MS students discuss and enact themes of justice
On Thursday, December 14, The Sharon Academy middle school students, their parents, and school staff gathered in the Middle School basement to share a meal of Cockadoodle Pizza and to celebrate student work in progress as well as the art and ethos of rehearsal. The evening examined Romeo and Juliet as a foundation for discussions on our year-long focus on human rights, which includes the theme of justice.
In English Language Arts this year students are focused on justice. Through many interdisciplinary learning experiences, students will be asking, ‘What are my rights and responsibilities?’ and ‘How can I take action when I observe injustice in the world?’
Many new texts that speak to this theme of justice feature BIPOC and LGBTQ+ narratives. TSA is introducing them to the middle school library and curriculum to innovate and diversify reading options. However, choosing texts and topics for classrooms can become fraught, as our culture and politics have become increasingly polarized. In this environment, TSA wants students to learn the skills that can empower their hope, instill leadership, and sustain their energy for change.
Inspired by the work of Ben Steinfeld and Craig Maravich in pedagogical disruption, “embodied language” is a tool that promotes literacy, builds community, and empowers student voices through acting exercises. TSA students will apply these exercises to their exploration of texts such as Tupac Shakur’s verse, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. All conversations in each unit, from human rights to food and hunger to energy will circle back to the yearlong theme of justice and our essential questions concerning student accountability and actionability.
For its first unit, TSA invited Craig Maravich, Madison Middleton, and Lindsay Pontius, the teaching actors of Middlebury’s Beyond the Page, to lead the students through embodied language exercises as they navigated Romeo and Juliet through a lens of justice. Students spent two days of workshop experiences in class with Beyond the Page.
At the community literacy event on December 14th, the students demonstrated their work in these kinesthetic literacy workshops and connected community members in a shared meal. By engaging the wider community in ways that encourage connection and vulnerability, students experienced being leaders and saw their work living in an authentic audience. Community experiences like these aim to support stronger connections and better mutual trust so we are more prepared to navigate political and cultural dissonances.
The evening closed with discussions on the theme of justice and how the work of the evening connects to our year-long essential questions. Students will look forward to a culminating event of spoken word poetry in the spring.
Thank you to everyone who came out to play and experiment and support our young artists! Thank you to Middlebury College and the Change Action grant for supporting our community and to the amazing actors and teaching artists at Beyond the Page.
Addendum: Read Hailey Neal Elles’s reflections on her work in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network Newsletter