Inquiry-Based Learning Through The Creative Arts For Teachers and Teacher Educators

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 arts-
informed research in education that seeks to reposition creativity studies
within (and in conversation with) education as a multi- and interdisci-
plinary 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 histor-
ical 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 theoret-
ical lenses, strengthening the links between creative and arts educa-
tion 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 prac-
tice 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 Molly Hamilton Sherman
English Education Harvest Collegiate High School
Lehman College New York, NY, USA
City University of New York
Bronx, 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
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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 imagina-
tive 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 them-
selves, their practice, and teachers and students everywhere; to that end,
they employ the central metaphor of “upside-down” to describe the turn
v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
that life took when COVID-19 hit in early 2020, in a range of produc-
tive 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 them-
selves 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, stan-
dardized 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 socioeco-
nomic, 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 applica-
tion, 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 oper-
ationalizing the mandate to “teach creativity” in their diverse fields of
enquiry, this book not only tells, but shows us how.
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii
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 adult-
hood, and their many students over the years are its beneficiaries—as
now their readers will be. The book remains grounded deeply in prac-
tical 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 teach-
ings you will take away from this book. Lastly, these authors tell us—but
also show us throughout the book—how powerfully their long collabo-
ration is “rooted in a shared enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities of
imagination and creativity in teaching and learning, as well as an under-
standing 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
viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
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 creative-
relational 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 eagle-
eyed 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
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 17
3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Ekphrastic
Poetry 51
4 Imagining the World as If It Could Be Otherwise:

Preparing Students for Solving Problems and Seeing
Possibilities (Writing Poetry as Evidence-Based
Argument) 67
5 Analyzing and Synthesizing Our Stories: Exploring

Identity Through Art and Poetry 81
6 Art as Exploration: Jacob Lawrence and the Great

Migration 117
xi
xii CONTENTS
7 Making Claims and Making Change: Creative

Responses to the 1619 Project 143
8 Point of View: Stepping Inside the Story 159
9 Teaching as Transaction: Building Community

Through Shared Inquiry 185
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 205
Appendix 213
Visual Art and Artists 215
Index 219
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Word cloud 1 2

Fig. 2.2 Onion goddess 28
Fig. 2.3 Ghana beads 31
Fig. 2.4 Mr. Bear 33
Fig. 2.5 Record 34
Fig. 2.6 Internal word cloud 42
Fig. 3.2 Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the
Elder, 1558 59
Fig. 4.1 Word cloud 68
Fig. 6.2 Maria 121
Fig. 6.3 Roy 122
Fig. 6.4 Andy 124
Fig. 6.5 Ema 125
Fig. 6.6 Fabilisa 129
Fig. 6.7 Assad 131
Fig. 6.8 Harlan 133
Fig. 6.9 Loraines 136
Fig. 6.10 Nelson 140
Fig. 7.2 Tubman 1 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by
Elliott Guzman) 154
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 7.3 Tubman 2 (Source “Swing Low” Alison Saar. Photo by

Elliott Guzman) 155
Fig. 8.1 Cloud 159
Fig. 9.1 Cloud 186
Fig. 10.1 Cloud 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 1

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
2 A. N. GULLA AND M. H. SHERMAN
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 devel-
opment. 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 simultane-
ously 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
1 INTRODUCTION AND LOOKING BOTH WAYS … 3
teacher and an education professor, we bring to this project the experi-

ence 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 “stu-
dents” 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 gener-
ated 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
or imagination in any way. If they are mentioned at all, it is with an expec-

tation 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 method-
ology 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 rela-
tionship 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 commu-
nity 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
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 devel-
opment 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 philos-
ophy 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 collabo-
ration 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 expec-
tations 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
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 class-
rooms, and then returning to the learning space in order to reflect on
their practices. In order to frame the possibilities of such creative collab-
orations 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 back-
grounds 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
same neighborhood in which he later taught, into a working-class Italian-

