One year ago, my community suffered a devastating loss, which called into question the very systems upholding the safety of the neighborhoods my students and I call home. In the wake of this tragedy, street art has been popping up around the community. This art is varied and unique, giving a platform to unheard voices. It is empowering, celebrates diversity, and represents an outcry for justice. I began to wonder how I could include these amazing pieces in my classroom to foster conversation, create an opportunity for my students to share, listen, and learn from one another, and connect with what I’m teaching in Algebra.

Through this fellowship, I will travel to Philadelphia, home to the nation’s largest public art program. I will explore the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, learning about the ways that one community has used art to ignite change. My primary activity while traveling will be to explore the murals of Philadelphia, the world’s largest open-air art gallery. I will participate in three different walking tours, led by professional guides and local experts:

• The “Mural Mile City Center” tour will introduce me to the stories of Philadelphia’s culturally rich downtown.
• The “West Philadelphia” tour will teach me about leaders and change-makers who faced tremendous barriers and
  paved the way for change in Philadelphia for years to come.
• Lastly, the “Morals & Murals: Tales from Our Hood” tour will use art to teach me about the experiences of life in Philadelphia from one of its very own community members.

Once home, I will reframe my Linear Functions unit through the lens of art – drawing inspiration from both the established art scene of Philadelphia and new works of street art appearing in my own community.

My ultimate goal is to explore how art can empower personal expression, celebrate who we are, and move us forward, while also deepening connections to foundational Algebraic understanding.

I will utilize what I’ve learned to reframe my Linear Functions unit, a foundational skill for Algebra and higher-level math, through the lens of art. I hope that through this reimagining, I will be able to better engage my students in learning, make my curriculum more representative of my students and their experiences, and connect the content to my students’ realities. As we move further into our unit, exploring art will drive our mathematical learning. We will use graphing software to recreate parts of the murals that sparked the students’ interests, exploring how modifying the slope, y-intercept, or domain of a function changes the design of a piece.

After using Philadelphia’s murals to explore linear functions, students will leverage their mathematical understanding and creative inspiration to create their own piece of original “linear artwork.” They will first design their art using graphing software, and then bring their artwork to life on the walls of our school. My principal has already given her permission for a student mural, and I colleagues in the art department who are willing and eager to collaborate with me on this endeavor.

I work in a district where, according to our most recent state-wide test, only 29.3% of students are proficient at math. We know that algebra is a gateway to graduation and future success in college and careers, so our school has responded by doubling the amount of time our students spend learning math. Even so, students are still struggling. Despite my best efforts to bring the world into our classroom, many students wonder, “Why do we have to learn this?” It can be challenging to find authentic opportunities to connect social justice to my curriculum. This problem is complex and I certainly don’t have all of the answers. But I do know that when students feel disconnected from the content being taught, their engagement, and ultimately learning, suffers. If students feel that what they’re learning doesn’t matter, some don’t buy into what’s happening in the classroom. If the world around my students feels like it is imploding, and I as an educator do nothing to address it, I am tone deaf to the lives they lead.

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Emily Kjesbo-Johnson teaches high school math and drama at Washington Technology Magnet School in Saint Paul, MN. She has been teaching since 2008 after working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda and an AmeriCorp volunteer on Saint Paul’s West Side. Emily holds an undergraduate degree from Bethel University and a Masters in Teaching from Hamline University. She is also a two-time FFT Fellow.

• In 2019, Emily captured in virtual reality Thailand’s history, culture and architecture to create case studies for the analysis of geometric properties and theorems set amidst the rich backdrop of the Southeast Asian nation. Here is her summary of this fellowship.
• In 2014, she used a grant to explore how Apartheid continues to affect issues of racial injustice, self worth, motivation and academic achievement to inform discussions on social justice and build a math curriculum based on the principals of reconciliation. Watch her presentation about this experience here.

Emily was awarded one of Fund for Teachers’ new Innovation Grants to undertake her research in Philadelphia this summer. Click here for additional Innovation Grant recipients and to be inspired by their plans.

On the final day of their fellowship, Alice Laramore and Kat Atkins-Pattenson shared with us their reflection on a four-week, 9,000 mile road trip along the United States/Mexico border exploring language arts, visual arts, immigration and identity. Thank you, Team Paredes Que Hablan (or Walls That Speak) for sharing your experiences and hope for future students.

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Our students cross borders every day. They switch from home language to school language and back again.Their warm presence, giggles, and questions invite new families inside our school buildings. And, everywhere they go, our students carry the imprint of their family members who came to Boston for refuge, for freedom, for opportunity. Every time these young people change spaces, they reconcile their identities and pasts with their presents and futures.

We know that for students to truly succeed academically, they must see mirrors of themselves in our curricula – art, media, and text – and validation of their identities in our classroom spaces. While we can empathize with our students, as white female teachers, we do not truly understand the depth of our students’ experiences. To effectively understand our students’ experiences, we need to cross borders ourselves and experience the displacement our students have experienced traversing these borders.

Today, the last day of our trip, we are energized by the Borders and Identity Unit that we have built and will use to launch the year with our students. We are flooded with all that we’ve seen in our seven cities. We are entrenched in the creative part of teaching, the part that involves being an interesting, engaged individual to better support the interesting, engaged individuals in our classrooms. The part that means we learn something new in order to teach something new. The experience of being a learner better prepares a teacher to teach, and this summer was an opportunity for us to authentically learn about murals on different borders, to confront not knowing and to investigate, to use art as a lens into community.

