Andy Powell Case Study

DreamYard — Andy Powell Case Study

HEALING AND AGENCY THROUGH POETRY

Andy Powell came to poetry late in college, and has been writing poetry for a little more than a decade. Some of the best qualities he brings to his job are his sensitivity, creativity and verve. Andy admires and is inspired by poet Ross Gay for his tenderness & generosity & specificity as he moves through the good & the difficult of this world. Andy’s Pet peeves are milk chocolate and wet socks. Most people don’t know he makes a mean roast chicken. Three words that describe Andy are joyful, tender, and hopeful. When he isn’t working he is happiest sharing a meal with friends, flying kites, and swimming. Some causes he cares about are public things, equity, accountability (people to people, people to the environment. Andy wants to be remembered for his love of ice cream and public parks. Andy is a poetry Teaching Artist and School Programs Coordinator for DreamYard Art Center. Andy’s chapbook ‘My Heart is a Public Park’ is forthcoming from Best Buds! Collective, and he has been published by The Paris Review, Winter Tangerine Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. He co-founded DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium with Ellen Hagan. This interview shares Andy Powell’s teaching journey at DreamYard and navigating new territory with virtual learning due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Andy talks about the mass protests that happened due to the killings of unarmed Black men, how he offered his students an outlet to express their agency, and their shared process of healing and liberation.

Interviewed by Denisse Cotto Reyes, DY Alum

TEACHING AT DREAMYARD

Denisse: What is your role at DreamYard? What sort of things has changed for you from being a Teaching Artist to now an In-School Program Coordinator, and even doing both at the same time? How has being a Teaching Artist, supported your role as a In-School Coordinator, and vice versa?

Andy: Yes, this year I’m doing a little bit of everything. I’ve been a poetry Teaching Artist at DreamYard for six years. During my tenure, I have taught in elementary schools, high schools, and at the DreamYard Art Center. This spring I transitioned into the role of In-School Programs Coordinator, working to develop and maintain deep relationships between our artists and our collaborator schools in The Bronx. I am committed to my work with DreamYard because it is a place that has long worked to be an anti-racist, activist organization, and, like few organizations, is committed to re-working itself when it can to be more equitable and expansive. Working through the best ways to engage my students and be in relationships with teachers and administrations has absolutely been useful as I have moved into the coordinator role–I have a sense of what concerns the Teaching Artists might have for a school, and what concerns their partner teachers & administrators might have.

When I teach, I want my students to know that their poems can be populated with the stuff of their lives

— Andy

Denisse: What is your teaching style? What does teaching mean to you? How have your students kept you on your growing edge?

Andy: When I teach, I want my students to know that their poems can be populated with the stuff of their lives. I want to honor their experiences and their communities, which means I have to do the work of finding poems that will reflect their experiences, which, in some ways, is its own form of social justice — though it’s a very first step. As a white cis man in a white cis dominant culture, I have to reflect on what I’ve been taught is important in art and in history, and I have to do the work of researching and finding works by poets that contribute to a culturally relevant pedagogy. And when I bring more overt social justice issues into the classroom, my goal is for my students to build their own opinions and decide what kind of future they want.

Denisse: What sort of themes came up this past semester and what topics did they respond to more than others?

With only two weeks to go in our poetry residency, the country faced a reckoning with police brutality in Black communities, and Black Lives Matter protests once again took to the streets. Since the students had already been thinking about their own powers and their own fights, a lesson on the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests was heavy, but the students had been building a vocabulary of resilience and an understanding of their own ability to make demands. We had learned about Muhammad Ali in the fall and his relationship to the Vietnam War including what he gave up to fight against the war. We’d learned about Malala Yousafzi, Emma Gonzalez, Mari Copeny, and the young activists at Standing Rock and what they all fought against as well as what they stood for. We wrote poems after Nikki Giovanni’s “The Rosa Parks”, (“Do the Rosa Parks/ Say no no…”). The students wrote “Do the ____” poems where they could choose an activist or themselves to honor and share the demands and actions of. For our response to the police murders of George and Breonna, we wrote: “Dear America” or “Dear ____” poems, letter poems to America, the victims, or the families of the victims. I’ve used the “Dear America” / “Dear _____” prompt before, reading a couple of bits from Allen Ginsberg’s “America” and “lady liberty” by Tato Laviera (see below) to discuss military budgets and what the kids think the country should spend its money on.

