#had this svaed in my drafts????? still true

[himbotheninth]

I hope nureyev gets to bite someone. idk why i just think he deserves a little treat y'know? my man needs to be a little feral

[amyashida]

A Big False Start

After my conversation with Hannah, I started preparing to go back to Great Oaks and work with the 8th-grade students there. Kate had let me know the week before that I should be able to come twice in December to observe and work with students. That didn’t quite work out as planned. 

Hurry Up and Pause

In preparation, I wrote up a proposal for what I would like to do over the course of two visits, sent it to Kate, and started preparing. I spent several hours one night working out how I was going to introduce myself and my project to the students and drafting a few activities we could do together. I was ready to go!

Then, the day before I was supposed to go to the school, Kate emailed me and said that she didn't have the capacity to help organize my visits this semester. I felt all of the momentum I had built up leave. In the next two weeks, I needed to find a way to prototype my idea with students, hold a workshop ideally with students and teachers, and create a prototype to present to my advisor and class.

Lessons Learned

I believe every time you fall, you fail if you don’t figure out why. Here are the reasons why I think Great Oaks didn’t work out this time; 

I was ambiguous with my ask. It wasn’t clear what I was asking Kate to do and what I was going to do to make it easy for her. 

I asked for too much. I got excited about the workshop with the students and doing a workshop with multiple stakeholders. This was too big of an ask and merited the response of “not having the capacity.”

I was trying to design collaboratively, but it made me timid. I was afraid to push buttons, but in trying to avoid pushing buttons I made things overly complicated. 

Hit the Ground Running

I gave myself the night to freak out, process what I could learn from the experience, then did one thing that I actually know how to do well: cold email. I started by emailing the people I knew who worked with kids. Then I just started researching schools they were connected to and schools close to SVA. I found email addresses of History, English, and Film teachers and sent out emails. Within a few hours, I had a response from an English and Film teacher at The Young Women's Leadership School in Astoria.

Xenia, the teacher that I connected with, was excited and open to me visiting in a short turn around. I was also super excited to connect with her because film was an element of my long-term vision for the projects students could create. The catch was that her students are high schoolers and the school is in Astoria. I knew that going in and I needed a group to work with, so I was excited to talk to her about what her students were working on.

During our conversation, Xenia told me about the film program they have in partnership with Tribeca and how her students are currently working on documentaries exploring different aspects of identity and stereotypes. Groups were tackling topics like being Latina, African-American, an Immigrant, a student-athlete, and sexualization of women. In order to complement what the students were already learning, the age of the students, and the quick turn around, I would need to change the way I was approaching the workshop.

Finding a Subject to Engage

Not sure of the best way to move forward, I started researching policies that had been recently passed in the New York City Council that touched on women's or immigrant rights. I quickly realized that finding an argument with two true sides to it in those areas might be difficult because of the strong blue hold in the city. The best arguments against programs were often budgetary - and that doesn't make for a very exciting discussion.

Luckily, I found a debate that had been filmed tackling the question of whether campus sexual assault cases should be decided by courts or colleges. It presented a great opportunity for code-switching as the debaters were law professors speaking to an academic audience, but were still approachable enough for high schoolers to understand (hopefully). I spent the weekend watching and rewatching the debate, making sure it was okay to cover the topic in the class, and trying to figure out meaningful but not gut-wrenching ways to help the students reiterate what they heard and articulate how they felt about it.

In my quest to find a meaningful discussion format, I tried a few different approaches on for size including: - Writing a skit explaining the impact of the policy to a friend - 1, 2, 4, All - Storyboarding - Representational crafting

I ended up finding an educational blog called "Minds in Bloom" with a post called "10 Classroom Discussion Techniques" by Kelly Malloy. I was skeptical at first because this blog was written by a fourth-grade teacher (that's a big age difference), but the tactics listed seemed really solid. So, I incorporated one of the exercises called Four Corners. In this exercise, the facilitator hangs up signs that say "Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree" around the room. They then read out statements and students move to the corner they identify with. Then the facilitator asks for a volunteer to share why they felt that way.

So, with that exercise in mind, I came up with the following plan:

Hypothesis: I believe that if students learn how to code switch when it comes to policy, they will be able to understand how it impacts them and be better advocates for their communities.

I will know this is true when students are able to translate policy impacts into their own words and articulate how they feel about it to others.

Objective: Students will understand both sides of an argument/policy, decide whether they agree or disagree, and articulate why

Methodology:

Start with some ground-setting: What is code-switching (setting examples: professional, school, home)? Why apply code-switching to policy? 

Break down the vocab words in the debate video or that a guest might use. Vocab words include due process, neutrality, and adjudication.

Watch the opening argument for courts to decide

Four corners group discussion - Students will receive a hand out reviewing the points made in the video. They will circle "strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree" for each point. Signs displaying with "strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree" will be put up in four corners of the room. Each point will be read allowed, students will move to the corner that has the side they agree with. One volunteer will from each side will share their opinion. 

Watch the argument for campuses to decide

Four corners group discussion round 2

Debrief - On provided sheets, students will write down one thing they enjoyed about the class, why they enjoyed it, and one reason why code-switching is relevant to their lives/projects

I also designed the following worksheet. Wish me luck!