults at SUNY in my Writing Effective Prose class shared that others at work were now coming to them to have them draft important letters, memos, or responses. They were as proud of and excited for one another as they were for their own growth and I was inspired by them to recreate this in my later work after I officially learned about writing workshops and writing groups in graduate school. I became even more enamored of writing groups and community workshop process writing with other teachers during a summer fellowship with the New York City Writing Project. The shared work of that summer supported me through difficult times as an educator and made me increasingly reflective/metacognitive around the process of creating and writing in community. Writing groups, peer feedback, and teacher-student writing conferencing are widely used in K-12 schools and teacher education contexts because they provide many moments that support and deepen the foundation upon which the community is built. Writing groups by nature require sharing the intimate act of writing, of making the inner public. For tweens, teens, and college students, this act of revealing one’s thoughts, expression, and even basic skill takes practice. Start small and identify the goals of the partnerships, groups and teacher meetings. The meeting and sharing of low-stakes writing, the listening without concern for the rules of grammar is key to building a foundation of trust. Without ever having written a word, a student has shared “work” without the metaphorical red pencil bleeding them dry before they have had a chance to consider or reconsider an idea. The sharing of creative or argument writing should always start with a discussion, one in which students are prepared to listen. Idea development is supported by the “big brain” approach I used with my middle school students or rephrase for high school and college learners. When a writer can go in and simply talk through ideas and knows they can find what connects with an “audience” and one deepening or clarifying question to consider, they are emotionally prepared and less likely to shut down. Often simply hearing the ideas and strategies of peers in the brainstorming phase inspires new thinking in their peers. Writing is

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a process and “writing and talking to learn are more inviting to students because they needn’t fear being wrong, for the idea is to generate ideas, not to express intact ideas in immaculate form” (Smagorinsky 2007). This process is the same one educators employ as they gather over a desk and eat a rushed meal while discussing an idea for a unit, project, or lesson. Sitting with a peer, brainstorming, exploring ideas and potential gaps as well as being inspired by another’s perspective and insight is one of the great joys of teaching. Making time for students to sit together with the expectation they may bring only a request for help to the table, lowers the stakes for all students, and allows students who excel in the development and deepening of writing to model their process. It seems a simple task, but making time for low-stakes, discourse, and listening-based writing process work feels harder and harder in schools that expect concrete delivery of materials in timed segments. The success my students have had with writing in middle and high school comes from my being fortunate enough, or during the days of scripted curriculums crafty enough, to prioritize the process of writing workshops. I have found it is the low-stakes to high-stakes deep dives over time that build deeply rooted skills and stamina and reduce academic shame that most often is inflicted on students in poor communities. It is not always easy, sometimes it is often quite challenging, but it is a process. Writing is a process, learning is a process, and developing community is a process. Time, care, and structure need to be given so that the young writers engaging in personal or low-stakes writing or the high-stakes work of summative and standardized essay writing can mine the “big brains” of their pairs, small collective, and ultimately others in the larger learning community. This is the social learning of which Lev Vygotsky refers with his ZPD (Vygotsky 1978). The image of two of my students at Kingsbridge working together early one morning is an example of how the independent and dyad and even small community work leads to community. I looked over and one of the most gregarious and outgoing students I have ever taught was laughing loudly with a peer as they pretended to revise their poems. At the table behind her sat a quiet, religious Bangladeshi girl who had interrupted learning and was slowly making her way through her work. This was my 8:20 class and her partner had not yet arrived, very likely picking up the coffee and bacon, egg and cheese rolls that scented the room at that hour. I asked the outgoing girl to work with the quieter one as both had drafts and needed a listener and some deepening questions. As she

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gamely moved to the other table, I realized I had never seen the two of them talk. The Bangladeshi student tended to work with students who spoke Bangla and the Dominican girl was so high energy, even in the early morning hours, she could well unintentionally overwhelm a peer. I moved to a student who had asked to conference with me. When I looked up, the two young women had their heads bent together and were quietly talking and looking at words on their papers. This went on until the bell rang. I had posted the reflection question but didn’t stop them to have them write their wrap up when I noticed tears not falling, but forming. They were sharing examples of the heartbreak of having a mother on the other side of the world. Of not being able to hug her and smell her, of expensive phone calls that like junk food, filled them for a moment, but left them feeling under nourished not long after. The next day, the two girls sat together again and revised telling the same story across different borders. Both wrote more figuratively and powerfully than they had before. Both publicly celebrated each other and the work they achieved. They did not become best friends but their shared individual experiences created a bond that showed in small moments throughout the rest of the year. Although a teacher is assigned a leadership role in a classroom community by the Board of Education, an inclusive, respectful community that can work and learn together requires an educator who deeply considers the lives of the students outside the relative safety of the school. In For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… And the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education, Christopher Emdin details his own experiences with walking into his building to gunshots ringing out. He froze, but is taught to hit the ground if/when it happens again. A loud noise at school sends him under the desk. For a teacher of privilege or one who simply cannot understand the world Emdin describes, it is important to visit and walk the places and spaces where their students live in person. Create discourse and a curriculum that allows students to bring expertise to the conversation and listen. And learn. These spaces that many students come from are spaces that Emdin describes as: filled with fear, anger and a shared alienation from the norms of school, birthed from experiences both within and outside the school building…the urban youth who inhibit these complex psychic spaces, and for whom imagination is the chief escape from harsh realities. (p. 21)

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Educators all over the world navigate our positionality in classroom communities based on race, socioeconomic status, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. As a white woman, I reach out to peers, some of color, some who had grown up in similar neighborhoods, some with more experience navigating the differences in community culture to help me understand their experiences as well as those of our students. I turn to my teacher community, to my community of friends, and to the community in my classroom to learn who they are and what the world looks like to them. As a clear outsider with my eighth graders, I asked, I listened and learned and then began having my students write to topics and themes that reflected the world in which they are growing up. Given a thematic or philosophically/theoretically driven prompt or excerpt from text, most students would write the allotted time and there were always those who ran over. As we approached Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry 2002) Students were asked to decide on a definition for what is called the “American Dream”. They were also to decide whose dream was being defined. A student argued it was the chance to work hard and have a house and land and have one’s children do well. One young man, living with ongoing stress and trauma, was resding resistant, and had a penchent for the halls spoke out emphatically explaining that was not the American Dream in Harlem, where he lived. “Cash,” he said, “it is all about having cash.” A powerful discussion ensued, driven by the students’ connection with the topic. Without realizing it, he had characterized the position a young and not so young George Murchison held, formed by the dehumanizing oppression he saw in his community. Money is power, money talks and more literally for students who might experience homelessness and food insecurity, money is what keeps a person and family safe from the trauma of homeless shelters and debilitating internalized shame. His classmates then shared, echoed, and added on to his response. He went on to support his analysis with evidence and I listened and learned some more. He may not have read the early part of the play, but he deepened understanding of character for others and opened a discussion that called on our readings of critical race theory. I also gave him a commendation on our school praise and discipline record. I don’t pretend that such actions will change the life of a student who lives in a dangerous reality. I do know he deserved it and so I made sure he knew he had challenged us all to think more broadly. When he was present for discussions, he always participated addressing thematic connections and CRT readings