Watch in this video the artistic expression Kat and Alice captured in three countries and seven cities to help students answer the question: “How do we show other people the depth of our past and the strength of our future?”

This month, we immersed ourselves in adult project-based learning. We’ve tried lots of new things, from food to cloud-mountain hiking to driving to places we’d never been (while blogging) to talking about art from sunrise to sunset. And we’ve done the whole thing together. Often, in our classrooms, we create groups that we believe will benefit from the individuality of each member. We build in scaffolds meant to allow the group to discover each individual’s strengths and to make empathy a non-negotiable. Though we embarked with empathy and respect already in place, our twenty-six days together have illuminated the strengths and areas of growth (thanks, BPS, for the language) of our partnership. We both value efficiency, and, in the face of less-than-such (e.g., when the internet goes as turtle-pace, when people get motion sick, when you walk up the wrong side of the mountain, etc.), we have learned much about each other. That knowledge has made us better collaborators and better friends.

In San Francisco, where we started our trip, we were oriented to the idea of looking. This was not just because there was so much to look at in The Mission, but also because we did our first day with a guide, who was able to re-frame what we had seen and interpreted in the context of history and community. Carla made us cognizant of how much we needed other people’s knowledge and understanding to build our own. The Pacoima (L.A.) murals added a layer of “looking around corners” to that concept. On the hottest day of our trip, we spent the majority of it seeking out art on the walls of automotive dealerships and in the parking lots of community centers. It wasn’t always going to be all in one alley. In San Diego, a park once occupied by people and now occupied by art, had us looking for four hours and not seeing enough. We returned home those nights googling Aztec symbols and stories, trying to learn enough to know something.

Tucson and Dr. Acosta gave us yet another frame through which to experience our learning. Freedom of education does not mean freedom to learn about the American Revolution and the Civil War through a lens of whiteness. Precious Knowledge, to our generation of “urban baby teachers,” is a reflection of our intentions. Though we (the generation of “urban baby teachers”) are in no way united in our vision or our understanding of social justice, the power of conviction in ideas, history, and lifting stories and voices drove us into the work of education. We wonder if Dr. Acosta knows how many teachers who are only five or six years in are tracking his legal battle and celebrating his victories, most recently the repeal of Arizona’s ban on ethic studies which a district court deemed racist and targeting of Mexican Americans.

In Santa Fe, we absorbed the International Folk Art Market, how artists envision and reimagine, how tradition can morph modern and can accommodate the present day without reneging its roots. This mirrors the murals we’ve seen and the art of Frida Kahlo, taking symbols from the past and bringing them to life in the now. In Mexico City, we saw so much. Teotihuacan, Frida, Diego, the Anthropology Museum, street art, the culinary art of Pujol, the stained glass and craters of Toluca. With American eyes and feet, we navigated the city, and learned all that we still had to learn.

It is hard to classify this experience, and even harder to know all that it will bring to our classrooms. It falls somewhere in the vicinity of sabbatical – an intentional, purposeful break that brings new insight – but also touches the realm of professional development, continuing education, and a creative project. We envision a unit with three parts. First, with our students, we will read several memoirs that broadly address the topic of borders and walls, thinking with our students about potential barriers and how to scale them. Second, we will all generate and share memoirs from our own lives on the same topic. The author of each memoir will formulate his or her own theme about the topic, communicating a piece of knowledge gained from navigating–either adeptly or crudely–a border. Finally, after examining many primary sources collected on our trip and within Boston, students will co-construct a mural combining the themes of their memoirs to create a community creation.

The idea of “insider and outsider” has been, in many ways, the crux of our travels. We asked questions and navigated our identity as visitor, as white visitor, as American, as woman. In our classrooms we are often the the outsiders to the communities in which we teach. However our ethnicities and upbringing reflect the dominant histories and tools that are demanded from dominant culture. In this unit, we hope to illuminate these walls, supporting students to name them, scale them, and ultimately paint them. As humanities teachers, we believe that providing students vocabulary and time to think and discuss the world and its issues leads to a brighter, more creative, and smarter future than the two of us can imagine. Solutions lie in the writing, in the art, in the conversations, and in the relationships that students create. Just as we wrote in our FFT proposal, students must see themselves reflected in curriculum, in physical space, and in pedagogy in order to be successful. Because we do not physically reflect our students’ identities, we think constantly about how to make all other facets of our teaching affirming. This unit and this project will be a launching point for discussions about personal identity, community, and what comes next.

In Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson and Santa Fe, this fellowship made space for us to be learners. After the twelfth grade, those opportunities almost always come with one (or many) literal costs. And Fund for Teachers (along with the school year calendar) gave us the time, space and finances to learn more in a way that will support our students, but also in a way that sustains us as teachers, professionals, and individuals. It made it possible for us to end the trip feeling rejuvenated rather than depleted. There is a constant push for teachers to continue professional development; it is indeed essential. But driving this profession development experience (and literally driving more than 900 miles) meant that we could pace our learning and reflection, and that we could intentionally choose meaningful experiences that hit our “zone of proximal development.”

If you’d like to know more about our trip, we’ve been writing the whole time. Read our blog at www.writingisthinking.org

In Solidarity,
Kat + Alice

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Alice is a 7th grade Humanities/Special Education teacher at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, MA. She infuses arts into her Humanities classes, most recently taking students to do pop-up Shakespearean theater in several Boston Public libraries. She works on a cross curricular team of teachers who study the intersection of English Language Learning and Special Education to build inclusive writing experiences in all contents.        