American 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 organiza-
tion 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 back-
grounds 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 even-
tually 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
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 encoun-
ters (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
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
day to day as a school student. The actors who gathered in our apart-
ment 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 intel-
lectually 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, commu-
nity, 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 comfort-
able 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
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 student-
driven 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 tradi-
tions 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 transforma-
tion” 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 posi-
tive, 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.
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 over-
whelmed 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 imag-
ined 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 discus-
sion 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).
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 trajec-
tory 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 transforma-
tion 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
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, intel-
lectually. 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
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 imagina-
tion. 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/graduation-
requirements.
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-what-
you-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 condi-

tions 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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_2
even under “normal” circumstances, we are almost always teaching trau-

matized 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 along-
side 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
2 TEACHING TO MEET THE MOMENT 19
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 inti-
mate. 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.
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 strug-
gling readers, requiring that they attend closely to unfamiliar material and
actively engage in a meaning-making process. The overlapping vocabu-
laries of the various arts can help students gain a deeper understanding of
the terminology of the Language Arts classroom. We can all recall stan-
dardized exams requiring multiple choice or short answers about tone
and mood, symbolism, and metaphor in the context of studying canon-
ical 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 plat-
form. 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
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 essen-
tial 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 contex-
tual 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.
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 comfort-
able 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 anecdo-
tally 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 imagina-
tion, 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.
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 straight-
forward 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 under-
stand that we all have a place in “the family of things,” and take comfort
in knowing that the world goes on.
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 opportu-
nity 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)
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
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 imag-
ination, 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 Migra-
tion 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
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.”
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

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 palm-
sized 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.
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
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 experi-
ence. 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
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 assign-
ment, 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.
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

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 photo-
graph 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

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.
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 determi-
nation 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
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 prac-
tices 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 discon-
certing 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
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 disap-
peared 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 Trau-
matic Stress Committee 2011) in addition to singular event traumas. This
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 academi-
cally 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 confer-
encing 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 commu-
nity 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 trau-
matic 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.

students or avoid being labeled as a “bad kid” throughout their educa-

tion 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 adminis-
trators 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 over-
load 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, atten-
tion, executive skills, and abstract reasoning (Beers and De Bellis 2002;
Pynoos et al. 1995; Cicchetti and Toth 1998). Then the ongoing noth-
ingness exploded into the civil uprising of BLM protests triggering new
or previous trauma which impacted student focus, processing, and reac-
tivity. 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
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 discus-
sion going. I sent out a homework assignment asking all students to share
five sentences or even five words that express or capture their experi-
ence of what many call Quarantimes. This was both an opportunity for
overwhelmed students to be heard and to achieve a completed task.
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 connec-
tions. 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 experi-
ence 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

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 commu-

nity. 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.
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.
The pandemic lockdown triggered quite a few students’ anxiety and/or

depression around the isolation it created or the fear of death every-
where, 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, height-
ened, 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 commu-
nity 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 lock-
down world as it exploded with dehumanizing images streaming more
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 experi-
ences 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
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.
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 expres-
sion 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.
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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.
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.
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NY: Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education.
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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.
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professionals. Los Angeles, CA, and Durham, NC: National Center for Child
Traumatic Stress.
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Teachers College Press.
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Press.
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and adaptation (pp. 72–95). New York: Wiley.
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higher education. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
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a trauma-sensitive classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
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ambiguity, tension, and associative logic. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, &
P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences.
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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 educa-
tion 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 standard-
ized 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 criti-
cized because they “devalue literature as art” and that they “devalue

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_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
3 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT TEXTS … 53
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 ques-
tion 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 inte-
grated. 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’ experi-
ence 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.
The voices of those who create the mentor texts we study in class
become part of the classroom community. Through expansive discus-
sion 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 what-
ever 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 perfor-
mance, 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 imme-
diate 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 strate-
gies 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 obser-
vation, questioning, and art making, is in keeping with Maxine Greene’s
notion of aesthetic education (2001) which is characterized by “conscious
encounters with the arts” (p. 5). This approach helps students develop the
capacity to discuss a wide range of forms of expression including litera-
ture and the arts and is not dependent upon prior knowledge. Because we
begin with what students can observe and proceed up a ladder of ques-
tioning, there are multiple points of entry for students regardless of their
backgrounds.
We use a combination of print materials and visual art in these exam-
ples. 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 readi-
ness 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 conversa-
tions 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
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 essen-

tial 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 fore-
ground 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.
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 fisher-
man’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
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 Land-
scape 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 Land-
scape 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
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.
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
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 every-
thing. One student who had been severely ill with COVID-19 early in the
pandemic and was still struggling to fully recover and process the expe-
rience 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 trea-
sure 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
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 mid-
fall 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.
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:

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 …
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.
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
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 initia-
tive. Retrieved June 10, 2020, from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Lit
eracy/.
NY State Education Department. (2017). New York State Next Gener-
ation 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-common-
core-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 juxta-
poses “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 mate-
rials 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,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_4
Fig. 4.1 Word cloud
then our bodies, our senses, and our voices all become vehicles for artic-
ulating 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
4 IMAGINING THE WORLD AS IF IT COULD BE OTHERWISE … 69
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 orienta-
tion, 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 depart-
ment 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).
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 paint-
ings 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 Bear-
den’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 Inter-
national 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 paint-
ings. 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 antiq-
uity 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 paint-
ings, which in turn are a response to Homer’s epic (Romare Bearden
Foundation, n.d.). The poems continually reframe Odysseus’ wanderings
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 connec-
tions 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 slave-
ship 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:
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 interrelation-
ship 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,
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.
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 assign-
ment, 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
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.
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 asso-
ciations 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
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 Sun-
a 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.
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 possibili-
ties 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 Insti-
tution 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 Exhibi-
tion 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.
transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322.
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-to-
the-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 Kings-

bridge 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 Interna-
tional 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 displace-
ment 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 Inter-
national had one of the highest percentages of students identified as
Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE) in New York City.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_5
Fig. 5.1 Word cloud
A student with an interrupted education might have a temporary inter-

ruption 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 radi-
cally 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.
5 ANALYZING AND SYNTHESIZING OUR STORIES … 83
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
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, unde-
sired, 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.
Both Amanda and I too often found that the students we understood
to be multilingual and culturally rich, often had internalized the “bro-
kenness” 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 rich-
ness 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 expe-
riences. 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)
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 Educa-
tion (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 reflec-
tive, introspective thought was often too painful and repressed in the face
of the need to survive and succeed and most simply, English. Most educa-
tors 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 memo-
ries 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. Further-
more, 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.
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 prac-
tice 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 experi-
ence “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 trau-
matic 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 reten-
tion of the language of painful teasing/bullying. When I questioned him
regarding the question mark, he explained it was because he wondered
2 Pseudonym.
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 privi-
lege 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 post-
colonial 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).
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 discus-
sion. 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 state-
ment 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.
Students who are struggling with language are by necessity, literal, and
often seek the language learners’ holy grail: formal vocabulary instruc-
tion. 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’ obser-
vation 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 some-
thing 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,
and academic knowledge to create questions around the image. The direc-
tion 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 agree-
ment 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 connec-
tions, observations and prior academic learning freed students from the
paralyzing search for a correct answer. I left all the chart papers of ques-
tions 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 ques-
tions 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 coun-
tries, 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
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 ques-
tion 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.
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 over-
sized 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 brief-
case 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
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
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, test-
driven 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 under-
standing 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
through this process in a language and country that are new and unfa-
miliar 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 immi-
grants, 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
wanted to show the complexity of their identities to those who dehuman-

ized 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 perspec-

tives.
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.
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 misfor-
tunes 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 remem-
bered 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
borderline and the experience of being a hyphenated American, Fabilisa