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we had discussed. The simple act of making time for students to respond in writing or speech on themes and text excerpts that reflect their reality creates a community that empowers and connects. This is a practice that always pays off. Over time, it proves itself again and again. Students who rarely speak eventually start adding on and deepening the thoughts/analysis others share. I am still asking, acknowledging, and learning. It is a lot. Teachers do a lot. Determined teachers do even more. But it is nothing compared to the psychic toll living in communities under stress enacts on the growing minds and spirits. When teachers expect students to behave as if none of that matters, the community is not healthy. One support in building a solid community of skill development asks teachers to look to the shared language of moments, words, and revelations. While I am not advocating acronyms as pedagogy, I am using two examples that my middle school students still use with me over 10 years after I taught some of them. It speaks to the sharing of a common experience. Students still use Great Writing Is Specific And Evocative (GWISAE) or Make A Movie In My Mind (MAMIMM ) that was code to my learning community to write specifically and evocatively for those who live outside their writer heads. At a time when our staff was receiving training on gang symbols and signs, my students made up a hand sign for GWISAE. That years’ group would throw the sign when a student wrote something that moved or inspired them. There might be some educators who find this alarming, but the gang signs and complex hand greetings were part of the community within and outside of gangs. Students were simply using translanguaging to express themselves fully in our community. This language of the classroom also became a part of students’ informal written and spoken discourse as demonstrated by two reluctant 8th grade writers were caught with a note in math class that read “Meet me in the stairwell’’ to which the response was “Which stairwell? Be GWISAE!” The big brain group effect had brought our community learning space into the halls and even their nonacademic forays into the stairwells. I understood what that meant and I have never forgotten it. The math teacher gave the note to me and it kept it on my desk where it encouraged me on days in which growth seemed elusive. Teachers cannot control the lives of our students outside the classroom, but if we create a space where challenges are shared and efforts honored, there is likely to be respect and growth for all involved.

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Daily or almost daily gatherings in classrooms process the news of the world and the experiences of its members. They share these moments and images, as well. There are the discussions around school drama or policy that students bring to the room. There are also the deep dives into literary themes and text that encourages students, even disengaged ones, to speak up, to be the expert voice. Community requires meaningful interaction and deepened understanding, two things that can occur as a result of writing and sharing, particularly informal writing (Dean and Warren 2012). A wise teacher creates opportunities for this to occur. If the topics are relevant and the material speaks to students, then the learning impacts all in the community including the teacher. Like most educators, I have high standards for my students regarding the work of supporting a literary thesis or argument as well as the development of voice. Working with others and developing their voice, students grew and developed, which was reflected in measures personal, summative and standardized. I do not wish to see my own observations or a googled and modified academic paper reflected back to me. I want to have students argue their vision or refine it to vary from others who are following similar lines. The more original thinking is done, the more investment the individual has. The greater the learning of the dyads and small groups and the more powerful the “big brain” grows, there appears a new element, a “big heart” develops, which gives lifeblood to the community. In my teacher community, we also share and our discussions into literature or pedagogy often veer into the personal, as they do in our classrooms. Recently, my friend loosened my blinders of privilege when she explained she didn’t want her son to learn to drive. I was surprised and asked why she wouldn’t want him to drive, especially going to college out of state. She responded, “Why would I put a young black man in a car in America today?” It was so simple and true and horrifying. To me as a white person, even a reasonably well read one who is fortunate to work in an environment of social justice discourse, it still seemed somehow inconceivable that systemic, punitive, and lethal racism is really happening to children every day in modern day America. I witnessed students show up to school beaten or fear leaving without a group to safely navigate the few blocks home. My son did not have to navigate park areas that were claimed by gangs, risk being seen wearing the wrong thing or standing with the wrong person. He and his friends were not constantly aware that they could be harassed or jumped. He could always ask a police officer for

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assistance. I could forget what was so upsetting, so it never got real. I get it now, but it took time and listening. The greatest builder of community is a conversation. Done honestly with all participants given voice what can be created and cultured is truth, trust, and bonds that support open discourse, create empathy and hopefully action. The more teachers understand who sits in our classroom and the places in which they live physically and psychically, the more supportive a learning community we can facilitate. This matters as I am a teacher of current and future teachers. I encounter classrooms in which I have been the only white person or part of a minority population on the Bronx campus where I teach undergraduate and graduate students in the English Education program. My students are frank about what they see in society which includes academia. The learning communities I facilitate and learn from develop proximally and individually, but most of them are experts on the life and world of urban students and are there to explore and challenge themselves to create the classrooms they wish to see or wish they had. Elizabeth was an undergraduate student in my Teaching of Writing Class. She shared that she had mostly written argument essays in her middle and high school year and was not comfortable with creative writing. Talking through this experience with peers, she shared common educational traumas and brainstormed creative work. In an emulation poem activity, she wrote a poem inspired by Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise that speaks back to those who shamed her throughout her education and is the motivation for her to develop voice in systemically silenced students. She was beginning her relationship with voice. This is her opening stanza to that poem. I am thriving in this world, That wasn’t built for those like me I was told that it’d be over, I’d reached my end at seventeen.