Kat is a 7th grade Humanities teacher at Gardner Pilot Academy K-8 School, a Pilot School in the Boston Public Schools. Katharine was a 2012-13 Donovan Urban Teaching Scholar at Boston College where she earned her Master’s in Secondary Education. Prior to becoming a teacher, Katharine built a college access program in rural Pennsylvania that continues to help first generation and undocumented students find the appropriate post-secondary fit while developing college and financial literacy
within the community.

Tammy Friedman believes the link between art and its history can help build bridges among different cultures, including the culture of a school. Cloonan Middle School in Stamford, CT, is experiencing a sharp increase in English Language Learners who speak Spanish at home. Realizing the lack of relationship between herself and students’ parents, Tammy turned to art (and a Fund for Teachers fellowship) to bridge the gap.

Last summer, Tammy developed under Barcelona artist Martin Brown skills to create “trencadis” mosaics popularized by Antoni Gaudi. Trendacis literally means “chopped,” referring to the fragmented shards and recycled materials pieced together to form images and/or patterns. When not in Brown’s class, Tammy embarked on daily field trips across Barcelona, exploring Gaudi’s masterpieces, such as those at Park Güell.

Tammy’s goals for this fellowship were:

1. to develop a bond with families,
2. teach students something they may not know about themselves and their culture, and
3. make them proud of their heritage.

With her new expertise, Tammy led 100 art students (40% of whom are Hispanic) in the creation of four 30 x 56 murals, which were installed around the school last week.

                                          

“The four mosaics represent Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, and Antoni Gaudi, including inspirational quotes from the artists,” said Tammy. “In addition, students painted cubist self-portraits, personal cultural art, surreal collages, surreal hands, and street art. This fellowship inspired me with new creative ideas to share with my students, not for just one year, but for years to come.”

“Tammy is one of three teachers at our school who have received Fund for Teachers fellowships and I can’t say enough about how they return re-energized and with experiences that are relevant to kids, which has a huge impact on how they respond,” said David Tate, principal at Cloonan Middle School. “Tammy’s project is particularly relevant, as our school’s single largest demographic is students from Latino homes, so for them to see this aspect of their culture on permanent display is huge.”

A group photo of students who created each mosaic is mounted alongside their artworks, which were praised by the mayor and the superintendent during a special showing.

Tammy chose for one mosaic Dali’s quote, “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” We love how Tammy embodies this quote as a role model for her students — taking her belief in the power of art from her classroom to Barcelona and back again to foster cultural pride and community relationships.

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Tammy has taught for 29 years, first with special education, then third grade, middle school Language Arts, and now Fine Arts. Recently she received a Spotlight Award for Teachers, one of 20 recipients nominated by peers and awarded from across the Stamford Public School district.

 

 

[minti_dropcap style=”box”]W[/minti_dropcap]hen Heather Ely purchased the college text book for her first music history course, she eagerly flipped through looking for female composers — and found none. Almost ten years later when creating the curriculum for her music students at Lake Park Elementary in Bethany, OK, available resources highlighted the same male composers who dominated her own education. She wondered, “Are there truly this few women who influenced music composition worth noting?”

Anna Beer’s book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music  provided a definitive answer and the basis for Heather’s Fund for Teachers fellowship. Last summer, she explored in five European countries the lives of women highlighted in Beer’s work to compare struggles with male counterparts and enrich students’ understanding of women’s compositional voices in four periods of music history.

“Beer recounts the sexism and frustrations that these women faced in the pursuit of their art and questions the impact of the loss of their legacies in our cultural heritage,” said Heather. “Gender determined so much of what the classical music world classifies as canonical, but Beer exposes the dangers of silencing these prolific voices in our society.”

Heather’s efforts to amplify their voices began in Venice with Baroque period, studying the life of composer Barbara Strozzi and her male contemporary, Antonio Vivaldi. A night train took her to Vienna and the Classical period, where she examined the legacy of Marianna Martines compared to Joseph Haydn. Leipzig, Germany, and the Romantic period presented opportunities to evaluate the relationship between piano prodigy, Clara Schumann, and her composer husband, Robert Schumann. Renegade musicians from the Impressionist and Modern periods came to life in Paris’ bohemian Ninth Arrondissement, artists such as Nadia and Lili Boulanger. Finally, the Women’s Suffragette movement in London provided the backdrop for Heather’s consideration how Elizabeth Maconchy and Benjamin Britten’s experiences differed, despite having the identical education.

This fall, music education for second-fifth graders has #balanceforbetter, the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day celebrated globally tomorrow, March 8. Specific changes Heather made post-fellowship include:

• Examination of a different musical period she researched per grade
• Researching what life was like for one male composer and one female composer during the musical period they study
• Listening to and analyzing  works of both male and female composers from the musical
  period being studied
• Exploring history trunks she created with artifacts from her fellowship, and,
• Publication of a book by fourth and fifth graders containing research of a male or female composer.

“This fellowship awakened a passion and thankfulness for the lives of all the women who came before me and fought for all the freedom and rights I enjoy today,” said Heather. “It also gave me a greater desire to share the narratives of people from all races and cultures. I know that this experience has changed my view of my abilities as both an educator and leader. I am more excited to take risks if it means better understanding and growth for my students and for me.”

