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!