had not realized how she and others were being defined and dehuman-
ized 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 Amer-
ican 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
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 flow-
ering 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
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 tech-
nically 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.
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 mono-
lingual 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 deep-
ening specificity and imagery in description. We discussed choosing the
language that best fits the emotion and energy of the moment when
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 expres-
sions 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.
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
went online and found a website that showed him how to select the char-
acters 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.
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.
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 ordi-
nary 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
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
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 publi-
cation 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 expres-
sive writing through our own workshop experiences. Ibrahim reflected
that the sharing of the poems
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 some-
what 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 grand-
daughter. 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
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 expres-
sion. 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
this was not an easy image. None though connected it to the “other-
ing” and oppression of people of color the way American born BIPOC
students would. It is not that these students hadn’t experienced preju-
dice 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, heteronorma-
tive 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 argu-
ment 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
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 demon-
strates 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 founda-
tionally 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
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.
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.
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/multiple-
intelligences-howard-gardner-video.
social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
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.
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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 prac-
tice the skills of close examination (noticing), questioning, analysis, and
production of a work of art in response.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_6
Fig. 6.1 Word cloud
The use of poetry and fine art to do the work of analysis and argu-
ment 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 vocab-
ulary 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 vocabu-
lary 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).
6 ART AS EXPLORATION: JACOB LAWRENCE AND THE GREAT MIGRATION 119
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 Kings-
bridge 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 ques-
tions 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
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 immi-
gration 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 Immi-
gration 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.
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.
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 grandmoth-
er’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,
“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.
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
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
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.
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.
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

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.
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 away
a thin line of 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.
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
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 depri-
vation 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 “man-
age” 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 avail-
able 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 experi-
encing 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
Fig. 6.8 Harlan
war in the painting that opened our inquiry work. He watched docu-
mentaries 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 hand-
cuffed 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,

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
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 relation-
ships 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 what-
ever language” they appeared. Upon hearing she could use Spanish, she
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
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.

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 under-
stand 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 dehu-
manizes 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.
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 some-
times 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
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
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 commu-
nity 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.
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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_7
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).
7 MAKING CLAIMS AND MAKING CHANGE: CREATIVE RESPONSES … 145
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 inter-
pretive 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 jour-
nalism 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 recog-
nized 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 “Whites-
plaining,” 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
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 reve-
lations 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 acknowl-
edge 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 Wilker-
son’s breathtaking account of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other
Suns. The book is both expansive and meticulously researched, telling
the epic story through the lives of three individuals, their stories inter-
woven 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 narra-
tive 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,
all but guaranteeing a lynching.
Newspapers alerted readers to the time and place-

Spectacles 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 igno-
rant. We see this play out over and over again in our history, propaganda
is successful when utilized to sway the ignorant masses. (Auletta 2019)
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 Amer-
ican 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.
Our class discussion of the two videos centered on the aesthetic choices
Giddens made in telling these stories, speaking in the voice of her char-
acters 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 Fugi-
tive 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).
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
the circumstances of his life, and how the rule-bound institutional struc-
ture 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
always enjoyed having social studies students in my classes because the

blending of the two subjects into the humanities offers a richer perspec-
tive, 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 multisen-
sory 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 foot-
prints 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.
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.
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.
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 student-
friendly 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 indi-
vidual 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.
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.
transformations. The High School Journal, 63(8), 316–322.
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
Fig. 8.1 Cloud

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_8
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-foot-
long 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 charac-
ters, 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
8 POINT OF VIEW: STEPPING INSIDE THE STORY 161
“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
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, espe-
cially some of the women, remarked that the end stanza about the “party
of robust fellows” felt more menacing than picturesque, as their experi-
ences 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
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 ampli-
fying 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 confi-
dence 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 exten-
sion, 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.
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.
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.

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

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
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.
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 Rail-
road (2016). This book employs the element of magical realism as it
imagines the underground railroad to be an actual railroad with elabo-
rately 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 Conven-
tion 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:
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 metacog-
nitive 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 ostra-

cized 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 emotion-

ally 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 rela-
tionships was not surprising to many of the teachers in the room who
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.

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

Many could escape if they all worked together. (Martindale 2019)
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 person-
ification. 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.
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 under-
ground
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)
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 recita-
tion, “I’ve got a secret” postcards (created digitally and otherwise), digital
slideshows, one-pagers, posters, etc. Drawing on this (their) prior knowl-
edge, 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 manipu-
lation, 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 oppor-
tunity to my students will allow them the freedom to express their
creativity through a chosen medium while minimizing the stress of getting
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 assign-
ments 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 inquiry-
based arts activities as formative and summative assessments. I chose to
do this partially due to the Teacher’s College approach which encour-
aged 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.
My previous experience with students for whom standardized testing

played a life-altering role had been teaching at a secondary school origi-
nally 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 fami-
lies 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 ludi-
crous 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 genera-
tion. 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 devel-
oping 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
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 commu-
nity 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 neigh-
boring 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 Agri-
cultural 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
and lived their understanding of Shakespeare and other authors we read