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Heather is an elementary music teacher in northwest Oklahoma City for Putnam City Schools. She has spent all four years of her teaching career at Lake Park Elementary, and currently serves on her school’s leadership team as the Specials Team Leader. Heather enjoys helping her students explore culture and history through music. You can see more images from her fellowship on Instagram @elys_musicalmusings2018,  where we found this image and accompanying description:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote in the U.K. The Museum of London chronicles the bravery of the women involved in this movement. One such women was composer Dr. Ethel Smyth. Ethel was very close with Emmeline Pankhurst, and in 1912, she was arrested for her militant efforts to get the vote. Ethel and many other women were sent to Holloway Prison for their actions. What happened next is just my favorite! Women in the prison yard began singing “The March of the Women” which was composed by Ethel. She heard them and from her cell began to conduct their voices with her toothbrush! What resilience and courage these woman had! Thankful that their efforts prevailed so that I might have the rights I have today!

Last night’s Oscars telecast inspired some awards of our own. Without further ado, we present a few of our 2018 Fellows who designed learning experiences around the performing arts…

Most Creative Use of Funds
Diana D’Emeraude | Canyon Vista Middle School – Austin

To make the most of her 42-day stay across the pond, Diana found hostels with private rooms and pet-sat in three different homes — including one that had two cats and four chickens. Saving money on accommodations meant she could apply her $5,000 grant toward participating in a Shakespeare training program for teachers at the Globe Theatre in London, and attending 15 plays, ten classes, six tours, a conference, and multiple museums. Her goal was to create curricular units for middle and high school language arts/theatre teachers that help students develop critical thinking skills in the classroom and beyond.

“Taking classes on teaching Shakespeare with U.K. teachers helped me compare notes on their schools, how they taught, learn engaging activities, learn about and teach the plays and more about the English language,” said Diana. “Attending an International Theatre Teacher Conference helped me learn how theatre is taught in other countries and ways to improve my teaching, and classes at the Globe Theatre helped me learn more, not only of Shakespeare’s plays but also of other works written in that era.”

With her new knowledge, Diana started a Shakespeare Club where students explore the Bard’s plays, his style of writing, the importance of his works, the era, and how to perform monologues, scenes and the plays.

Best Sequel
Warren Pemsler, Ari Hauben and Chris Busch | McKinley South End Academy – Boston

In 2007, this teaching team was awarded a Fund for Teachers grant to tour art museums, theatres, stages and facilities in England, and then meet with outreach departments at museums in the Netherlands, to expand on their school’s partnerships with the Huntington Theatre and Institute of Contemporary Art. Eleven years later, these same teachers returned to London on their second FFT fellowship to explore London’s street art, contemporary art, and theatre communities to develop in-depth performing and visual arts units in collaboration with Boston Public School’s pilot Fab Lab.

Warren would like to thank his colleagues for their learning:

“Honestly, it was the collaboration with my colleagues that brought out new energy and ideas. By immersing ourselves in the content we teach and meeting with professionals who do similar things in London, we have planned new avenues to make our curriculum more vital to our students. After 28 years of teaching, I feel like I am embarking on a journey that will sustain me professionally and personally for years to come! I couldn’t be more thankful!”

This teaching team is working with students to create four large murals of the artists and playwrights they read and admire on exterior walls of the school building. This will lead to four “openings” for the school and neighborhood, as well as T-shirts so students can show off their work to the wider world.

Best Supporting Teacher
Christine Jamerson | Roseburg High School, Rosburg, OR

Christine designed her fellowship around information she learned from a previous workshop with Eric Jensen called “Teaching with Poverty in Mind.” There, she learned that the working memory of students who experience poverty is very limited. As a drama teacher, Christine knew how memorizing lines and stage directions helps build one’s working memory, in addition to self-efficacy and self-confidence. Therefore, she participated in the Broadway Teachers Workshop in New York City and learned strategies for using theatre to support brain and soft-skill development.

“I learned so much about technical design, directing, and running a smooth program in the few short days I was at the workshop, it just blows me away.” said Christine. “I feel like my world has been opened up to different approaches I can take with my plays and musicals, and it all benefits my program. I have also gained a lot of confidence – I’m not only bringing new approaches, but I’m implementing them well.”

In order to reach the largest number of students possible, Christine and her theatre department formed an improv troupe open to all. They perform at assemblies, football game halftimes, and local middle schools.

Best Transformation
John Matthiessen | Branford High School – Branford, CT

John arrived at the Globe Theatre’s “Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance” workshop as a 58-year-old literature teacher and completed his fellowship as Ophelia, Hamlet’s love interest. He explains:

“Our director told us he was going to cast us ‘against type,’ and consequently, I was cast as Ophelia. Playing a teenage girl was a stretch. To do this, I had to not only overcome a certain amount of self-consciousness and stage fright, but also try to imagine and portray the emotions experienced by this doomed young girl. I was very proud of my final performance!”

John’s English students now spend less time interpreting text and more time in creative activities to demonstrate their understanding. Although he still includes rigorous reading and writing activities, he now concludes some units with a final role-play presentation (like the one he did) as a major grade. He’s found this kind of active, student-centered assessment makes learning a more social activity alongside their peers than the typical summative assessments.

The BIG winners are the students, whose learning changes from text to technicolor after their teachers return from summer fellowships. In her Best Supporting Actress acceptance speech last night, Regina King called herself an example of “what it looks like when support and love is poured into someone.” We believe the students of our Fellows look (and feel) the same way.

Pictured above: David Williams (Bacon Academy – Colchester, CT) who attended the Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance course at the Globe Theatre in London to learn practical approaches for engaging students from a variety of backgrounds and academic levels.