The community around the creative act also supported the inquiry into the experience and how it might be used in a classroom. The sharing of imagination, expression, and pedagogy in college classes will help these students create the positive experiences they have had developing

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as writers through peer support and discourse around themes and identity. When a student is acting out or shutting down, pushing all a teacher’s buttons, it is an opportunity for both teacher and student to learn. Elizabeth also shared a piece that came from mining her writer’s journal. This is a practice that serves both academic writing and narrative/creative writing. Students have a build in resource of ideas, observations, connections, and descriptions they previously captured in a low-stakes manner. She shared this piece in our publishing party, a practice I like teachers to experience so they can reflect on it when it may seem “too busy” a time for their own student “celebrations.” Students were asked to select one line or phrase from a peer’s “published work” and then create an arts-based response. Here is an excerpt of Elizabeth’s piece inspired by her own writer’s journal. This is an excerpt from a vignette she titled Walking as a Woman. To be a woman is to exist in a constant state of vigilance. She played several scenarios in her head, each one worse than the next. By the time she approached the end of the block she had already scolded herself for all of the time she had wasted on Netflix instead of taking self-defense classes. A strong right-hand cross would’ve come in handy at a moment like this. She wondered if men ever felt this way, she wondered what concocted scenarios made their hearts almost jump out of their chest. She heard hurried steps. At this sound her hands instinctively wrapped themselves around her keys, weaving them between her sweaty fingers, ready to confront the jaw of an antagonist. The jaw, the eye, the Adam’s apple–any sensitive spot would do. Her college roommate had taught her this trick. She’d want to stun him but not cause any damage that would make her the aggressor. Selfdefense can be such a tricky thing. Swiftly, she turned. Phone in one hand, weaponized keys in the other. This was it. Fight or flight. She positioned herself so that whoever it was behind her would have to show their face. Within seconds of just standing, a jogging man breezed past her. He did not seem to even acknowledge her—gone as quickly as he had emerged. Moments later, in the comfort of her home, she contemplated the events. Paranoia is exhausting, but she knew that it was this which also kept her alive.

This heartfelt piece had an unexpected result. After writing their “inspired by the words of” on-demand piece, students explained why they selected

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the item they did and then shared their arts-based response. Kevin,1 a confident graduate student taking the class, was heavily involved in bias and racism issues affecting his community, sat a moment in silence in the circle before he spoke. He looked over to Elizabeth and asked, “Is this true.” Every woman and several of the men affirmed this with nodding heads and emphatic words. Elizabeth added she had had experiences that taught her to be wary. This topic was something that infiltrated her work and journeying through life. It was clear how strongly she felt the experience as a woman, especially as a petite one. Kevin was genuinely shocked and shared, “Well I didn’t know that. I never ever have to think like this.” One might wonder that in the twenty-first century he was unaware of the constant vigilance women often need when navigating spaces with men, but this work occurred just before #MeToo movement took off. Elizabeth had spent her life managing male presence in interactions with men who held culturally, physically or systemically dominant positions. Vygotsky argues the value of creative work in community is critical to the health of young people and I would offer that this is true for older ones as well. Vygotsky uses the metaphor of a tea kettle to communicate his thinking. The world pours into man…thousands of calls, desires, stimuli, etc. enter but only an infinitesimal part of them are realized and flows out through the narrow opening. It is obvious that the unused part of life must somehow be utilized and lived. (p. 247)

Vygotsky asserts that our psyches occasionally require the release of “‘steam pressure’ or emotion when it exceeds the strength of the vessel” (Connery et al. 2010). To write his “inspired by” piece, Kevin’s inquiry into Elizabeth’s work demanded he walk in her (and many women’s) shoes, reflecting on Elizabeth’s words, images and tone. His response presented and, in the end, examined, the previously unconsidered privilege he enjoys as a male moving through society. His finished piece reflected Elizabeth’s imagery and experience and he pitched the tone of the piece to reflect an evening walk home through the eyes of a male who is physically confident in his space and safety navigating elevated trains and dimly lit streets as he pleasantly ruminates about his dinner options and sings along with the music that plays from his headphones, unable to hear and unconcerned about hearing approaching footsteps. The two 1 Pseudonym.

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pieces read together show the dual realities and highlight the stress and fears Elizabeth and many women manage in the enacting of ordinary tasks and the freedom most men have from the ongoing stressor. Near the end of the poem, Kevin addresses what he has never had to see, using the imagery from Elizabeth’s work, demonstrating a new awareness and empathy for women. Kevin also acknowledged her as he shared, thanking her for opening his eyes. The development of insight into the experience of another of empathy is a powerful element of creative learning communities. It can develop in a moment through an image or description or over time. Kevin was surrounded by strong, outspoken women in his graduate program but it was Elizabeth’s captured moment that showed him what he never saw. Elizabeth’s choice to select this writing seed to develop, to capture, and express her ongoing stress experience compelled Kevin to inquire more deeply into the reality of women from the gender privileged position he only now really saw. This example of inquirybased learning through the arts as a community builder shows, even in low-stakes activities like this one, shared public writing can create an expansion of perspective, a deepening of bonds and respect and empathy can develop. These are the characteristics we wish for in our learning communities, especially when crisis(es) hit. Last fall, I was teaching an undergraduate writing methods class and four students called, texted, emailed, and pulled me into the hall in one week to share they were undergoing critical, life-altering events and if they had to run out, that was why. These students all came to class, they all did their work, they apologized for being distracted. When two additional students approached me to share that they were struggling with family situations after class and another had just learned of a high school friend’s suicide as we entered the room the following week, I made the decision to alter the curriculum. The need to process as a community, a close community, was important when so many members were struggling. The following week we discussed the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on students and considered the impact of a student acting out on a teacher who has also experienced similar traumas. The truth is students aren’t in the “mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological readiness to learn—they simply will not learn. And students suffering from the effects of trauma are definitely not in the learning mode” (Souers and Hall 2016). Vygotsky’s “steam pressure” metaphor has proven itself true through the creative communities at SUNY, Kingsbridge International High

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School, at the South Bronx middle school where I taught, at the current high school at which I teach, and in the undergraduate and graduate classes Amanda and I teach at Lehman College. This particular undergraduate class experienced so many traumatic events in such close succession that if they were high school or middle school students they would be assigned counseling or would be engaging in one or more survival strategies. These young adult students were showing up, fully expecting to be accountable for work, some staring into space or almost through a peer who was speaking. I had to assure them it was okay to go to the hospital, hospice, or family that needed them in their moment of crisis. Some with ongoing crises or the student having just heard of a friend’s recent suicide had no need to be anywhere specific and chose to be with the class and do their best to focus. I offered free writing to student selected music as a clearing to help focus before students worked in writing groups on their recent pieces developed from their writing notebooks. I also decided to modify my curriculum. The sheer number or traumatic events required acknowledgment in the community which was a close one. It was also important to look at the reality of middle and high school classrooms which contain traumatized students and those living with the similar impact of chronic stress, classrooms in which these students planned to teach. Students carry trauma with them into classrooms. Students may arrive having experienced wars, violence and prejudice from communities or individuals, natural disasters, loss, abandonment, chronic poverty, fear, or abuse. Based on growing statistics, it is likely there are children in every classroom who have experienced some level of trauma (National Child Traumatic Stress Network [NCTSN] 2016), with disproportionately higher rates in low-income schools (Brunzell et al. 2016; Ford et al. 2012). The traumatized student is affected both emotionally and in their ability to process in the classroom. At the very least, this struggle impacts the teacher and class in how the student is processing or not, but the teacher who listens and supports a child through the sharing of their fear, shame, and trauma must often then take responsibility for caring for the child and potentially involve child protective services or protective hospitalization. Or feel helpless in their inability to change the dynamics which surround the child. If the situation is violent or life threatening or a child is at risk in some way, a teacher is a mandated reporter and is legally required to seek help from child protective services or psychiatric care facilities. These actions create further traumas for the students,

