Poetic Reflections: Notes from “I am from…”

When I was a Penn GSE student now more than 15 years ago, I sat in classrooms both large and small, hardly speaking up in class. I was just one year out of my undergraduate studies, hence young and doubting still my contributions to course text discussions with my peers. I sat mostly silent, wanting to speak but holding back. In classes, we were reading the heavy hitters such as Paulo Freire, Herbert Kohl, Paul Willis, and Signithia Fordham, among others. One day, I remember looking around the classroom and wondering what conversations would be like with each classmate surrounding the topics we were reading. Then it dawned on me that I didn’t actually know most of my peers. Sure, I knew their names and shared brief pleasantries passing through the halls and across campus, but I didn’t know where they were from, what brought them to graduate school, and what they did outside of classes; let alone, what they thought about our week’s readings. And this was a shame, I thought, because what I was learning through readings was changing, shifting, and shaping my core; I wanted to talk about them, but feared to think out loud.

Paulo Freire’s (1970/1996) truth that “dialogue cannot exist … in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people” (p. 70) became a reality for me, a convoluted realization that dialogue blossoms when we love others and the world we share together. The education I received from Penn GSE to bravely march forward could best be summed up as if to hide in Freire’s footnote on the same page describing his interpretation of love. It asks simply, “What, indeed, is the deeper motive which moves individuals to become revolutionaries, but the dehumanization of people?” (p. 70).

This experience may perhaps be the reason that today, I purposefully create a space for my graduate students to share their backgrounds and positionalities in class early on, at the start of the semester. In whatever way or extent to which they feel comfortable sharing, I ask that each student reflect and share, and not just with me but with one another. To achieve this, I need to be the first to be a revolutionary, open and vulnerable, yet brave and taking up space.

In my Foundations of Urban Education class at USC Rossier School of Education, I incorporated an activity called “I am from…” as described by Mike Klein (2019). He explains that “‘I am from’ is a tool for analyzing the social construction of intersectional identity that addresses racism and other inequities in the classroom” (p. 87). The tool was a result of a conversation with his student who had shared with him her identities that complicated what society typically thinks of people placed within boxed categories. As a way to encourage my students to think through their lived experiences and empower them by claiming and defining their own identities, I planned for the activity during week 2 of the 15-week semester.

Week 1 set the tone of the course, including a set of rules that we collectively created to abide by moving forward with the rest of the semester. The result of an in-depth discussion of the class and classroom expectations were as follows:

• Understand that we get passionate; don’t misunderstand passion with anger or heat.
• Take risks; speak your truth.
• Own the impact on other people; accept that what you said could be hurtful.
• Be respectful for others’ readiness to engage and boundaries.
• Keep conversations open ended; provide time/space to think/reflect.
• Be aware that people process at different paces.

Subsequently, instead of the typical around-the-classroom introductions, I had students pair up and interview one another and then prepare a bio of their partner to present to the whole group. Since this class is the first course of their first semester in the Education Leadership program, the mini-interviews in pairs proved to be special—it was exciting, engaging, and informative.

In the second week of class, we began the session with Klein’s “I am from…” activity. I started by sharing my reflection:

Students subsequently jotted their identities privately, noting which ones they felt comfortable sharing with the whole class. The following were some of the responses:

The consequence of the exercise was nothing short of poetic reflections, and much more than I, or anyone else in the class, had anticipated. Students shared identities and experiences of sadness and pain, but also hope and triumph. Throughout the rest of the semester, dialogue felt genuine and honest, with students often recalling some of their peers’ responses to the “I am from…” activity during future discussions.

To be sure, part of the reason the exercise felt so powerful for our class was because I have the fortune of working with students who self-selected themselves to pursue further education and learn the raw and untethered truths of urban education. These K–12 education-focused students came to the program and the class acknowledging that there is something that needed to be done to improve and/or enhance the state of urban education. Sharing our reflections of where we are from allowed us to address our positionalities not only as educators, but as individuals who are from somewhere. And this, perhaps, might have been the most powerful lesson of the day: that we are from somewhere and each of us belong to a community. The exercise was a reminder that for many of us teaching in or considering urban classrooms, we must contemplate where our young students are coming from and where they belong. Acknowledging that someone belongs to a community is one strategy of illustrating profound love. It recognizes humanness, especially in a diverse urban education setting.

As I continue to think about Freire’s (1970/1996) footnote that challenges us all to be revolutionaries—because the dehumanization of people still exists in much of the same but also nuanced ways—I think how a revolution needs to happen, it must happen; and it starts with me. It starts with me knowing who I am, and where and to whom I belong, because a thoughtful reflection on my own history allows me to appreciate others’ stories and who they are and where they belong. Profound love for the world and for people can happen, it takes work and mutual appreciation of histories.