Day 3 Reflections

I learned early in my teaching career that you have to be seaweed: rooted, but flexible. So when we got our students later than expected, we just rolled with it! We started with some prompts:

• What would happen if we allowed prejudice and stereotypes to govern us?
• What would happen if we actively counteracted our biases and preconceived ideas?

What a great conversation! These kids are at a level where they are self-aware of the prejudices that they have and that they experience, and readily apply those to a context larger than their own experience.

We used this discussion to lead into a video that talks about how we as humans are really connected, and that the differences we feel are fairly insignificant. This is not to say that inequalities aren't there, but that we actually need to talk even MORE about issues of race, culture, gender, class, etc. to combat these toxic narratives. The video shows a Kurdish woman refugee who goes on a DNA Journey and finds her ancestry is quite mixed with groups she feels animosity toward. She also connects with a distant relative, who is also from a very unexpected ancestral group.

Before jumping to work on our final project, we took some time to step into the mindset of a Syrian refugee. We asked the students to write an "I Am" poem from the perspective of this refugee. This helped them really identify with who's stories they were trying to tell, and built on yesterday's 4 Corners activity dealing with how someone identifies versus how the world sees them, and eventually how they would like everyone else to see who they really are.