[minti_dropcap style=”normal”]A[/minti_dropcap]s part of the “follow up” portion of an FFT fellowship, grant recipients complete a Passport that documents their learning and where they plan to go from here. Teachers answer brief questions in three categories:

1. Personal and Professional Growth
2. Impact on Your Classroom, School & Community, and,
3. Imagining the Future

During the month of August, we’ll share some of our Fellows’ Passports to get us all in the “Back to School” mode. Today, we’re proud to share the reflections of Jacqueline Catcher, teacher at Exeter High School in Exeter, NH.

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Fellowship Description
Tour literary sites associated with famous British authors, including William Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, and Horace Walpole; examine the impact of Gothic architecture in the development of characterization and theme in Jane Eyre; and study canonical literature at the Oxbridge Teacher Seminar at the University of Cambridge to create differentiated and engaging learning for academic and AP English students.

Personal & Professional Growth

I am returning well equipped to integrate British literature, artwork, architecture, and history into all of my courses. I learned about unique ways to approach poetry analysis, which have students engaging in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic analysis. I can also see how various local museums, parks, and libraries offer unique opportunities for literary analysis based on these new techniques. This has been the most inspiring, exhilarating, and rewarding professional development I’ve ever had.

Oftentimes we teach art, history, and literature we’ve never actually seen. Now I am able to incorporate primary documents, pamphlets, photographs, books, and videos that I prepared throughout my trip and tailored to my lessons. I have photos of paintings and videos of interactive art installations that will help my students explore literary themes in unique mediums. I’m most excited to share the 3D and panoramic photos I took, so students can observe England as if they were actually there.

I challenged myself to create more adds-on units for traditional texts. I’m required to teach Shakespeare to my struggling readers, so I knew I wanted to build a Globe Theatre facade and host a night that would not only provide my students with an authentic audience, but it would also showcase their work. By collecting materials, visiting historic sites, and experiencing a performance in the actual Globe Theatre, I learned how to approach this project and production.

Impact on Your Classroom, School & Community

Students will read and discuss literature through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic methods that will engage them beyond the page. They will derive meaning from modern art, connect current historical and art exhibits to past literature, and think critically about how spaces and architecture frame both characters’ worlds as well as their own. They will visit England through photos and videos while at the same time physically constructing these spaces to share with their community.

I am collaborating with our school’s theater director to host a Shakespeare night. Our classes will work together to construct the facade of the Globe Theatre onstage and prepare a performance of various scenes, monologues, dances, and musical productions to honor Shakespeare’s work. In addition, I will also be collaborating with an educator from Pakistan who I met during my coursework. We are planning to lead short story discussion groups between our students via video chats.

Imagining the Future

I believe the best way to celebrate student learning is by providing authentic audiences, which push students to educate others beyond their peers. Our community Shakespeare night will allow students to prepare and present their research, analysis, and performances for our local community. Additionally, my AP Literature students will construct small dioramas that look at natural and architectural spaces’ impact on characterization in Jane Eyre. These will be on display in our school library.

Too often we dismiss older literature as antiquated or out-of-touch. What we fail to recognize is that the reason these plays, novels, or poems are deemed classics is because they explore universal themes that help us contemplate the world around us. Literature can’t be read or even analyzed in a vacuum though. It is deeply social, overlapping with other subjects and cultures. I hope students can help others see that literacy and literature is valuable to understanding everything.

Observing the world as both a traveler and a teacher provides a unique vantage point. You absorb, discuss, photograph, and document everything with more intensity, knowing that you aren’t just seeing these places for yourself, you are experiencing them for the hundreds of students who will pass through your classroom. I can only hope my fellowship will change my students’ outlook on poetry, literature, art, and architecture as much as this journey has changed my life as an educator.

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Jacqueline teaches Freshman English and AP Literature, as well as pre-service teachers at the University of New Hampshire. She empowers students through independent reading and authentic writing experiences using a workshop model. Outside of the classroom, she enjoys serving as the vice president of the New Hampshire Council for Teachers of English and advisor of her school’s Government Club and Writer’s Club. See more of her fellowship and follow her on Twitter:[minti_social icon=”fa-twitter” url=”https://twitter.com/@JackieCatcher” target=”_self”]

Congratulations to Luis Gonzalez and his art teacher/FFT Fellow Ari Hauben for Luis’ selection as one of three young artists whose work now adorns LIFEWTR bottles. According to the company’s website:

“LIFEWTR Series 4 celebrates the long-lasting impact that art education has on our lives from youth into adulthood. The series features the work of three young artists who have discovered the empowerment that comes with creativity and demonstrated the importance of early art education in instilling the values necessary for a more inspired future.”

LIFEWTR also shared:

“Luis Gonzalez, a Boston native and high school senior, views the abstract art he creates as more than just a mode of self-expression—it’s “a lifesaver.” Growing up in an underserved community, art has kept him in school and has guided him down a safer path than the one he has witnessed many of his peers taking. Gonzalez plans to become a professional artist, following in the footsteps of his art teacher and mentor, Ari Hauben. He also aspires to teach other youth, and show them the possibilities that art can bring.”

Ari, along with colleagues Warren Pemsler and Chris Busch, designed their Fund for Teachers fellowship to experience art museums, theatres, stages and facilities in New York City, England and The Netherlands. They also met with outreach departments to learn best practices for expanding McKinley Preparatory High School‘s local partnerships with the Huntington Theatre and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Subsequently, the teaching team set about closing the achievement gap of emotionally-disturbed special education students who are predominantly children of color.