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and I have not met a teacher who is unscarred by the decision and consequences of those phone calls made with a guidance counselor who often has to process with the teacher as they write and speak the words that will profoundly impact the child who they most want to protect. These teachers often continue to have involvement with the traumatized student/s they teach and are at risk of secondary trauma (Bride 2007; Figley 1995), once thought to be only limited to counselors and clergy but now being seen in educators. First addressed in counseling and psychology, secondary trauma is a consequence of learning about a traumatic event and the ongoing stress associated with helping or wanting to help the traumatized individual (Tehrani 2007). Examples of secondary trauma include learning about the death of a student’s caregiver, familial abuse, or housing/food insecurity. Teachers are often the one students turn to when they feel unsafe in their world. It seems at first glance that a connection of a shared experience of trauma would help the teacher support the student, and often it does, but teachers are human and many who come from urban poverty or cultures that are not supportive of therapeutic treatment and also deal with systemic racism often experience the resonance of their own psychic stress when dealing with that of their students. I felt it was important for these preservice teachers to explore as my own high school community was working to learn more as educators at a Title 12 school. The rapid chain of traumas experienced by the undergraduates in that class occurred as the staff and administration of my high school were discussing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as were the students in the English class for which I served as a reading and writing specialist. Students engaged with the controversial and potentially triggering material in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, supported by supplemental video and written information around the existence of and long term impact of ACEs. This was a lens through which students could examine the dynamics of Morrison’s plot and characters. The English teacher put in place time to talk in small groups and write before sharing out as a

2 According to the US Department of Education, “Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA) provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic standards” (2018).

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larger group. Student engagement grew as they began to recognize themselves or connect with characters on a more compassionate or complex level as well as following themes that captivated them within the text. My Teaching of Writing syllabus had indicated the next class to be when students would be introduced to Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jaye McTighe, but it was an unmistakable teachable moment. Teachers come from traumatized backgrounds, they are often able to care for and support these students in positive ways, but they are also more open to triggering their own traumas. Many of the passionate and creative undergraduate students I teach come from communities with high levels of poverty and plan to teach in those same schools to support and empower students the way they wish they had been educated. Deeply traumatic events were shared, some with positive outcomes, some that still continued on into their adulthood. Students did some free writing and some prompt writing which led to a shared discussion of personal trauma and its impact on them as individuals and as learners. I had selected two short chapters from Fostering resilient learners: Strategies for creating a trauma-sensitive classroom for students to read, annotate, discuss, and consider how this knowledge might advise them in the future the teachers of students in areas of poverty they stated they wished to be. Most of the students admitted to “taking the ACEs test” even though the book advises against that. Most had five or more ACEs and the impacts of those experiences live with them. They will provide a powerful understanding and connection for them as educators, but also it can be a trigger set off unexpectedly. Awareness is the key to managing the difficult situations urban and rural educators come up against. These undergraduate students were clear that they are strong and making their way with a determination built from these experiences. Also, many of the students selected the same quote to discuss even with two chapters to choose from. They chose “it’s up to us—the adults in their lives—to offer an array of appropriate alternative means for them to regulate their emotions and manage the intensity of their behaviors” (Souers and Hall, p. 34). They wrote reflections and a next step of how they would use this information in planning. Many said they wanted to read more on the topic outside class. Educators, as community facilitators, need to be prepared when the unexpected trauma arises, to give the time, space, and conversation that allow for a positive, growth-minded outcome. In a middle or high school setting, the three weeks my students experienced would have played out very differently.

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Space, time, and conversation were certainly important to many members of the personal essay writing class I taught seniors my first year at my new high school. Shoshana came to our diverse, social justice high school in Manhattan after being expelled from an orthodox girls’ Yeshiva boarding school in Queens for temporarily dying her hair. It was an act of desperation by this brilliant young woman in order to escape an experience that had hammered at her sense of self for wanting a strong education and to go to college. Her parents had converted to the orthodox community after completing their master’s degrees so they encouraged their daughter’s dreams of education. The entire family faced social shunning and repercussions for making the choice to complete her education in a public school. Her arrival brought to our community an important perspective and a powerful social justice-driven voice. We were her first encounter with a world she had been taught, in her school, to fear. Shoshana had never been alone with, nor educated with, males, nor had she spent time around women who didn’t live in accordance with Orthodox Jewish laws around clothing, language and gender roles/identity and sexual orientation. Her first days in the school found her in my personal essay class. She was seated when Luis arrived and I asked him to take the seat next to her. I did not yet know her story and it was a fortunate pairing. She wrote of her meeting Luis in her college essay. In English class, I was paired with a Latino boy my age. Luis’s diamond earrings and large presence was exactly the image of what I had been taught to fear, yet he regarded me with open eyes and ears to hear about my foreign way of life. He was my first male friend and our two worlds collided in a classroom.

I reached out to Shoshana and she shared a reflection on her experience in the class. She wrote she had been so beaten down at the Yeshiva that doing the low-stakes inquiry into identity writing in class left her overwhelmed. She wrote what happened next. I ended up turning to the classmate next to me, Luis. Luis was the epitome of all the things my past life had “sheltered” me from. He was a big man, he had his ears pierced and people affectionately called him Booby. He also seemed to be struggling. We spoke and I and I looked over his paper and made some comments and edits.

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With a friend like Luis on my side, my confidence grew. My teachers all noticed a change. I came out of my shell and even used that same class and that same assignment to write pieces that would help me come to terms with the life I had left and the life I wanted. Some of my best work was written in that top floor classroom in HCHS around a small bunch of tables. Having Luis and other classmates read over my writing led to some of the most incredible rewrites and drafts of life. There was no sense of judgement or being looked down upon. I was able to bring out the inner emotions I had shut down onto paper and they could live outside of me, making for a rewarding and healing experience. I met so many classmates and friends in that classroom through the Socratic style community workshops. The majority of my close friends today, as a college senior, are people I met in that same room.

