Workshops on Water, Privilege, Poetry (Days 2 and 3)

Tuesday

We presented some background on the ongoing water crises the people of the Navajo Nation are facing, including pollution from coal and uranium mining, and a lack of infrastructure for clean running water. We had a plan to bring up the idea of "disposable" people, to connect to comments made by Flint residents we heard on Monday, but our students made that connection before we even prompted them. We asked if the water crises facing Flint and the Navajo Nation have anything to do with the populations there - that is, would this be happening if those populations were middle-class white people - and they thought that yes, it did have to do with particular groups being written off.

We then asked them to make maps of their hometowns, and to consider which areas are more and less privileged, and, if there was a water crisis there (say, a major drought), which areas would lose access to clean water first.

While they worked on those maps, one of our more involved students seemed stuck. I asked her what was up, and she said she'd never paid attention to those kinds of differences in her town before, so she had no way to map it. I told her not to worry about it and got her started on the next activity, figuring that, since she was so thoughtful and engaged already, she would learn from her peers' presentations on the geography of privilege.

After hearing about geographies of water and privilege, we asked for volunteers to share stories of seeing or experiencing privilege or discrimination. We had a couple women tell powerful stories of being racially profiled by security guards and police, and we encouraged them to think more about these stories to write them the next day.

Wednesday

We started with Ashley telling a story of language discrimination (her grandparents are immigrants from Italy), and then had our students write down their own stories. After writing, a few volunteers shared, talking about experiencing discrimination based on sexuality and race. I was impressed how comfortable they seemed to feel talking about those issues, and there was plenty more to be said, but unfortunately we had to move on.

We did a short presentation on Cochabamba, water privatization, and climate change. Then, after a quick break (during which a few students expressed appreciation for being exposed to all these issues they didn't know about), they got into groups to create their poetry presentations about what should change in the world. We showed them the 3 high school students on Queen Latifah's show performing "Somewhere in America," and then they got to work. Most of the groups seemed pretty excited.

Also

I want to note the other great GALACTIC projects going on, including African storytelling and dancing, music improv, immigration debates, and role-playing difficult situations (from Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, I think). I want to try all those things myself.

First Day

Great first day, I thought. We spent longer than we'd planned on a name-based ice breaker, but we sure learned each other's names. Then we talked about water, and Flint, and the relationship between the concerns expressed by Flint residents and those by the Black Lives Matter movement. Our students (the vocal ones, at least) had no trouble seeing the connections there. We also spent some time doing "blackout poems," where you take a non-poetic text and cross out most of the words, leaving only a chosen few, which as a new and often surprising poem, can bring new meaning to the original text as well. Our students seemed to enjoy that.

I do think they may have tuned out a little as we presented them with information about Flint; I want to be efficient tomorrow as we introduce the Navajo water crises. One of the tricks, I think, will be to keep making connections to larger issues, and to their own lives.

One of our current plans for tomorrow is to have them write about times when they've seen or experienced privilege or lack thereof based on race or ethnicity. This will be coming after having had a discussion on race/ethnicity in the water crises we've introduced.

But I had a great conversation with Oliver this afternoon, and it gave me ideas for a few other things I want to do tomorrow.

Oliver's group (Movement) will be having their students draw maps of their towns with a focus on privilege. I'd like to do that too, before going into the storytelling. Also, in hearing Oliver describe today's "Peace through Art" group's day, it occurred to me I want to have the students just simply talking.

So after the maps, and before writing, I think I want to have them tell some privilege/identity-related stories to each other in small groups. (Ashley? What do you think?)

The writing's still important, though, because we're trying to build material to create performance poems by the end of the week!