“One aspect of the achievement gap that seemed particularly pronounced among our students was their lack of cultural capital,” explained Warren. “To increase students’ exposure to dramatic and fine arts, we first developed our own cultural capital with our FFT grant and then formed collaborations with The Huntington and ICA to forge new paradigms that engage students in these areas of study.”

In recognition of his accomplishment, LIFEWTR sent Louis and Ari to the Teen Vogue Summit in Los Angeles last month. Soon Louis, Ari and Warren head to New York City for the formal introduction of the artful bottles.

“Fund for Teachers is the proverbial rock thrown in a pond, with its ripples spreading out in exciting and unexpected ways,” said Ari. “One perfect example is my student Luis Gonzalez. Luis has participated the past 3 ½ years in my art (and theater) collaboration with two other FFT recipients, spurred by our fellowship to New York London, and The Netherlands. Luis has participated in approximately thirty field trips to contemporary art museums and plays, many exploring cutting edge artists and playwrights. Through these experiences and others, Luis was inspired to create abstract and pop culture works of art. When the opportunity arose for students to enter a contest to be on LIFEWTR bottles, Luis was the perfect person for the task. Having seen his abstract art piece Daydreamin, LIFEWTR replicated the art on 15 million bottles with the hopethat it will inspire other teens to be creative.  Thank you FFT for the support and opportunity to connect our FFT experiences in the ‘real world’ with our students in the classroom, who then take this full circle and bring it back out to the world.”

Thank you, Amie Robinson, art and special education teacher at PS77 in Brooklyn, NY, for sharing your fellowship story with us. Last summer, Amie researched the impact of sketchbooks as communication tools among displaced youth and non-native language learners at a refugee camp in Greece. She’s now incorporating this experience into an alternate assessment social studies curriculum focused on developing global empathy and citizenship by having special education students connect with the students she left behind in Samos. Here’s how…

Upon returning home from Greece many people have asked me, ”How was your fellowship?” It is a simple question, but one that has been extremely difficult for me to answer.

During previous travels to Greece, I witnessed vast numbers of refugees newly arrived on the islands, and was profoundly moved by the sight of children covered in Mylar blankets and clinging to their families, confronted by unfamiliar surroundings and languages. I started following stories in the news about the refugee crisis more closely. As a teacher I was particularly struck by the lack of education for thousands of children stranded in Greece long-term. I knew I had to get involved, so this summer I went to the island of Samos and volunteered at a refugee camp, with the incredible support of Fund For Teachers.

My project introduced sketchbooks as a communication tool among displaced and non-native language children in Greece, and now incorporates that experience into an alternate assessment social studies curriculum focused on developing global empathy and citizenship for my students in New York City. Cliché as it may sound, I believe that art really can help change the world in its power to illuminate and inform.

Communication can be difficult for my students with autism, and for those identified as English Language Learners (ELL), it presents an even greater challenge. Obstacles in communication can lead to frustration, anxiety, and behavioral problems that disrupt learning. Art builds self-confidence by giving students a voice. Over the past two years, I have seen the power that creative expression has while inspiring and transforming my students’ learning. The portable nature of the sketchbook allows them to express themselves outside of school. I wondered if sketchbooks would provide displaced children in Greece a similar non-linguistic space to tell stories, make connections, and build expressive language skills.

I arrived on the island of Samos on July 15, and spent the first day exploring the town of Vathy, walking through the steep and narrow streets and watching the sunset over the port. The next morning, I had an introductory meeting to begin working with Samos Volunteers, a grassroots organization responding to the needs of the growing refugee population on the island. After being registered with Greek police and I was walked into the camp with the other new volunteers from New York, Sweden, Germany, and Poland. The tour of the camp was heartbreaking. The conditions that the refugees live in are entirely inhumane. New arrivals can be soaking wet from their journey and are often made to sleep outside on concrete before they are processed by the police. We were shown the overcrowded levels of the camp, many without running water or toilets. During our tour, a woman fainted from the heat, while another pleaded hopelessly with the police until she collapsed in anguish. The physical and psychological conditions can take their toll on individuals living in the camp, and while there are international aid organizations on the island, they are not equipped or appropriately staffed to handle the increasing numbers of refugees.

That night I sat down and cried. I reflected on everything I had seen that day and questioned whether or not I was strong enough to contribute. I reminded myself that one of the reasons I applied to Fund For Teachers was to step outside of my comfort zone and usual routine, and on my first day volunteering with Samos Volunteers I was encouraged by the incredible strength of the people with whom I worked. Their warmth and determination in the face of unspeakable suffering was inspiring. Furthermore, being part of a devoted volunteer team deepened my understanding of true collaboration. Every role—teaching English and art, coordinating creative activities for women outside of the camp’s stifling conditions, swimming, jumping rope, cleaning, serving tea, sorting clothes, or playing backgammon—was equally important to creating a safe and engaging community. As the weeks flew by, I learned from others skills that I thought I had, such as humility and patience, as well as some new ones, like learning the Arabic words for colors.

While on Samos, I spent most of my long days working at a shelter for vulnerable families. In the morning, I volunteered teaching English to adults from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Following the these sessions, I would work with their children (ages 3-16) to connect an art activity to their days’ lessons. I was so excited to present them with their sketchbooks and even more excited when they returned to school the next morning and shared pages filled with beautiful drawings. One of my favorite moments from my fellowship was the peek-a-boo like game the kids created to show me what they had drawn in their sketchbooks each night. They would open and close the cover quickly, revealing only a small part of each drawing at a time, until eventually they displayed the entire page, erupting into laughter. As I look back at these photos of their sketches, I am reminded of something a young woman from Syria told me, “just remember, although they are refugees, they are still first children.” The drawings—of ice cream, birthday parties, cats, fashion designs, rainbows, hearts and flowers—tell stories of childhood, familiar to us all.

