The website for the Museu Picasso in Barcelona doesn’t load in my school, probably because it is a European website. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be too worrisome for me as I’m generally unconcerned with the work of Pablo Picasso in the planning and teaching of 11th grade English but a teaching idea Yemi Stembridge began to hatch as he stood in the museum studying masterpieces this last summer has me clicking back and forth between Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas and the abstract remixes of that masterpiece created by Picasso.

I’m gonna b looking for a middle or high school partnership this year to teach an interdisciplinary unit on Revision combining Art & Language Arts

If you’re interested, hit me up

— Adeyemi Stembridge (@DrYemiS) July 15, 2018

Stembridge stood in front of Picasso’s work and had epiphanies about how his own public schooling in New York left him with few memories of art class, and how the high cost of visiting a museum in America creates an experience gap for American students with limited means.

Though we hadn’t made the trip to Spain, art teacher Alison Manciu and I wanted to tinker with this teaching idea because the series of works Picasso created based on Las Meninas by Velazquez suggested instructional ideas to us. Manciu imagined ways to help her students understand perspective and abstraction in her drawing class, and I thought the paintings could offer a new tact for presenting the revision process to high school writers.  For me, it is important to give writers a view of writing  in the real world, where adults who write professionally struggle with first drafts, and they embrace creative, personal processes to help them produce writing that has meaning and serves a personal purpose. In the hustle of English assignments and unit planning that sometimes shoehorns writing into grading windows and reading response tasks,  I can inadvertently give them the message that hurried revision of a written piece that amounts to polishing for a teacher audience is all there is.

The quote below begins to explain how my revision unit might gain inspiration from the art.

The series is made up of 58 works: 45 interpretations of the work Las Meninas by Velázquez (isolated figures, heads, groups of characters and interpretations of the whole), the 9 paintings of The pigeons (works about the dovecote and the views that he had from the studio of La Californie in Cannes where he painted the whole series), three landscapes and the portrait of Jacqueline. At the museum we also have the preparatory sketch that was subsequently donated to the museum and that doesn’t form part of the series itself, but it is fundamental for understanding it.

My planning and teaching will be inspired by great art, as well as what I learn in a bustling art classroom.  I’m observing for a week or two to see how Picasso’s Las Meninas pieces inform her teaching of abstraction and perspective. I’ll adapt some drawing lessons from the mini-unit on perspective and abstraction to launch my revision mini-unit. Also I’ll take photos, capture videos, and record conversation with students as they create art under the influence of Picasso’s abstractions. The media I gather will help me illustrate creative possibilities for the revision process.

In his address, “How leaders change culture through small actions,” for Academi Wales, the public center in Wales for leadership and management excellence, Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge describes how he gathers narrative data from patients and nurses in hospitals to develop what he calls a human sensor network. He refers to two sets of stories that emerge as The Patient’s Journey and The Nurse’s Journey.

I’ve excerpted the clip from his talk above because it might help school leaders who are beginning to gather stories envision potential collections that could emerge at their schools to promote deeper understanding of different stakeholders’ experiences. In the 2017-18 school year, I began to pilot Cognitive Edge’s Sensemaker software at Rangeview High School, where I collected a few hundred stories from students and teachers using the Culture SCAN survey. Since I was piloting the work, I would inevitably focus on how to introduce the survey to different groups of respondents, which involved thinking through how I would support them as they coded their stories using triangles and a sliding digital ball (pictured below).

A few times in the 2017-18 school year I had a chance to put stories together in collections to share them with colleagues and students. To do so, I would read through the data and look for multiple stories about the same general topics, then curate small collections that included an even balance of both negative and positive experiences. My cleanest examples were two sets of stories about broad categories: student conduct and school leadership. With these small collections in hand, I facilitated the next part of the process, which was to put the stories back in front of teachers, students, deans, and school leaders. As they read, I asked them (while pointing at the stories coded as positive by respondents), “How do we get more like this? And, (pointing at the negative stories),  as determined by respondents), “How do we get fewer like this?” On each occasion, because I was piloting a process, I was probably more attuned to how I was facilitating than I was to how people were responding. Still, despite being a little self-conscious about introducing this novel process, I was able to gauge how all of the different groups became engrossed in reading the stories I presented to them. Just as engrossing as reading the stories were the conversations about how we could create conditions that would lead to more positive and fewer negative stories at our school.

Hearing Snowden talk about the work he’s done in hospital systems, I’m struck by his use of the word “empowerment.” I think the engagement I see when teachers read the stories written by students, and by their colleagues, is a sign that this process of collecting, curating, and redistributing stories might lead to a greater sense of empowerment across our system. Certainly, when I challenge teachers with the task of imagining a few ways they, in their current roles, might take actions that would amplify the positive and dampen the negative in their workplace, the room buzzes and they immediately have ideas they can act on.