VIRTUAL LEARNING: CONNECTING FROM A DISTANCE

When COVID struck, I made a quick pivot to virtual learning with my 5th graders at PS 32. We wrote poems that would honor the situation we were in, and make them feel connected and in the community even though they were stuck at home.

— Andy

Denisse: How did your class change with Virtual Learning and how did you adapt?

Andy: When COVID struck, I made a quick pivot to virtual learning with my 5th graders at PS 32. We wrote poems that would honor the situation we were in, and make them feel connected and in the community even though they were stuck at home. They wrote poems about objects in their homes that connected them to friends or family or what makes them feel powerful at home (e.g. a Spongebob Costume, a basketball, the last Taki, the chancla that ends the fight over the last Taki). Then they wrote poems based on Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”, about fighting to survive the pandemic, and also about what they planned for the future, how they would fight to see their abuelas again, for example. Alicia Marin’s “Still I Rise” poem was chosen to be highlighted during DreamYard’s annual end of year arts festival and was printed on a giant poster that was hung on the fence of the Andrew Freedman Home, where student work would have been exhibited if we could have gathered in person. Her classroom teacher drove out to photograph the poster and FaceTimed Alicia and her mom to show them the reach of her powerful poem, which made for a powerful moment of connection at a distance and, as Ms. Matos, her teacher, said, “the three of us got to feel that incredibly proud moment she deserves to feel… it was moving to see Alicia feel so empowered.”

Dear America, by Destiny Gutierrez, 5th Grade, PS 32

I am starting to get tired of this country.

Why’s it so hard for black people to get peace? Equality?

They have been asking this for years and they still don’t get what we want.

IS that task that hard? To just treat us fairly?

Our DreamYard Art Center middle school crew this year, the Bronx Liberation League, has been on interdisciplinary work.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LIBERATION THROUGH POETRY

Andy with colleagues at a Teaching Artist Professional Development located at the DreamYard Art Center

Denisse: What does Professional Development look like at DreamYard Art Center? How have you created new ways to be free in the classroom? Teaching in the Bronx, long a symbol of poverty and the most marginalized borough in New York City, how do you teach liberation?

Andy: The ways I move through this work are deeply informed by Renée Watson. When I started teaching for DreamYard, she had recently developed a few poetry lessons centered around the police murders of Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin. I attended a few professional development sessions she ran, both at DreamYard and in Community Word Project’s summer training. Renée has a Masters in Art Therapy and framed the work with the intention of working through traumatic issues with students without traumatizing or re-traumatizing them. (And, generally, operating under the ethos that “we don’t want to teach children that Black pain and struggle is the only part of Black life.”) She introduced small techniques like limited time to create lists or boxes you could put your sensory details into, perhaps on a graphic organizer, so they could be contained exercises, contained thoughts that could be the basis for their poems. And the work of learning about and engaging grim truths about this country that are very present can be traumatic, so she put an emphasis on giving the students an outlet for hope, for action, for agency—to read and create poems of hope, of demands; to send your message to the President or politicians; to share your message on social media or on a poster; to teach the response to tragedy as well as the tragedy; to tell the students that people are and have been fighting, protesting, boycotting, spreading their messages.

Andy with colleagues at a Teaching Artist Professional Development located at the DreamYard Art Center

There is healing in honoring a student’s demands for the world, in honoring their priorities (mess with the environment and animals and my 5th graders will COME FOR YOU), and in making sure they are aware of what our leaders are setting up our country for and how that will be their future.

— Andy

POETRY HAS HEALING POWERS

Denisse: What are the ways you all have supported each other’s healing in the classroom? What are some ways poetry manifested its healing powers unto your students?

