All the ways to explore identity

As we enter into fall YESS classes at Kennedy has continued our unit on identity. Students have explored identity and intersectionality through food, books, and even through exploring local history. Students have written out what they know about themselves, how they understand their intersections. In order to dive into this topic we watched short videos from Kimberlé Crenshaw, credited with coining the term intersectionality. We watched and talked about a video in wich she discusses how intersectionality can function in schools. Students got to think about this concept in their own spaces and we were able to give explicit credit to a woman who has done so much to expand how we understand identity and oppression.

In addition to this work in the last month we have celebrated and studied Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept 15-Oct15), LGBTQIA History Month (October), and Banned Books Week (Sept 27-Oct 3). Each of these allowed us to dive deeper into the concept of identity and our own history.

For Hispanic Heritage Month students did short research projects on a few major figures in Hispanic American History. We also watched a series of videos on the Denver Chicano Mural Project to help students begin to think through those local connections. Please see some of their work below.

Special shout out to Thalia, a mentor whose work can be seen on the Juan Felipe Herrera poster.

We also did a similar project for LGBTQIA History Project. You can see the posters below, but I want to give special mentio to 9th grade students Dom and Jose who took project lead on their posters.

Lastly I want to highlight students' self portraits which they did as part of our unit on identity. Students were given free reign to create portraits either literal or abstract in nature to show the complexities and intersections of who they are.

Moving forward, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week we will begin setting up out mentor-mentee pairs and groups. I look forward to seeing how these groups will continue to learn from and with each other.