and debated.
I believe the lived knowledge of the play acquired through perfor-
mance 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 characteriza-
tion 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 indepen-
dent 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.
Christopher Emdin addresses how this experience plays out in Amer-

ican 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 consid-
ering its density and linguistic requirements. It seemed important to
engage in the themes and experiences detailed in Wright’s autobiograph-
ical 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. Thank-
fully, 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
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 respon-
sibilities, 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 arti-
cles 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 tradi-
tional 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,
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, charac-
terization, 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,
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 Amer-
ican 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 expe-
rience, 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
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 connec-
tions 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 imag-
ined 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 oppo-
site 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.
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 Depart-
ment of Education’s own measures for many years. They consistently
scored well, in fact, until I was given a scripted curriculum by a well-
intentioned 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 “cre-
ate”. 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).
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 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.
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.
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9105307086703.
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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/i-
hear-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 confer-
ences or in professional development contexts, one of the most frequently
asked questions is how we managed to persuade students to be vulner-
able 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).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_9
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 foun-
dation 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
9 TEACHING AS TRANSACTION: BUILDING COMMUNITY … 187
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 intellec-
tual 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 devel-

opment (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 connec-
tions, 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 rhetor-
ical 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
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 perspec-
tive. There are administrators who demand maximum skill building into
all the available time of a class and will penalize what seems unquan-
tifiable 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 ques-
tions, 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
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 confer-
encing are widely used in K-12 schools and teacher education contexts
because they provide many moments that support and deepen the foun-
dation 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
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 poten-
tial 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 curricu-
lums 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 inter-
rupted 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
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 commu-
nity 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 expe-
riences 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)
Educators all over the world navigate our positionality in classroom

communities based on race, socioeconomic status, gender, gender iden-
tity, 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 commu-
nity 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 oppres-
sion he saw in his community. Money is power, money talks and more
literally for students who might experience homelessness and food inse-
curity, 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 under-
standing 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
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, acknowl-
edging, 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 revela-
tions. 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 commu-
nity. This language of the classroom also became a part of students’
informal written and spoken discourse as demonstrated by two reluc-
tant 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.
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 inter-
action 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 develop-
ment of voice. Working with others and developing their voice, students
grew and developed, which was reflected in measures personal, summa-
tive 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 incon-
ceivable 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
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 chal-
lenge 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
as writers through peer support and discourse around themes and iden-
tity. 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 narra-
tive/creative writing. Students have a build in resource of ideas, obser-
vations, 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. Self-
defense 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
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 experi-
ence 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 priv-
ilege 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.
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 commu-
nities. 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 inquiry-
based 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 addi-
tional 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 strug-
gling. 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
School, at the South Bronx middle school where I taught, at the current
high school at which I teach, and in the undergraduate and grad-
uate 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 disproportion-
ately 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 psychi-
atric care facilities. These actions create further traumas for the students,
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 trauma-
tized 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 trau-
matic 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 ther-
apeutic 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 mate-
rial 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).
larger group. Student engagement grew as they began to recognize them-

selves 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 under-
standing and connection for them as educators, but also it can be a trigger
set off unexpectedly. Awareness is the key to managing the difficult situ-
ations 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.
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 commu-
nity 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 accor-
dance 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 experi-

ence 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.
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 Eliz-
abeth’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 expe-
rience 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
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 commu-
nity. 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

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5_10
Teachers who have not had opportunities to explore their own creative-
Creative 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, expe-
rience 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 Pre-
K-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
10 THIS IS NOT FOR ME: IN WHICH WE DISCUSS … 207
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 “seri-
ous” 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
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 Migra-
tion 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 connec-
tions 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.
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 ques-
tion. Students would then work in groups and attempt to answer each
other’s questions and ask follow up questions. That continued discus-
sion 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 quali-
ties of what we hear and see” (2001, p. 18). This prolonged observation,
questioning, and discussion are at the heart of the practice. Just as impor-
tant 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 orga-
nized 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 immer-
sive 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 uncomfort-
able, 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 under-
standings, their teachers need to have the experience of immersion in the
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 under-
stand 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 espe-
cially 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 previ-
ously had robust education programs no longer do this kind of work at
all. That, too, represents an obstacle to developing a practice in inquiry-

based 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/.
social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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 direc-
tion. 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 213
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5
214 APPENDIX
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 educa-
tors, 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-boarder-
line.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.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5
216 VISUAL ART AND ARTISTS
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/wallace-
stevens#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.
VISUAL ART AND ARTISTS 217
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/.
218 VISUAL ART AND ARTISTS
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 Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, 56–58,