In the evenings, during recreational activities, we extended our art projects to include collage, crafts, and painting. The children were all so curious and talented, and I was constantly fascinated by watching them explore new materials and make creative decisions. I was really excited when the education director from Samos Volunteers asked me to have them collaborate to create a large canvas painting that would be auctioned to raise money to provide supplies and programs to the refugee camp. We started by looking through their sketchbooks to find images. For one beautiful and moving painting they chose eyes, mermaids, and fairies dancing together in an ocean of tears.  In the second, we used drawings that they had made of robots and how they imagined the future. They then worked together to plan compositions, transfer their designs, and paint the canvases. It was thrilling to watch their drawings come to life, and to see each of their personalities expressed in the painting. We had so much fun each evening working together, especially my youngest artist, who decided to paint her hair blue!

I am so excited to share the many drawings, paintings, and photographs created by my students in Samos and introduce them to my students in Brooklyn through the stories they tell. My colleague and I are collaborating to develop an Art and Social Studies program at our school that focuses on global citizenship.  We are working on lessons that translate the experiences of young refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Burundi, and Congo to place a human scale on a global crisis. We want our students to develop critical thinking skills to connect to their world in a broader sense, and in our first session we introduced the crisis to students using the questioning technique to develop their research question, “What is a refugee?” We were surprised to discover that most of our students had no prior knowledge of the topic, but impressed by how quickly they engaged with the serious issues at hand.

Over the course of the unit, we hope that our students will recognize that they can make positive change.  In fact, with only one co-teaching session into our project in Brooklyn, they are already asking, “How can we help?” As a culminating learning activity students will will learn techniques in bookmaking and create sketchbooks for children at the Samos refugee camp. They will also organize a fundraiser to raise money for organizations helping refugees, including International Rescue Committee, Samos Volunteers, and MSF (Doctors Without Borders).

Being a Fund for Teachers fellow has expanded my classroom beyond borders, and I can’t wait to deliver handmade sketchbooks to my “habibis” and “habibtis” when I return to Samos as a volunteer again this July.

Bill Gates just released his suggestions for holiday reading, and FFT Fellow Thi Bui made the list!

This gorgeous graphic novel is a deeply personal memoir that explores what it means to be a parent and a refugee. The author’s family fled Vietnam in 1978. After giving birth to her own child, she decides to learn more about her parents’ experiences growing up in a country torn apart by foreign occupiers.

Thi’s learning took place on her Fund for Teachers fellowship.

To create an oral history project for immigrant students and complete a graphic novel about her family’s emigration, Thi sketched her way across time and her homeland, learning from and listening to her mother recount stories about their heritage. Thi’s experiences and drawings gave newly immigrated students at Oakland International High School the courage to document their own journeys to America through a graphic novel format. We Are Oakland International shared illustrated stories by 170 students – where words and often language could not – and sold copies to raise money for quality public education for them and their peers.

“My students’ memories of their home were fresh when they arrived in my class, and so were the contrasts with their new environment,” said Thi. “By modeling how I went through the same process, through a project that was deeply personal while academically rigorous, we – together – opened doors to what would otherwise have remained silent, forgotten histories.”

The Best We Could Do is a national best seller and required reading for every entering freshman at UCLA.

Click here to watch and listen to Thi read an excerpt from The Best We Could Do at an Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

On the final day of their fellowship, Alice Laramore and Kat Atkins-Pattenson shared with us their reflection on a four-week, 9,000 mile road trip along the United States/Mexico border exploring language arts, visual arts, immigration and identity. Thank you, Team Paredes Que Hablan (or Walls That Speak) for sharing your experiences and hope for future students.

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Our students cross borders every day. They switch from home language to school language and back again.Their warm presence, giggles, and questions invite new families inside our school buildings. And, everywhere they go, our students carry the imprint of their family members who came to Boston for refuge, for freedom, for opportunity. Every time these young people change spaces, they reconcile their identities and pasts with their presents and futures.

We know that for students to truly succeed academically, they must see mirrors of themselves in our curricula – art, media, and text – and validation of their identities in our classroom spaces. While we can empathize with our students, as white female teachers, we do not truly understand the depth of our students’ experiences. To effectively understand our students’ experiences, we need to cross borders ourselves and experience the displacement our students have experienced traversing these borders.

Today, the last day of our trip, we are energized by the Borders and Identity Unit that we have built and will use to launch the year with our students. We are flooded with all that we’ve seen in our seven cities. We are entrenched in the creative part of teaching, the part that involves being an interesting, engaged individual to better support the interesting, engaged individuals in our classrooms. The part that means we learn something new in order to teach something new. The experience of being a learner better prepares a teacher to teach, and this summer was an opportunity for us to authentically learn about murals on different borders, to confront not knowing and to investigate, to use art as a lens into community.

Watch in this video the artistic expression Kat and Alice captured in three countries and seven cities to help students answer the question: “How do we show other people the depth of our past and the strength of our future?”