The connection made between students sharing creative expression is deepened by both the discussions and the creation that results. Ibrahim, from Kingsbridge International High school, echoes Shoshana when he observes, “when I read Suhel’s poems, my feelings came in touch with his feelings.” Elizabeth later wrote in her reflection of creative response to Letter from a Birmingham Jail that the work she did with her peers encouraged her as a writer and inspired her as an educator. Once I had started, I was so inspired by the (content of the) letter that I actually created a second poem. I felt like what I had to say about it was unfinished, that second poem led to our group discussing empathy and how it can be taught in a classroom.

This group of future educators bonded over their discussion not only of their creative work, but how this experience of theirs might manifest in lessons that could develop and deepen empathy in the urban classrooms in which they intend to teach. The discourse with her peers silenced Elizabeth’s resistant voice and her newly emboldened creative spirit led her to prolific and powerful writing in the class. It wasn’t long until she inspired a peer to see past his gender privilege and write a moving piece in response to her words. He shared how he had previously been unaware of the experience of women in what he deemed ordinary or safe situations but that after reading her work and writing his piece, he would never see things

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the same. Call it the Zone of Proximal Development, call it a thoughtful, creative community, it seems to time and again lead its members to be wiser, more skilled, and perhaps even more empathic.

Works Cited Bride, B. E. (2007). Prevalence of secondary traumatic stress among social workers. Social Work, 52(1), 63–70. Brunzell, T., Stokes, H., & Waters, L. (2016). Trauma-informed positive education: Using positive psychology to strengthen vulnerable students. Contemporary School Psychology, 20(1), 63–83. Connery, M. C., John-Steiner, V., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2010). Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts. New York: Peter Lang. Dean, D., & Warren, A. (2012). Informal and shared: Writing to create community. National Writing Project. Retrieved from https://archive.nwp.org/cs/ public/print/resource/3918. Emdin, C. (2017). For white folks who teach in the hood—And the rest of yall too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston: Beacon Press. Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel. Ford, J. D., Chapman, J., Connor, D. F., & Cruise, K. R. (2012). Complex trauma and aggression in secure juvenile justice settings. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 39(6), 694–724. Hansberry, L. (2002). A raisin in the sun: A drama in three acts. New York: Random House. National Child Traumatic Stress Network. (2016). Secondary traumatic stress: A fact sheet for child-serving professionals. Los Angeles, CA: Secondary Traumatic Stress Committee. Smagorinsky, P. (2007). Vygotsky and the social dynamics of classrooms. The English Journal, 97 (2), 61–66. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from www.jstor. org/stable/30046790. Souers, K., & Hall, P. (2016). Fostering resilient learners: Strategies for creating a trauma-sensitive classroom. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest. com. Created from teachers college-ebooks on 2020-05-20 10:12:35. Tehrani, N. (2007). The cost of caring–the impact of secondary trauma on assumptions, values and beliefs. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 20(4), 325–339. US Department of Education. (2018). Title 1, part a program. Retrieved July 5, 2020, from https://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/index.html. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1930/2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97.

CHAPTER 10

This Is Not for Me: In Which We Discuss Some Challenges and Obstacles That May Impede the Development of an Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Arts Practice, and What Might Be Done About Them

Fig. 10.1 Cloud

© The Author(s) 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_10

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Teachers who have not had opportunities to explore their own creativeCreative voices and means of expression may find it quite challenging to design arts-based lessons for their students. When we plan for our teacher education methods courses or professional development in schools, experience has taught us to always anticipate that there will be someone who says, “I am not creative!” We cannot help but wonder what happened along the way to convince some people so resolutely about their own lack of creativity. It seems likely that the reason for this is that in PreK-12 schooling, the attention paid to hands-on creativity and art making diminishes as students get older. By the time they reach high school, many students may only have one 45-minute period of an arts class per week. According to one study, only 88% of American public high schools offer at least one arts class (leaving 12% of high schools in the country with no arts classes at all), while only “37% of charter schools offer any arts instruction at all” (Elpus 2017) (Fig. 10.1). Inquiry-based learning through the arts is not interchangeable with an arts class, of course. Both are important to a well-rounded education. Unlike arts classes, which are centered on the study of art forms such as painting, dancing, singing, or acting, inquiry-based learning through the arts is a means of interacting with ideas that might be conceived within the context of any subject, through the lenses made available by a range of different art forms and artists’ visions. Just as we laid out in Chapter 3 a narrative study centered on the story of Daedalus and Icarus as depicted in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, one could imagine math classes studying paintings with vanishing point perspective, or a physics class studying the trajectory of figures in motion in Bill T. Jones’ haunting digital dance/art installation Ghostcatching. Some teachers will outright reject the notion of taking time out of the curriculum in high-stakes testing subjects to study works of art. The danger is in thinking of the art as something “extra” rather than as a vehicle for teaching high level literacy skills. Amanda recalls from her days as a staff developer in lower Manhattan, a teacher who railed loudly against “those creative beauties who think they can do whatever they want!” This teacher may have been a somewhat extreme case of conflating creativity with misbehavior (and he was talking about fellow teachers, not students!) His attitude does seem to reflect a resentment that may be

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masking a fear of risk taking and loss of control, and a belief that once the glitter and paint come out, all hell will break loose. This, after all, was a teacher who proudly displayed student “book reports” that were made from a template in which the student only filled in one verb or noun per sentence. For some teachers, the need for order and compliance supersedes the desire to foster curiosity or joy. One wonders what must have happened along the way to make some people believe that learning cannot and should not be fun, that the arts are a distraction from “serious” school work, just as one wonders why anyone thinks that academic success requires growing bodies to sit still for hours on end. Sometimes the fear is that the students and teacher will be “caught” by an administrator having fun, and that fun means that the work is not “rigorous” and learning is being neglected. We have discussed the widespread use of the word “rigor” in several chapters. Teachers who wish to try the work of inquiry-based learning through the arts can usually find the Common Core Standards that address the cognitive work to be done. Molly is particularly adept at coaching teacher candidates in how to describe this work using the language of the Common Core Standards. Chapter 3 is largely devoted to the study of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, while the Common Core Standard for integration of knowledge and ideas in grades nine and ten requires students to: Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment. (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) (http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/9-10/ 7/2020)