The notion of empowerment also reminds me that an important next step in this work for me is to invite others into to process of creating story collections. To help others see the potential in this process without burying them in spreadsheets full of stories I’ve done this on my own to this point, but I think there it will empower other leaders to see a “human sensor network” in its raw .csv file-view, and in the populated triangles that the associated Sensemaker Explorer app produces. While I’ve been delivering short collections of stories in an easy to read format, I want to empower others with the abstract nature of pages and pages of stories, despite their messiness and occasional mundanity. (Among some moving stories and occasional rough ones, our budding human sensor has also revealed less powerful stories like this: “I came to work last week and there was no paper in the copy room.”)

It is my hope that by inviting others into the spreadsheets of data this work generates, and into the process of creating collections, we can think together about the collections we want to stitch together that can support a better understanding of a school. In the way Snowden puts together The Patient’s Journey and The Nurse’s Journey, I can imagine a freshman’s journey, a new teacher’s journey, or department chair’s journey. I’m anxious to see where this work will go next but my hunch is that empowerment will come from inviting others into this process and asking them what potential they see.

“This is a hard life, Mister.”

He was holding a paper attendance tracker form in his hands, which he shook at me while he gave me the rebuttal he had wisely kept to himself in the dean’s office. He explained how he was 14, a middle schooler, when his father had been deported, which also marked the time he began working to help his mother pay rent. Three years later, his despondent mother wouldn’t talk to him anymore and his house was a place where he and his siblings fended for themselves to survive economically and emotionally in Aurora, Colorado, their adopted home, now that no one expected their father to return.

I stood and nodded, knowing that the relationship building I try to do with struggling students had earned me this story.

He went on to tell me how hard he had to work since that time to help pay rent, to buy a truck, and to afford the insurance and maintenance costs that went along with the transportation he needed. Growing angry as he talked, he told me how he had worked jobs in fast food restaurants for years and how the managers would only allow him to clock a fraction of his hours. When he complained, they would invite him to quit. They knew he was undocumented, without any rights to stand on, so he wasn’t entitled to the minimum wage guarantees afforded to citizens, to documented workers.  S_____ knew at an early age what many American citizens don’t: the profits of fast food franchises in America are bolstered by the cheap labor costs of teens with fake social security cards. The fast food restaurants my students flood to every day at lunch cheat the kids they know they can cheat.

“This is a hard life, Mister.”

On that day, in that hallway, I told him that he was going to finish high school. Scared and angry as he was about the dean’s firm message about attendance, he also knew that his coaches and teachers cared for him. As a teacher of immigrants, I know that the trust we’d earned as a school with this immigrant boy missing his father was that much harder to earn because of the way our culture views and treats the immigrants we entice across our borders with jobs we’ve always counted on them filling.

The story didn’t pour out of F_____, I had to drag it out of him while his mother listened. I’d spoken to both of them about attendance a few times by phone before. Meeting face to face in the main office, I asked why he hadn’t transferred schools when he moved out of our attendance area like he and his mother had told me they were planning. He explained that his father had not gone to his new school to complete the transfer paperwork, so he had mostly stayed home while he was in academic limbo- too far away to drive to my class for our 8:30 AM start time but not enrolled in the high school right behind their new home. On that day F_____ promised to do better as an assistant principal and I laid out the potential consequences if he kept skipping school.

Weeks later, when F______ missed class for the first time since that conference, he told a coach his father had been deported. Now attending class daily, he sat in the first row right in front of where I started class each morning and he looked sadder by the day.

With his father gone, he chose to read My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant, by Jose Antonio Vargas in my class. The reading response he turned in during this traumatic time read:

Being an undocumented person is hard and comes with many challenges. Jose says, “I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality.” This means people like him don’t grow up living a life like people that are documented and were born in the United States.

F____’s paper reminded me about the experiential cultural differences between me and so many of my students. My privilege contrasts with their constant worry.

These two boys missing their fathers and confronting trouble for missing school are in my thoughts on this Father’s Day. With both of them, I know I earned their trust in a cultural setting that treats them and their families like criminals while our Colorado economy booms with them as important cogs. When we said goodbye for summer, S_____ looked forward to working on a construction crew because the real estate market in the Denver metropolitan area is thriving and he found a boss who treated him fairly. The wages for a strong young laborer make it easy to afford rent, gas and insurance.

F____’s summer started on a more somber note. In past summers he would work long hours with his dad to renovate the houses of “people that are documented.” Will he be looking for work using the skills he learned working with his dad? Those skills and the stamina of strong young men are in high demand, as immigrant laborers know well. I like to think his dad’s friends will help take care of him. Unlike the hard fought trust teachers like me earn from immigrant students in our question to help them develop academic skills, the trust immigrant families have with employers is colder and more transactional. The risk and reward of employment with a labor crew is something immigrant students are all fluent in. Less personal than the trust grown between teachers and students, immigrants to my city trust they can find work and make money despite the harsh reception they receive on so many fronts.

Families know they risk being torn apart when they come here but they come here still. For wages. For jobs. American dreams are realistic dreams of families who expect full well to confront racism and corruption. While the horrifying new policy of separating children from parents, boys from fathers, is in the headlines and shocking to many American citizens on this Father’s Day, undocumented fathers and sons know our immigration system has been tearing families apart for a while.