Together We Created Art

Last week I joined teachers at Simon Middle School to Break the Box!

When I spoke with Yvonne from Simon Middle School about navigating the benefits and challenges of a school with students from countries all around the world, I knew that a Break the Box experience for her teachers would be just the thing to open up the conversation in a new way.

I happen to be on a Community Advisory Board for a Language Justice Study (shoutout to Dr. Laurie Cook Heffron and her team!), so I decided to theme the experience around the idea of incorporating language justice in schools via the metaphor of a tree. I was thrilled that Esmeralda Rubalcava Hernandez, one of the researchers on the study, was able to join me as well!

Together with the teachers, we discussed a working definition of language justice, learned about their experiences of systemic challenges and their incredible efforts to support their students, and broke down the concept of language justice into the roots, the trunk, and the leaves of a tree.

For the roots, we talked about a foundation for language justice that included openness, collaboration, patience, and humility. The trunk, or heart, of our tree was home to compassion and empathy. On the leaves, teachers wrote about the outcomes we would see in students, including self-acceptance, unity, pride, self-esteem, growth, autonomy, resilience, love, and so many more. We also made beautiful flowers in the school colors and got creative with decorating our masterpiece!

I left our time together with a full heart and a sense of hopefulness that I feel is much needed these days. Coming together around art is a unifying force that can bridge us beyond our day-to-day differences and worries. The feeling of seeing a teacher’s eyes light up as they added their colorful flower to a branch on our tree was priceless - and is why I’m so excited about this work.