A Social Justice Newsletter For Educators

“We must free our imaginations. Not because it is fun, but because our futures depend upon it.

Yet we must be especially brave in our dreams, because it is far harder to envisage love than it is to envisage horror.”  – Musa Okwonga, “We Must Free Our Imaginations”

Hello, October!

Hello, Fall temperatures, cozy sweaters, changing leaves and waking up in the dark. Come on, Halloween, pumpkin spice, cream soups and candy corn!
We’ve come this far and there are certainly wins to celebrate: we’re still in school and holding our own (in Austria, mind you, with universal health care, effective COVID contact tracing, etc.). I see happy kids of all ages and sizes moving through the building smiling with their eyes and through their masks. I see activities in progress and the camaraderie of sports teams enliven the campus after the school day is done. There are lots of good things happening and it’s sometimes a challenge to carve out time to savor them while we are witness to so much in the world that is anxiety-inducing and simply terrible.

I’ve chosen poetry as a focus for this month’s newsletter because it’s an art form that allows us all our feelings, that opens the door for ambivalence and lets us roam the canvas of our varied imaginations. And as Musa Okwonga, shares in his talk highlighted in the quote, freeing our imaginations is crucial. It also happens that October 1st appears to be National Poetry Day in the UK! (Bonus!!)

Poetry in these last years has often surprised me with its capacity to get into my emotional nooks and crannies. In the last month, two of the poems below have stunned me with their message so much so that I have listened to each repeatedly, while the third has helped me elaborate on an emotional disparity between Black and white better than any batch of articles could do.

• Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i – Waiting Water –This poem by a senior student in New Zealand conveys the urgency of climate change action for the Pacific Islands with stunning clarity.

• Miami Dophins football players used a poem to explain why they will stay inside while both the national anthem and the Black national anthem (“Lift Every Voice And Sing“) are sung. I found the emotive power of players’ voices particularly striking.

• Clint Smith describes the never ending tensions of being a Black male son and parent in his poem “How to raise a black son in America.”

For young learners I recommend exploring the poems of Eloise Greenfield, an African American poet and children’s author. Her first poetry collection, Honey, I Love and Other Poems was published in 1978. 
“Her work is widely praised for its depiction of African American experience, particularly family life; Greenfield has said she began writing for children after looking in vain for books for her own children that reflected their life.” – from The Poetry Foundation

To Catch a Fish
BY ELOISE GREENFIELD
It takes more than a wish

to catch a fish

you take the hook

you add the bait

you concentrate

and then you wait

you wait     you wait

but not a bite

the fish don’t have

an appetite

so tell them what

good bait you’ve got

and how your bait

can hit the spot

this works a whole

lot better than

a wish

if you really

want to catch

a fish


“To Catch a Fish” from Under the Sunday Tree. Copyright © 1988 by Eloise Greenfield, used by permission of S©ott Treimel NY.
Source: Under the Sunday Tree (Harper & Row, 1988)

Also consider the work of Kate Clanchy who has been teaching and encouraging young poets for years in the UK. Her recent book, How To Grow Your Own Poem offers resources for bringing even the most reluctant writers to celebrate their first attempts at poetry. In this short video she shares a method she uses and includes a sample poem composed by a pre-schooler (highly recommended!).

For secondary students, an exploration of spoken word poetry can open up new worlds of possibilities in thinking about and performing their own creations. I reached out to my Twitter network and received a bevy of suggestions for getting started:

• The documentary “Louder Than A Bomb” tells the story of 4 high school poets in Chicago preparing for a city-wide poetry slam of the same name which has become a national phenomenon. The trailer is wildly compelling!

• powerpoetry.org  offers 5 tips to poets who want to create spoken word pieces.

• My friend, Scott Bayer, generously shared a spoken word playlist he uses with his students. It is genius!! 

Every time I begin to pull this newsletter together, my plans to scale it down always fail because choice works best in abundance. More than you need but plenty you can use!

I want to leave you with one more performance that speaks of language and identity in a way that it would feel negligent not to share. I give you, Dr. Camea Davis, “The Syntax Of Survival.”

Be well,
Sherri

Autumn image CC0 via Pixabay.com