I had such a good time browsing through the activities; I recognized a lot of them from having experienced them at MYFest! I’ll confess that since I taught asynch online for all those years, I was not exactly an activities-oriented person. Instead, my classes were more project-focused, and asynch learning is really ideal for projects, while classrooms lend themselves better to activities… which is why so many of the activities we did during MYFest were totally new to me. I found two while browsing that I remember as being really meaningful for me both in terms of what I created and also what I learned from other people’s creations.

As it happens, both of these activities are from Felecia Caton Garcia and Heather Wright who facilitated an amazing track called “Dark Matter y La Facultad: Liberatory Knowing & Practice” for MYFest… and when I went to look at my Padlet of MYFest notes (I learned the joys of blogging with Padlet thanks to that MYFest summer!), I found that I had saved both of the artifacts I had created for these activities, so you can see them here:
Origin Story: Zeus and the Turtle
Metaphor: The Coaster

Here are those activity pages at Equity Unbound: Origin Stories and Getting at Metaphor.

I was just dazzled for both activities by the creativity of the origin stories that other people wrote and the metaphors that they shared, and I remember we also did a related activity (I think it was in a session with Mia?) where we brainstormed all the phenomena for which we would LIKE to read origin stories, things that seemed to be crying out for stories — we did that in the Zoom chat and there were SO MANY ideas that people were throwing out, which made me think a whole workshop just on origin stories would be a beautiful thing.

Both of these activities relate to IEH in the way that they open up a creative space in which everyone can flourish, based on personal observations and individual ways of knowing, along with cultural ways of knowing that are alive in the metaphors of our languages and in the origin stories of traditional storytelling, along with the origin stories we invent and the metaphors that come from our imagination.

EVERYONE IS CREATIVE, and one of my biggest complaints about schooling and especially grading is that creativity is sidelined and downplayed. Many of my students would start the semester saying, “I am not creative…” — which just broke my heart. Children revel in their creative powers, but schooling stamps that out. I really liked how these two activities allowed everyone to reconnect with their creativity, resulting in creative thoughts and stories that we could share with each other.

Here’s a screenshot of the coaster post at my Padlet:

TEXT FROM THE IMAGE:

my coaster whirls like a wheel of the year.
I didn’t see it at first…
but there they are:
the spokes of the wheel radiating outwards,
spinning around and around,
are the weeks,
one after another after another,
never ending,
from solstice to equinox to solstice to equinox.
how did I not know that all eternity was there there,
right there on my coaster,
sitting on the desk
but spinning forever in time.
I looked, but didn’t see.
and now that I have seen it,
I will always see it.
how my coaster is a vortex of time
and we are all revolving inside it.

P.S. It’s true: I really do look at that coaster differently now after having meditated on it for metaphor purposes during MYFest. 🙂

Screenshot of Laura's MYFest Padlet at https://padlet.com/laurakgibbs/myfestlaura