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!

"Care," a poem by Craig Santos Perez

Okay, y'all. This next poem isn't exactly about climate change, although it's likely that climate change played a role in the violence in Syria that led to the vast numbers of refugees needing to get out. If you're interested in those connections, here's a brief story about climate change and the refugee crisis.

What's great about this poem, though, is how it connects the speaker's life in Hawai'i to the experiences of the Syrian refugees even though he has no personal connection. Also, Craig Santos Perez is a super-important poet writing about global issues of empire, violence, colonialism, and the love that struggles against all that.

It's also the second poem (2 of 2!) I'm posting here spoken by a parent to her or his young child. Hm. I seem to have a bit of a bias here. Nothing to do with my own status as a parent of young children.

"Dear Matafele Peinem" by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

An important perspective on climate change and young folks, from a young mother from the Marshall Islands, speaking at the UN Climate Summit in September 2014. This starts to touch on some of the many global connections at play in how we think about climate change. It also highlight the importance of young people in struggling for a more just future on this planet.

Intro

Hello, Balfour Scholars!

My name is Alex, and I'll be one of your facilitators this summer. Since you're approaching college, I want to tell you a bit about my own college experience, and then describe some of my interests today, as a writer and PhD candidate.

I started college not knowing what I wanted to study. I knew I liked thinking big thoughts, so I almost majored in philosophy, but I decided on English when I realized reading stories would be a much more fun way to learn about the world than reading dense philosophy texts. I did well in some classes, not so well in others. A turning point in my college career happened when I met with a professor to talk about doing the junior/senior honors program in English, where I would have to research and write a senior thesis. I was tempted, because I liked thinking hard about things, but it was also intimidating. The professor told me that sometimes the things you’re most scared of are the things that are most worth doing. She was right. It was a formative intellectual experience and set me on a course to pursuing a PhD many years later.

Now, after having taught high school English, and creative writing in prisons and on college campuses, I’m working on my dissertation in American Studies. I’m studying how we tell stories about the people and places who seem distant from us, geographically or socially, especially in the context of climate change. Sometimes this is about the other side of the globe, sometimes it’s about the other side of the street. Usually, these differences have to do with race, class, gender, and sexuality, and often the people telling the stories are the ones in power. I’m interested in what happens when the people who aren’t in power—people who’ve been excluded because of their race or gender or sexuality or age—tell their stories. How do underrepresented groups create political power for themselves? How might standing up for other perspectives help us figure out how to live better on this planet? How do our own lives connect with the challenges our world, whether climate, or refugees, or poverty in Bangladesh, Port-au-Prince, and Louisiana? These are global questions, but since we are all global citizens, we can think about them in our local communities, too.

I think it's going to be a great week of studying global struggle, telling stories, and learning from each other. Looking forward to meeting you all!