In Chapter 4, we discuss how writing poetry can be an effective way of constructing an argument. Here again, the Common Core calls for students in grades nine and ten to be able to: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. (2020)

Maxine Greene (2001) advocates for teaching that enables students to “multiply their perspectives, extend their visions, strive for new ways of apprehending the complex world” (p. 49). Her goal was not to “make aestheticians” out of teachers or students, but to teach people to “see

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more” and “listen more attentively” (pp. 51–52). This is the value of active, hands-on inquiry through the arts. Greene argues passionately that teachers must have their own immersive experiences of inquiry through the arts, this can only happen if teachers “take the time to cultivate (their) own informed awareness” and “allow their imaginations to be released” (p. 46). Additionally, many teachers may engage in creative work of their own but have not been able to find ways of incorporating their creativity into their teaching. While it is certainly not required that one be an artist in order to teach inquiry-based learning through the arts, familiarity with the language and processes of art making in any form can serve as a helpful frame of reference for planning lessons centered on the study of works of art. We also recommend that teachers form communities or partnerships in which they can learn, imagine, and create together. One of the most significant moments of our collaboration was visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to view Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series together. We walked around the exhibition for hours, studying and discussing each panel and the rooms full of related contextual material. As we talked about the paintings, we also imagined how we might use this narrative series on the subject of African-American migration with Molly’s students, all of whom had migrated from other countries. We went through the exhibit once, sat down to lunch and brainstormed together, and then went back again for another look at the exhibit. Over subsequent days, we were able to visit the exhibit online on the MoMA website to study the paintings and accompanying text. Because the Migration Series has such a strong narrative thread, it is a natural for an English Language Arts class. Our deep dives into the art, our personal excitement and connections all fueled the curriculum we subsequently designed. Inspired by our work, Molly joined with a social studies teacher at Kingsbridge to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to select several galleries of work for the entire twelfth grade class to visit. Teachers in every discipline were to select a work and assign a response task within their content area. Molly and her peer shared video links to the selected galleries with their peers and the entire team worked together to design a day-long experience for their students, one that even got a nod of approval from the previously unconvinced math teacher.

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Studying Lawrence’s overarching narrative of the migration through the stories represented by each individual panel was an excellent way to get English language learners talking about narrative structure, as well as the historical context and current realities that informed that work of art. Conventional wisdom dictates that we build a scaffold to challenging texts through a series of simpler texts, but by studying narrative works of art like The Migration Series or Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, students can develop the language, skills, and confidence to have similar discussions around texts that might have previously been considered too difficult for those students. Given the range of reading and English comprehension levels in many classrooms, we have come to understand that starting with a visual image is an effective way of teaching students to understand literary devices, which ultimately helps them to develop meaningful literacy by uncoupling the practice of literary analysis from the burden of decoding challenging texts. Once the students achieve conceptual literacy, they can apply these new understandings to complex works of literature. Starting with art enabled students to engage in intellectually stimulating discussions about symbolism and creative choices that carried over into subsequent discussions of literature, as well as into their writing. The purpose of aesthetic inquiry is to help participants—both teachers and students—learn to see beyond the limitations of what a primarily skills-based education can teach. The key to the process of inquiry-based learning through the arts is prolonged open-ended questioning. Works of art are examined and discussed as a class so students learn from each other’s insights. Amanda had developed this practice with the goal of helping graduate students and teachers be more open to integrating a variety of art forms into their practice, and Molly began by working with teenagers in Kenya and in the South Bronx. Before this collaboration, Amanda would always begin the study of a work of art by asking students to describe what they were able to observe. Through working with Molly and her high school students, that practice shifted to add an additional step of turning the observation into a question. Students would then work in groups and attempt to answer each other’s questions and ask follow up questions. That continued discussion and attention led to deeper observation and understanding. Maxine Greene understands that “so much depends on the ways we go out to what is offered to us, on our participation, our openness to the qualities of what we hear and see” (2001, p. 18). This prolonged observation,

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questioning, and discussion are at the heart of the practice. Just as important is the experience of art making in response to the work of art that is the subject of study. Greene (2001) insists that “You have to be fully present to it--to focus your attention on it” (p. 54). In the context of such a learning experience, art making becomes a form of research or inquiry as the student engages the creative process in order to explore an idea or question. Curating aesthetic experiences in the classroom involves carefully organized steps that include observation, questioning, hands-on artmaking, then deepening the inquiry through further questioning and analysis. This process in itself is transformative, teaching learners to look and respond to the world in new ways. In order for students to have immersive encounters with the arts, teachers need to feel equipped to curate these experiences. This is why we design our courses to immerse teacher candidates in active engagement with the arts. In our experience, high school students have had an overwhelmingly positive response to studying carefully chosen works of art, especially when they can see themselves in that art. Creativity occurs when the imagination is awakened, and this awakening often occurs when the perceiver experiences a work of art that speaks to an aspect of his or her own lived experience. Graduate students in teacher education programs have had more mixed responses to an arts-based approach. Many of our teacher candidates affirm that being engaged in the creative arts has opened new possibilities for them and helped them to find their voice. Others are uncomfortable, as they worry that deviating from the expected English Language Arts curriculum is a waste of time, and will not help their students pass high-stakes standardized tests. As we discuss approaches to integrating an inquiry-based approach to the creative arts, we also consider various students’ concerns and how we might address them. The success of Molly’s students, both in Kenya and in the United States, suggests that these practices do in fact help students develop skills that are part of the state-sanctioned curriculum subject to high-stakes testing. Stepping outside the familiar confines of one’s academic discipline can cause discomfort and disequilibrium, but can also be illuminating. Maxine Greene (1995) advocates for the role of the imagination in education as a way of “decentering ourselves” (p. 30) to remind us that education is not simply the acquisition of facts and skills, but a means of taking one’s place in the world. As students are encouraged to question their own understandings, their teachers need to have the experience of immersion in the

