The following is an adapted excerpt from Rebecca Bellingham and Veronica Scott’s forthcoming Artful Approach to Exploring Identity and Fostering Belonging. Coming January 2025.
When you return to campus after a long weekend, what are you most excited to talk about with your team? For us, our Monday morning meetings were often catch-up sessions about what we had just watched, read, or listened to. Sometimes, we would feel a little guilty not diving into our agenda right away but as it turned out, those seemingly frivolous chats were an essential part of our work together. We would start by recapping the latest episode of The White Lotus but then find ourselves engaged in deeper dialogue about the fluidity and complexity of privilege and status and all the ways that we experience these dynamics in our own lives. What might have started as typical watercooler conversation grew into something far more significant. As it turns out, pop culture can be a powerful starting point for a more meaningful exchange about how our identities impact the way we interpret the world or even the latest hit show.
Below are a few sample check-in questions to help you find organic, authentic (and fun!) ways to reflect on identity and connect as a team (see the full figure in the book). When we ask each other these questions, inevitably we end up laughing. We also end up learning more about each other even after working together for years. We hope these elevated watercooler questions help you to explore identity and connect with the people around you.
Binge TV and Picture Books: How to Deepen Our Noticing
We can consume content all day long, but developing a critical lens, especially around identity, requires deepening our noticing and paying closer attention to our own ability to discern the dynamics at play. As we become more intentional about the windows we’re seeking, it’s important to ask: What might I be missing? How is my identity and experience informing my interpretation?For example, you might have been one of the many people tuning into the HBO fantasy show Game of Thrones and wondered, “Why are there are no Black people in this made-up world?” or you might have been distracted by all the dragons and never noticed. If The Bachelor is more your thing, however, you might have been one of the fans who wondered why it took twenty-five years for there to be a Black “Bachelor” on network television. For both of these examples, your experience with race likely informed which observations you made or questions you asked. Similarly, you might be a horror movie fan and depending on your gender identity, you may or may not groan at the screen every time there’s a new movie without a female lead. Or, depending on your sexuality, you might be acutely aware of the fact that romantic comedies tend to center heterosexual couples.
We once invited an entire faculty of K–12 educators to watch a clip of White Lotus, a wicked satire that explores wealth and status. We asked them to pay careful attention to what they were noticing using the following questions: What do you notice about body language and tone (any “coded language”)? What do you notice about your own reactions and feelings toward different characters? What do you notice about the setting (especially considering its colonial and Indigenous context)?
Before sharing out as a whole community we provided the following context to help make the connection between social identifiers and how that impacts what you notice:
- Depending on your identity and experience with Gender you might have noticed the way some genders take up more space or how the tone used in conversations differs by gender.
- Depending on your identity and experience with Race, you might have noticed how some characters pretend to be colorblind or how for some characters race is an obvious and ever-present factor.
- Depending on your identity and experience with Class or Socioeconomic status, you might have noticed the upstairs/downstairs dynamics at the resort or have laughed when certain wealthier characters describe having a job as limiting.
- Depending on your familiarity with Intersectionality, you might have noticed the ways in which multiple identifiers created unique challenges for certain characters, like Paula, who is navigating her access to a world of privilege as a guest of her friend’s family and her identity as a young person of color.
Honing our noticing skills and realizing all the ways in which our identities impact our perceptions can lead us to new ways of seeing and understanding not only the stories we consume but also the world around us. When we think about what this looks like in practice, a little boy named Milo comes to mind. In Matt de la Peña (2021) and Christian Robinson’s book Milo Imagines the World, readers follow Milo on a subway ride. We soon learn he is headed to visit his mom who is incarcerated—a story that was inspired by Christian Robinson’s own life experience.
Like Christian, Milo is an artist, and on this subway ride, he notices the people around him and draws pictures of what he imagines their lives to be. He sees a boy in a suit and imagines him going home to a castle. He sees a whiskered man and imagines him going home to a lonely apartment full of rats and cats. He sees a bride and imagines her marrying a groom. Only, at the end of his ride, the boy in the suit is gets off at the same stop as Milo. They’re headed to the same place. Milo begins to question all his other imaginings. Maybe the whiskered man has a family at home. Maybe the bride is marrying a bride. Maybe there is more than one way to imagine each person’s story and maybe, as the book jacket says, “you can’t really know anyone’s story just by looking at them.”
While Christian Robinson’s experience informs the story at the heart of Milo, Matt De La Peña is the author of the book. This partnership underscores the complexity of “own voices” and how essential it is to make space for nuance. Researching the relationship between Robinson and De La Peña gave us context for the collaboration and the history between these two artists. What we learned was that a deep trust exists between them. In an interview about their partnership, De la Peña shared how important it was for him to “figure out how to honor” Robinson’s story (Colorin Colorado 2022). And Robinson shared that De La Peña’s “writing gave me an appreciation for my own story” (Robinson 2021a).
The more you get into the practice of noticing with art, the more attuned your critical lens will become: You’ll notice moments, characters, stories, and social dynamics in ways you never had before. Before we interpret, before we disrupt, before we launch into action, we start by noticing. And that work begins with ourselves. Taking a moment to pause and notice intentionally is just one small way we can continue learning for self and begin to (re)imagine the world.
***
A guidebook to creating classroom communities that foster identity and belonging in Grades K-6. | Learn more at Heinemann.com
