Day 4 Reflection

For today, we attempted to incorporate students' uncompleted artworks of making protesting poster from Monday's class to our main activity of role-play in which used Dr. Seuss's book titled "Oh, the Places You'll Go!". For the first 30-40 minutes, we asked students to develop more specific ideas of global issues that they wanted to address through their posters (as a group or individually). Other than one group, students made one poster for each group. The global issues that they addressed through the poster were gun control, racism, human right, war & conflicts and etc. Their thoughts expressed in the art pieces were much more sophiscated and critical than I expected. The group that draw poster against gun control expressed gun tied by rope. They said they did not want to argue that we should prevent all people from owning guns for any cases. Instead, they argued that we should tighten our gun control laws in a way that keeps people with mental problems or any suspecious people from getting guns easily. Another group that I got impressed was the one in which touched on the problem of language use that reflects racism. Language or terms often used reflects one's thoughts or one society's discourses. Therefore, it was quite impressive for me to see that the group of students attempted to touch on the problem of using terms that disregarded someone based on his/her race as an important issue and expressed the efforts to resolve the problems with a grave in which they buried the term. Lastly, one student from the group in which worked individually shared his poster that addressed African American people's human right through the phrase of Black Lives Matter and the list of dead people who were killed by police. He made sure that the phrase of Black Lives Matter did not mean that the lives of people who have colors only matters. Instead, he said, he wanted to emphasize all lives matter regardless of colors.  Another comment from him that was so powerful to us was that he wanted to express the need of consideration for equity instead of equality through his poster. Listening to all thoughts about their artworks, I found that they all achieved the goals that three of us (facilitators) intended, which was helping students broaden and widen their perspectives to multiple perspectives and be critical about contemporary issues. I was so proud of our students.

We have not completed our activity with regard to the Dr. Sesus's book. But, basically, what we were trying to do was incorporating the messages that were delivered through their posters into the stories and let them express as role-play or making any objects of Dr.Sesus's characters. We will continue to do this work tomorrow and I will add more thoughts to this blog.