Aesthetic, 8–10, 88, 107, 143, 150, 60–62, 206
156, 167, 210, 211
Aesthetic education, 1, 5, 8, 54, 211
Aesthetic inquiry, 12, 68, 72, 209 C
Alvarez, Julia, 163, 164 City University of New York (CUNY),
Artmaking, 1, 2, 20, 26, 53, 54, 61, 5, 17
67, 68, 156, 206, 208, 210, 211 Common Core Standards, 5, 8, 13,
Auden, W.H., 57, 58, 60–62, 207 95, 207
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 216, 217
Covid-19, 20, 24, 27, 43
Creative, 1, 4–8, 10–13, 19, 22–24,
B 26, 27, 37, 40, 48, 52–54, 70,
Bearden, Romare, 70–72, 120, 132, 72, 74, 86, 94, 96, 99, 102, 113,
161 120, 135, 147, 149, 150, 156,
BIPOC, 39, 45, 46, 112, 132, 134, 168–170, 172–174, 178, 186,
135 189, 195–198, 201, 203, 204,
Black Lives Matter, 36, 39 206, 208–211
Blackout poetry, 150, 181 Creativity, 3–6, 8, 9, 12, 51, 76, 88,
Bloom’s Taxonomy, 182 172, 206, 208, 210, 211
Bronx, The, 5, 17, 81, 84–88, 139, Critical pedagogy, 187
195 Critical thinking, 197
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57137-5
220 INDEX
D 195, 197, 202, 208, 210, 211,

Dewey, John, 8, 14, 15, 19, 53, 55, 213, 214
78 Inquiry-based learning, 2, 4
Inquiry-based learning through the
arts, 1, 5, 48, 51, 54, 61, 67,
E 88, 97, 114, 153, 187, 198,
Ekphrastic poetry, 56, 58, 70 206–209, 212–214
Elbow, Peter, 41, 48, 88, 113, 176 International high school, 5, 12, 70,
Embodied inquiry, 176 81, 117, 120, 199, 203
English language learners (Ells), 55,
81, 96, 209
Espada, Martin, 160 K
Kahlo, Frida, 5, 9, 14, 88–93, 117,
132, 209
F Kenya, 11, 101, 173, 174, 176, 177,
Found poetry, 73, 180, 181 187, 209, 210
Freire, Paolo, 15
L
G Lawrence, Jacob, 14, 26, 54, 120–
Giddens, Rhiannon, 26, 147–150, 122, 128, 132, 133, 135, 139,
161 141, 147, 152, 208, 209
Greene, Maxine, 1, 2, 8, 14, 15, 21, Lehman College, 5, 7, 81, 84, 96,
22, 26, 48, 54, 67, 68, 85, 143, 199
145, 173, 207–211, 213 Lived experience, 14, 67, 85, 100,
210
Lockdown, 21, 22, 36, 37, 39–41, 45
H Lyon, George Ella, 14, 100
Hughes, Langston, 140, 162–164,
166
M
Mentor text, 41, 53, 54, 56
Morrison, Toni, 200
I
Imagination, 4–6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 26,
27, 51, 56, 67, 68, 76, 173, 182, N
191, 195, 208, 210, 211 New York City Writing Project
Imaginative inquiry, 67 (NYCWP), 12, 41, 189
Immersive pedagogy, 3 The New York Times 1619 Project,
Inquiry, 1, 2, 5, 9, 20, 26, 37, 48, 26
54, 67, 68, 70, 78, 85, 87, 88,
91–93, 98, 100, 112, 117, 119,
120, 132, 133, 143, 146, 153, O
156, 173, 177–180, 182, 185, Odyssey, The, 71
INDEX 221
Oliver, Mary, 23, 24, 26, 29, 34 South Bronx, 6, 7, 11, 173, 176, 177,
199, 209
Standardized testing, 8, 95, 174, 188
P
Pandemic, 17, 20–25, 33, 36–39, 41,
42, 45, 46 T
Pedagogy, 2, 6, 19, 95, 145, 146, Teacher candidate, 2–4, 19–21, 51,
193–195, 214 52, 69, 156, 161, 207, 210
Poetic inquiry, 25, 94, 144 Teacher educator, 2, 5, 6, 211
Prendergast, Monica, 144 Transaction, 53, 55, 59, 67, 117
Process writing, 189 Translanguaging, 102, 163, 164, 193
Traumatized learners, 10, 17, 18, 20,
40, 86, 199, 200
R
Racism, 43–45, 99, 132, 146, 163,
181, 194, 197, 200 V
Remote learning, 11 Vygotsky, Lev, 11, 12, 48, 68, 175,
Romano, Tom, 9, 41, 96, 114 187, 190, 197, 198
Rosenblatt, Louise, 55, 67, 68, 117,
176
W
Whitman, Walt, 162–164, 166
S Wilkerson, Isabel, 146
Secondary trauma, 200 Williams, William Carlos, 58, 61, 69
Smith, Tracy K., 9, 161 Word cloud, 3, 41, 42, 118
Snowber, Celeste, 23
Social imagination, 22, 85, 213
Social justice, 10, 15, 156, 161, 166, Z
194, 202 Zoom, 36, 37, 39, 173
Somehowly, 36 Zoom bombing, 39

