I attended an educators' conference last week entitled "Equity in Action: Shaping Future Outcomes." We did a lot of internal work and external planning around systemic racism in our schools. On our last morning, we arrived to find the pages of history textbooks torn out and strewn across the tables. After a moving keynote, we were asked to engage in a found poetry task. We each used a random page from the table, and it was amazing to watch the ideas that had been percolating throughout the conference appear in our poems. (Found poetry or erasure poetry in this type of task is generally done by erasing words from a text to reveal a poem embedded therein.) Here is the poem I "found":
Data Update
Map and chart
people and where they live
Map and chart
Describe - rural or urban
one, two
Look at the map
the Profile
United States, South Africa
seacoasts, oceans
wealthiest riches
society divided
law, race, ethnic lines, language
How did such a system come to be?