Andy: In 2017, with a different group of 5th graders, we talked about Trump’s plan to cut the National Endowment for the Arts, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institute for Peace, while increasing the military budget by 54 billion dollars. There is healing in honoring a student’s demands for the world, in honoring their priorities (mess with the environment and animals and my 5th graders will COME FOR YOU), and in making sure they are aware of what our leaders are setting up our country for and how that will be their future. And, as of the past week or so, many of these sorts of demands — these questions about where the country spends its money — are being taken seriously, and my students are ready to tell you where they want to spend it: on education, on the environment, and on Takis for everybody.

Sometimes my job as a Poetry Teaching Artist is to give an outlet to the extra energetic student who has a hard time focusing, a moment in the day when she can be extra and it counts and is honored. And sometimes my job is to hold space for the quiet student who, when she writes a poem about her mom and tamales, gets super riled up and suddenly becomes a performer. Sometimes my job is to tell the classroom teacher that yes, it’s ok if the students are loud during poetry; I want to hear their voices and their joy. So, to me, liberation in a classroom setting means challenging students to grow and supporting them deeply as they do; making sure their voices, experiences, and communities are honored; and making sure they are given a platform to speak back to the world, to claim their identities for themselves.

Sometimes my job is to tell the classroom teacher that yes, it’s ok if the students are loud during poetry; I want to hear their voices and their joy.

— Andy

Lucki Aktar Islam, born and raised in The South Bronx, Student at DreamYard Preparatory Highschool, poet.

About an hour after I sent the Dear America lesson to this year’s 5th graders at PS 32 I already had a full-page poem from Edem Messanh, written breathlessly with heartbreaking lines like “I can’t breathe means I can’t breathe we’re fighting for a better future that’s all” and “you hurt people that did nothing yeah I’m hurt am I next?” Here are a few more examples of work created during that lesson:

Dear America or Breonna Taylor by Alicia Marin, 5th Grade, PS 32

We should feel as if we can all become One

In a world where we are barely accepted for the color of our skin

As I write this know I stand for you

All my brothers and sisters,

Mothers and fathers,

Uncles and aunts, know I stand for you.

My heart is as high as my fist in the sky.

Together we can all unite as one.

Dear America by Alaisha Cruz, 5th Grade, PS 32

You’re a great place to grow up in

Or are you?

Many people believe

America is like a fairytale

But I’m not sure it’s good place to grow up

And sure it’s might have good jobs but Americans are

Horrible people, if America was a fairytale

This would be more of a nightmare, lives are being taken

With just a blink of an eye

Oh America, it’s a very racist place

But not all are like this–protesters are being

Taken away for standing tall and standing strong

And for putting their opinions out in the world

Just remember all lives matter but right now

#blacklivesmatter

Here are some resources from Renée Watson, and you should also check out her books to include in your curriculum:

Aracelis Girmay, another poet who has deeply informed my work:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/22/from-woe-to-wonder/

* Here are parts of poems mentioned that I brought to my 5th graders:**

America by Allen Ginsberg (full poem here)

> America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America when will we end the human war? Get out of here with your nuclear bomb. America when will you be angelic? America you don’t really want to go to war.

“lady liberty” By Tato Laviera (full poem here)

> This is a warning, my beloved america. Help ALL of my people give the tired and the poor the same attention, AMERICA, touch us ALL with liberty, there is lots of hunger, our soil is plentiful, our technology advanced enough to feed the world, Let’s NOT celebrate our wealth, or our sophisticated army, let us concentrate on our weaknesses, on our societal needs.

The Rosa Parks (A Song in Rhythm) by Nikki Giovanni

do the rosa parks

say no no

do the rosa parks

throw your hands in the air

do the rosa parks

say … no no

do the rosa parks

tell them: that’s not fair

somebody’s lying

rosa parks him

somebody’s crying

rosa parks her

shame the bad

comfort the good

do the rosa parks

just like she would

sit down (1-2-3-4-5-6)

stand up (1-2-3-4-5-6)

sit down (1-2-3-4-5-6)

do the rosa parks all over town

For more on Andrew Powell follow him on Twitter @_andypowell