This month, we immersed ourselves in adult project-based learning. We’ve tried lots of new things, from food to cloud-mountain hiking to driving to places we’d never been (while blogging) to talking about art from sunrise to sunset. And we’ve done the whole thing together. Often, in our classrooms, we create groups that we believe will benefit from the individuality of each member. We build in scaffolds meant to allow the group to discover each individual’s strengths and to make empathy a non-negotiable. Though we embarked with empathy and respect already in place, our twenty-six days together have illuminated the strengths and areas of growth (thanks, BPS, for the language) of our partnership. We both value efficiency, and, in the face of less-than-such (e.g., when the internet goes as turtle-pace, when people get motion sick, when you walk up the wrong side of the mountain, etc.), we have learned much about each other. That knowledge has made us better collaborators and better friends.

In San Francisco, where we started our trip, we were oriented to the idea of looking. This was not just because there was so much to look at in The Mission, but also because we did our first day with a guide, who was able to re-frame what we had seen and interpreted in the context of history and community. Carla made us cognizant of how much we needed other people’s knowledge and understanding to build our own. The Pacoima (L.A.) murals added a layer of “looking around corners” to that concept. On the hottest day of our trip, we spent the majority of it seeking out art on the walls of automotive dealerships and in the parking lots of community centers. It wasn’t always going to be all in one alley. In San Diego, a park once occupied by people and now occupied by art, had us looking for four hours and not seeing enough. We returned home those nights googling Aztec symbols and stories, trying to learn enough to know something.

Tucson and Dr. Acosta gave us yet another frame through which to experience our learning. Freedom of education does not mean freedom to learn about the American Revolution and the Civil War through a lens of whiteness. Precious Knowledge, to our generation of “urban baby teachers,” is a reflection of our intentions. Though we (the generation of “urban baby teachers”) are in no way united in our vision or our understanding of social justice, the power of conviction in ideas, history, and lifting stories and voices drove us into the work of education. We wonder if Dr. Acosta knows how many teachers who are only five or six years in are tracking his legal battle and celebrating his victories, most recently the repeal of Arizona’s ban on ethic studies which a district court deemed racist and targeting of Mexican Americans.

In Santa Fe, we absorbed the International Folk Art Market, how artists envision and reimagine, how tradition can morph modern and can accommodate the present day without reneging its roots. This mirrors the murals we’ve seen and the art of Frida Kahlo, taking symbols from the past and bringing them to life in the now. In Mexico City, we saw so much. Teotihuacan, Frida, Diego, the Anthropology Museum, street art, the culinary art of Pujol, the stained glass and craters of Toluca. With American eyes and feet, we navigated the city, and learned all that we still had to learn.

It is hard to classify this experience, and even harder to know all that it will bring to our classrooms. It falls somewhere in the vicinity of sabbatical – an intentional, purposeful break that brings new insight – but also touches the realm of professional development, continuing education, and a creative project. We envision a unit with three parts. First, with our students, we will read several memoirs that broadly address the topic of borders and walls, thinking with our students about potential barriers and how to scale them. Second, we will all generate and share memoirs from our own lives on the same topic. The author of each memoir will formulate his or her own theme about the topic, communicating a piece of knowledge gained from navigating–either adeptly or crudely–a border. Finally, after examining many primary sources collected on our trip and within Boston, students will co-construct a mural combining the themes of their memoirs to create a community creation.

The idea of “insider and outsider” has been, in many ways, the crux of our travels. We asked questions and navigated our identity as visitor, as white visitor, as American, as woman. In our classrooms we are often the the outsiders to the communities in which we teach. However our ethnicities and upbringing reflect the dominant histories and tools that are demanded from dominant culture. In this unit, we hope to illuminate these walls, supporting students to name them, scale them, and ultimately paint them. As humanities teachers, we believe that providing students vocabulary and time to think and discuss the world and its issues leads to a brighter, more creative, and smarter future than the two of us can imagine. Solutions lie in the writing, in the art, in the conversations, and in the relationships that students create. Just as we wrote in our FFT proposal, students must see themselves reflected in curriculum, in physical space, and in pedagogy in order to be successful. Because we do not physically reflect our students’ identities, we think constantly about how to make all other facets of our teaching affirming. This unit and this project will be a launching point for discussions about personal identity, community, and what comes next.

In Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson and Santa Fe, this fellowship made space for us to be learners. After the twelfth grade, those opportunities almost always come with one (or many) literal costs. And Fund for Teachers (along with the school year calendar) gave us the time, space and finances to learn more in a way that will support our students, but also in a way that sustains us as teachers, professionals, and individuals. It made it possible for us to end the trip feeling rejuvenated rather than depleted. There is a constant push for teachers to continue professional development; it is indeed essential. But driving this profession development experience (and literally driving more than 900 miles) meant that we could pace our learning and reflection, and that we could intentionally choose meaningful experiences that hit our “zone of proximal development.”

If you’d like to know more about our trip, we’ve been writing the whole time. Read our blog at www.writingisthinking.org

In Solidarity,
Kat + Alice

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Alice is a 7th grade Humanities/Special Education teacher at the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, MA. She infuses arts into her Humanities classes, most recently taking students to do pop-up Shakespearean theater in several Boston Public libraries. She works on a cross curricular team of teachers who study the intersection of English Language Learning and Special Education to build inclusive writing experiences in all contents.        

Kat is a 7th grade Humanities teacher at Gardner Pilot Academy K-8 School, a Pilot School in the Boston Public Schools. Katharine was a 2012-13 Donovan Urban Teaching Scholar at Boston College where she earned her Master’s in Secondary Education. Prior to becoming a teacher, Katharine built a college access program in rural Pennsylvania that continues to help first generation and undocumented students find the appropriate post-secondary fit while developing college and financial literacy
within the community.