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CREATIVITY, EDUCATION AND THE ARTS

Amanda Nicole Gulla

• To publish creativity research and theory in relation to education

More information about this series at

Creativity, Education and the Arts

Cover illustration: © Salvatore Gulla

The “Upside-Down” of Creative

Importantly, the authors tell us that “Teachers need to be able to

political pedagogical activism are kept faithfully and dynamically alive in

I would like to thank my son Cooper whose thoughtfulness and support

1 Introduction and Looking Both Ways: How

2 Teaching to Meet the Moment 17

3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Texts:

4 Imagining the World as If It Could Be Otherwise:

5 Analyzing and Synthesizing Our Stories: Exploring

6 Art as Exploration: Jacob Lawrence and the Great

7 Making Claims and Making Change: Creative

8 Point of View: Stepping Inside the Story 159

9 Teaching as Transaction: Building Community

10 This Is Not for Me: In Which We Discuss Some

Visual Art and Artists 215

Fig. 1.1 Word cloud 1 2

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

Introduction and Looking Both Ways: How

Aesthetic education is an approach to teaching and learning that teaches

I (Amanda) had been teaching aesthetic education courses as part of the

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Fig. 1.1 Word cloud 1

teacher and an education professor, we bring to this project the experi-

A Word About Word Clouds

Creating an Immersive Pedagogy

or imagination in any way. If they are mentioned at all, it is with an expec-

This class allowed me to be vulnerable without even realizing it. Sharing

That experience of being “comfortable about being uncomfortable”

self-confidence. This book attempts to make the practices of teachers

learners had taught us that the opportunity to experiment with a variety

Amanda Gulla: Live Your Life Like an Artist

same neighborhood in which he later taught, into a working-class Italian-

science experiment, opportunities to write poems and stories. There were

administrators tend to be so preoccupied with the quantifiable, learning

Molly Sherman: Placed in Worlds

plazas, dancing reflecting centuries of culture occurred in the streets in

It was in the South Bronx I learned that students often had no

Why Voice Matters

Voice always matters. It matters so much that in more than a few

Art as a Portal to Voice

Teaching to Meet the Moment

In which we discuss how we had to suddenly adapt to teaching condi-

Teaching and Learning

© The Author(s) 2020 17

Fig. 2.1 Word cloud 2

even under “normal” circumstances, we are almost always teaching trau-

Integrating both language-based and non-language-based art forms

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

The soft animal of my body loves

Tell me about despair, yours…

I’ll tell you about despair, mine…

Now we pause long enough to see the hands and hearts,