Celebratory Symposium

On May 1, 2021, the three strands of the institute (sound, translanguaging, visual arts) met within and across strands to not only reflect on our outside/inside experiences of this institute, but also to share across strands.

Our warmup drew on the concept of what Cynthia Weiss calls “parallel processes” in which we experimented with how the opposite qualities of:

can all be explored both through our bodies but also through our voices.

We then looked again at the New Yorker magazine image we had examined in February at the beginning of the institute (an image that had perfectly captured the dichotomous lives we had all lived through in 2020). Next, we applied the same Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) we had used to analyze that magazine cover to explore an image from our text that suggests a hopeful opening up of closed spaces, mirroring our own experience of recent access to vaccines (click on the images to see them in full size).

After we had warmed up together, we met in our breakout teams to look back on our work in our strands, and to create new pieces for sharing across strands that distilled the take-aways from our various in-depth strand-specific explorations.

One of the strengths of the Habla approach is that all material created by participants is developed in meaningful layers through translation across languages, translation across media, and generation within a caring community. All creative prompts are inspired by responses to rich texts, are open ended, and are grounded in attention to sensory detail, a sense of place, and to building compelling relationships. This allows profound work to emerge quickly, with the focus remaining on meaning and connection rather than on “performing” for others - on revealing and sharing rather than on rehearsing and presenting. This can result in truly meaningful, truly inclusive performances that can be created quickly, and that also become occasions for reflection upon and internalization of new capacities and options.

The Sound Lab | Final Symposium

The Reverberating Echoes of the Sound Strand Breakout

The Sound Lab strand breakout team members screened for each other the multimedia “audio books” that they had created in the course of the institute:

We then reviewed topics we had covered in the Sound Lab strand throughout the institute:

Dario then showed some video footage of sound based teaching and learning strategies in action in an actual classroom:

Dario and Kurt also shared with us a wide range of resources for using sound based strategies in the classroom:

We concluded our Sound Lab strand breakout work together by preparing for a live soundscape presentation we would share with our colleagues from the other strands.

Crossing Borders | Final Symposium

The Translanguaging Messages of the Crossing Borders Strand

The Crossing Borders strand breakout team reviewed the wide range of frameworks they had explored during the institute to investigate the urgent need for narrative plentitude in our teaching and learning:

Bilingual Blues - Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Inspired by the translanguaging of Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s poem Bilingual Blues, the team broke into pairs to write their own translanguaging poems for two voices.

Together our pairs wrote the starting line of our poems with the phrase:

Soy/Somos un ______________ de __________

Each of our pair members contributed 3 lines to make a 7 line poem together, and then figured out how we would share our 7 line poem out loud to our peers, using such formal elements as repetition, remixing, and choral readings.

Yesenia and Marimar modeled the process by performing their POEMA A DOS VOCES that they had written together:

How have you benefited from the opening of translanguaging spaces?
¿Cómo te has beneficiado de la apertura de espacios para translenguar?

What negative impact happens when those spaces are closed to us?
¿Qué impacto negativo sucede cuando esos espacios se nos cierran?

How do we open spaces for all our students to be represented?
¿Cómo abrimos espacios para que todos nuestros estudiantes estén representados?

How do we create spaces in classrooms that empower and give voice to all our students?
¿Cómo creamos espacios en las aulas que empoderen y den voz a todos nuestros alumnos?

We concluded by generating ways for opening up spaces and for empowering voices for narrative plentitude in our classrooms, and then prepared to join our colleagues from the other strands.

Opening New Windows | Final Symposium

The Visual Arts Gallery Exhibit Breakout Room

The Visual Arts strand members went on a tour together of the collage works that they had created (as beautifully displayed in a virtual gallery prepared by Fannie Medina):

We also watched a video of our sharing of writing we had created in the development of our collages:

We were then asked to draw upon the images in our collages and our writing to think forward to when our inside worlds reopen, and to write about what this will mean to each of us individually. We made selections from this new writing, created a performance order, and got ready to share back with the group.

It may be useful to watch the entire video below to see an example of how quickly a meaningful presentation can be put together without angst when the creators are truly grounded in their own experience of their own learning:

After working in our breakout strands, we all came back together to share work with our peers across strands:

There are times when we learn best by working and sharing with folks that are job-alike to ourselves, and then there are times when we learn best by working and sharing with folks who have teaching skills and functions that are quite different from our own. After we had spent three months in deep dives into one of the three strands of the institute along with colleagues that taught many different ages and types of students, it was a good time to meet with job-alike peers from across the three strands to document the ideas we were most excited about applying in our own classrooms and circumstances. Together, we created our own collective cross-strand digital document The Book of Brilliant Ideas.

Documentation as Inquiry

This documentation website was developed to support participants in both revisiting the work they had already done and in also extending this growth to others. Consider what kind of documentation in your own classroom will support your students in reflecting on and asking questions about their own learning experience. Here is a link to documentation of other Habla Institutes:

Final Reflections

- What, from all of our time together, are you most excited about doing with your students?
- What will you apply right away?
- What inspired you the most?