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kinds of decentering experiences that can be the outgrowth of creative engagement. Prolonged encounters with works of art can awaken deeply personal and powerful responses, awakening in the perceiver a drive to engage in creative expression. These encounters that include active inquiry through dialogue, questioning, and hands-on art making or research are a path through which to introduce creativity and imagination into education. When teachers can create a classroom environment that fosters creative inquiry, students become engaged and invested in the work of school. In order to effectively create these kinds of aesthetic experiences for students, teachers must have first-hand knowledge of aesthetic experiences that incorporate inquiry and creativity. There is little talk of creativity or imagination in teacher education programs beyond early childhood, and inquiry is a term most often used in these settings in the context of analysis of testing data; but more creativity in later school years could mean more engagement with the world both inside and outside of school. Adolescents are expected to have a serious focus on academics, looking toward careers and higher education, but they are also creating themselves and expressing their emerging identities. Creative expression in many forms- music, poetry, drawing, acting, dancing, and others help us understand and express who we are. They help us find our voice. For many teenagers, art is an essential outlet, but there is often little connection between school and opportunities to develop and use their creative voice. In order to fully engage young people, we must consider their emotional as well as their cognitive development. Teacher educators can help teachers identify opportunities to integrate artistic expression and multimodal literacies across the curriculum. It is essential that methods classes or professional development workshops that ask teachers to consider the role of creativity in their work provide a safe space for such “decentering” experiences as Greene describes. Developing practitioners who are new to this work has become especially challenging as some of the main organizations devoted to the professional development of teachers and teacher educators in the fields of arts education and aesthetic education have either faced drastic budget cuts or turned away from educator development to focus exclusively on working in K-12 schools. This means that while children do benefit from visiting artists, no time is spent on working with their teachers so that they can carry on and deepen the work. Some arts organizations that previously had robust education programs no longer do this kind of work at

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all. That, too, represents an obstacle to developing a practice in inquirybased learning through the arts, which is why books like this one and those listed in the appendix/resource guide are intended as a companion for those embarking on this journey.

Works Cited Auden, W. H. (1940). Musee des Beaux arts another time. New York: Random House. Elpus, K. (2017). Understanding the availability of arts education in U.S. high schools. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/ files/Research-Art-Works-Maryland6.pdf. English Language Arts Standards Reading Literature Grades 9-10.7. (2020). Retrieved June 18, 2020, from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Lit eracy/W/9-10/7/. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Appendix

Resource Guide Even for teachers who are inclined toward inquiry-based learning through the arts, doing this work alone can be challenging—even daunting. Some may just not have had enough exposure to the arts to feel like they have a broad enough repertoire to build an arts-based inquiry classroom. Or some may become impatient with the inquiry process, especially if you have preconceived goals in mind but the inquiry leads the class elsewhere. It can be challenging to trust a process that is not always predictable. Of course any teaching strategy might move in an unplanned-for direction. When you are asking students to make their own observations and connections, it is those unanticipated moments that can be most exciting. The possibilities born of an awakening in response to interacting with works of art and engaging in the creative process is what Maxine Greene refers to as “social imagination,” which, as she expressed in a 1998 lecture, “awakens people not only to see, not only to feel, but to hold someone’s hand and act.” (Gulla 2020)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5

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Developing a practice in inquiry-based learning through the arts can be challenging for teachers or scholars who are figuring this out on their own. One suggestion we offer is to start with one work of art and get to know it well. Spend time interacting with that work of art yourself. The longer you teach a work of art, look deeply at it, discuss it with your students and remain open to their fresh insights, it will continue to reveal more and more to you. And then eventually, you will be ready to gradually expand your repertoire. And yes, it does help to have a colleague or a friend to practice brainstorming a work of art with. This is a completely subjective and absolutely partial list of resources for inquiry-based learning through the arts. We are listing here some of the works of art we have studied, as well as philosophy and pedagogy books that have been useful in developing our practice. It would be tempting to provide a much longer list of resources that are available online, but the cyber world can be fickle and ephemeral so we are only including online resources that have had a stable long-term presence. We recognize that there are almost infinite possible works of art one might use for classroom inquiry. We recommend that you seek out and partner with a local arts organization. There is also great value in collaborations between educators, and these formal or informal partnerships can work well in an almost endless variety of configurations.

Visual Art and Artists

Esmaa Mohamoud. (2018). Untitled: No Fields. http://esmaamohamoud.com/. Frida Kahlo. (1932). Self Portrait Along the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States.https://www.fridakahlo.org/self-portrait-along-the-boarderline.jsp. Jacob Lawrence. (1940). Migration Series —New York City’s Museum of Modern Art Displayed the Full 60-Panel Series in 2015. The Entire Exhibit with Extensive Background Material Is Available on Their Website Here: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/. Also found at: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/. Norman Rockwell. (1963). The Problem We All Live with (painting) paired with John Steinbeck’s memoir Travels With Charley. Both works depict six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrating William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Pablo Picasso. (1937). Guernica Reina Sofia museo nacional centro de arte. https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica. Pieter Brueghel the Elder. (1560). Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. https:// www.bl.uk/collection-items/landscape-with-the-fall-of-icarus. Romare Bearden. (1977). A Black Odyssey. https://beardenfoundation.org/. The Block. (1971). https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 481891.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5

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Fiction Books and Writers Coates, T. (2019). The Water Dancer. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. New York, NY: Random House. Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon. New York, NY: Random House. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York, NY: Random House. Whitehead, C. (2016). The Underground Railroad. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Poems and Poetry Books Alexie, S. (2017). Autopsy. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from https://earlybird books.com/autopsy-poem-sherman-alexie#disqus_thread. Alvarez, J. (2014). I, Too Sing América. In Braybrooks, A. (Ed.), Poems and Songs Celebrating America. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Billy Collins poems. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from, https://www.poetryfou ndation.org/poets/billy-collins. Dawes, K., & Shenoda, M. Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books. Langston Hughes poems. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from, https://www.poe tryfoundation.org/articles/88972/langston-hughes-101. Lyon, G.E. (1999). Where I’m From. Spring, TX: Absey & Co. Naomi Shihab Nye poems. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from, https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye. O’Hara, F. (1964). Lunch Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press. Oliver, M. (2004). New and Selected Poems. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Poems by Wallace Stevens: The Man with the Blue Guitar, The House was Quiet and the World was Calm, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Retrieved October 10, 2020,from, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallacestevens#tab-poems. Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywold Press. Shire, W. (2017). Home. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from, https://www.fac inghistory.org/standing-up-hatred-intolerance/warsan-shire-home. Smith, T. K. (2018). Wade in the Water. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Tempest, K. (2013). Brand New Ancients. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Thomas Lux poems. Retrieved October 10, 2020, from, https://www.poetryfou ndation.org/poets/thomas-lux. Whitman, W. (1860). I Hear America Singing. In Leaves of Grass. Boston, MA: Thayer and Eldridge.

