Black Girl In Suburbia YES! field trip
Today I took some YES! students on a field trip to see a screening of Black Girl In Suburbia at Midland Library and it was really magical! The film maker seemed excited to have young people there and my students we’re actually excited and engaged with the film and the discussion. IT was beautiful! There were 7 YES! students, a culturally/racially diverse group, one white boy, one mixed race black boy, one latino boy, one mixed race Asian girl, one Russian girl, one mixed race black girl, and one latina girl.
The YES! group has been off to an intense start this term because the class is full (so, the biggest it’s EVER been) and there are a lot of 6th graders that are just still adjusting to middle school life and pretty antsy by the end of the day for SUN. It’s been a challenge connecting and explaining the mission of the class/group for the hyper and distracted younger students, as well as giving other students what they want to get out of the group who are there intentionally because they were in YES! last year, heard about YES! last year, or watched the SUN video and connected with the YES! activities/ideas explained by me and the students in that video. We’ve been working pretty hardcore the first 3 classes on respecting each other’s talking time, the importance of talking together as a group respectfully, not deciding that certain people are bratty or troublemakers just because their having trouble managing their behaviors an talk in the class, and the importance of having a diverse group socially engaged with each other and working on issues in their community… And, 4 classes in, I think it’s really sinking in for these students that this is a group where they do have a voice as well as how to respect their fellow students’ voices.
I think the students today were really excited to ride the city bus (the library’s youth programming coordinator gave our group bus passes) and do a special field trip as part of YES! There was free candy and popcorn so I think that may have reinforced that it was fun for them, but they really did pay attention to the movie and they also respectfully participated in the discussion afterward. I think this was a really good experience for the students, especially 3 who have challenges in managing their behaviors sometimes in the school environment, but are sincerely interested in engaging once you break through with them and earn their trust - go figure, right? It was all over by 5:30, so we actually hung out as a group together and I learned that 2 students (of the 3 that I was so impressed with their participation today) didn’t have library cards, so 2 other students were sweet and asked me to help them find applications for the 2 students that didn’t have cards, so I did and I helped them fill the forms out. Their mom/aunt (these two students are cousins and live together) signed for them when she got there and I had a chance to meet her and chat for moment, which was cool (I also met other parents of students which was also wonderful, I love meeting my students’ parents). All the kids grabbed posters after the movie too, telling me how much they liked the film.
It was beautiful to see the students in a smaller-but-still-diverse group and do a little bonding with each other, as well as take them to a community place/resource where this conversation about race and identity was happening with the filmmaker (who is from Oregon) in room full of various ages and identies of community members. <3