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Journalism and Other Nonfiction Coates, T. N. (2015). Between the World and Me. New York, NY: Random House. Duvernay, A. (2016). 13th (Documentary film about the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution). Netflix, YouTube. Hannah-Jones, N. (Ed.). (2019). The 1619 Project. Retrieved October 10, 2020,from, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/ 1619-america-slavery.html. Wilkerson, I. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Important Educational Books and Philosophers Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, NY: The Berkley Publishing Group. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Hoffman Davis, J. (2012). Why Our High Schools Need the Arts. New York: Teachers College Press. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: The Trustees of Southern Illinois University. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Performing Arts and Artists Giddens, R. (2017). Freedom Highway. Nonesuch Records. Smith, A. D. (2018). Notes from the Field. HBO.

Organizations Facing History and Ourselves. https://www.facinghistory.org/. National Writing Project. https://www.nwp.org/. Rethinking Schools. https://rethinkingschools.org/. The Maxine Greene Institute for Aesthetic Education and the Social Imagination. https://maxinegreene.org/.

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Works Cited Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gulla, A. (2021). Aesthetic Experiences and Dewey’s Descendants: Poetic Inquiry as a Way of Knowing. In P. Maarhuis, & A. G. Rud (Eds.), Imagining Dewey: Artful Works and Dialogue About Art as Experience. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishing (in press).

Index

A Aesthetic, 8–10, 88, 107, 143, 150, 156, 167, 210, 211 Aesthetic education, 1, 5, 8, 54, 211 Aesthetic inquiry, 12, 68, 72, 209 Alvarez, Julia, 163, 164 Artmaking, 1, 2, 20, 26, 53, 54, 61, 67, 68, 156, 206, 208, 210, 211 Auden, W.H., 57, 58, 60–62, 207

B Bearden, Romare, 70–72, 120, 132, 161 BIPOC, 39, 45, 46, 112, 132, 134, 135 Black Lives Matter, 36, 39 Blackout poetry, 150, 181 Bloom’s Taxonomy, 182 Bronx, The, 5, 17, 81, 84–88, 139, 195

Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, 56–58, 60–62, 206

C City University of New York (CUNY), 5, 17 Common Core Standards, 5, 8, 13, 95, 207 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 216, 217 Covid-19, 20, 24, 27, 43 Creative, 1, 4–8, 10–13, 19, 22–24, 26, 27, 37, 40, 48, 52–54, 70, 72, 74, 86, 94, 96, 99, 102, 113, 120, 135, 147, 149, 150, 156, 168–170, 172–174, 178, 186, 189, 195–198, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208–211 Creativity, 3–6, 8, 9, 12, 51, 76, 88, 172, 206, 208, 210, 211 Critical pedagogy, 187 Critical thinking, 197

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. N. Gulla and M. H. Sherman, Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators, Creativity, Education and the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5

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D Dewey, John, 8, 14, 15, 19, 53, 55, 78

E Ekphrastic poetry, 56, 58, 70 Elbow, Peter, 41, 48, 88, 113, 176 Embodied inquiry, 176 English language learners (Ells), 55, 81, 96, 209 Espada, Martin, 160

F Found poetry, 73, 180, 181 Freire, Paolo, 15

G Giddens, Rhiannon, 26, 147–150, 161 Greene, Maxine, 1, 2, 8, 14, 15, 21, 22, 26, 48, 54, 67, 68, 85, 143, 145, 173, 207–211, 213

H Hughes, Langston, 140, 162–164, 166

I Imagination, 4–6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 26, 27, 51, 56, 67, 68, 76, 173, 182, 191, 195, 208, 210, 211 Imaginative inquiry, 67 Immersive pedagogy, 3 Inquiry, 1, 2, 5, 9, 20, 26, 37, 48, 54, 67, 68, 70, 78, 85, 87, 88, 91–93, 98, 100, 112, 117, 119, 120, 132, 133, 143, 146, 153, 156, 173, 177–180, 182, 185,

195, 197, 202, 208, 210, 211, 213, 214 Inquiry-based learning, 2, 4 Inquiry-based learning through the arts, 1, 5, 48, 51, 54, 61, 67, 88, 97, 114, 153, 187, 198, 206–209, 212–214 International high school, 5, 12, 70, 81, 117, 120, 199, 203 K Kahlo, Frida, 5, 9, 14, 88–93, 117, 132, 209 Kenya, 11, 101, 173, 174, 176, 177, 187, 209, 210 L Lawrence, Jacob, 14, 26, 54, 120– 122, 128, 132, 133, 135, 139, 141, 147, 152, 208, 209 Lehman College, 5, 7, 81, 84, 96, 199 Lived experience, 14, 67, 85, 100, 210 Lockdown, 21, 22, 36, 37, 39–41, 45 Lyon, George Ella, 14, 100 M Mentor text, 41, 53, 54, 56 Morrison, Toni, 200 N New York City Writing Project (NYCWP), 12, 41, 189 The New York Times 1619 Project, 26 O Odyssey, The, 71

INDEX

Oliver, Mary, 23, 24, 26, 29, 34 P Pandemic, 17, 20–25, 33, 36–39, 41, 42, 45, 46 Pedagogy, 2, 6, 19, 95, 145, 146, 193–195, 214 Poetic inquiry, 25, 94, 144 Prendergast, Monica, 144 Process writing, 189 R Racism, 43–45, 99, 132, 146, 163, 181, 194, 197, 200 Remote learning, 11 Romano, Tom, 9, 41, 96, 114 Rosenblatt, Louise, 55, 67, 68, 117, 176 S Secondary trauma, 200 Smith, Tracy K., 9, 161 Snowber, Celeste, 23 Social imagination, 22, 85, 213 Social justice, 10, 15, 156, 161, 166, 194, 202 Somehowly, 36

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South Bronx, 6, 7, 11, 173, 176, 177, 199, 209 Standardized testing, 8, 95, 174, 188 T Teacher candidate, 2–4, 19–21, 51, 52, 69, 156, 161, 207, 210 Teacher educator, 2, 5, 6, 211 Transaction, 53, 55, 59, 67, 117 Translanguaging, 102, 163, 164, 193 Traumatized learners, 10, 17, 18, 20, 40, 86, 199, 200 V Vygotsky, Lev, 11, 12, 48, 68, 175, 187, 190, 197, 198 W Whitman, Walt, 162–164, 166 Wilkerson, Isabel, 146 Williams, William Carlos, 58, 61, 69 Word cloud, 3, 41, 42, 118 Z Zoom, 36, 37, 39, 173 Zoom bombing, 39