ACT WRITE: AUTHORING YOUR FUTURE PINAY POETICS PERSONAL SESSION WELCOME BARREL MEN PAUSE: TAKING A BREATH TO TEACH UP, DOWN, ACROSS: THE EFFECTS OF RACISM AND HORIZONTAL HOSTILITY ON COMMUNITY BUILDING RESISTING THE MISSIONARY POSITION __________________________________ __________________________________ (Workshop) Anthem Salgado Often times youth perspectives, of themselves and of the world they live in, are shaped for the most part passively – by media, peers, neighborhood conditions, parents, etc. In this workshop, teachers can learn to give the beginnings of lifelong tools to their students that will help them take back the power to direct their personal narratives. This workshop will focus on writing prompts for educators who wish to offer literary instruction to students with limited creative writing experience – high school and up. Attendees will learn three writing exercises, all keeping with the mission to empower young people towards self-determination via the word. These each can then be (and should be) expanded in a typical class setting to ninety or so minutes. Participants will experience the lessons themselves and should expect to try on their own inner poet! Bio: Anthem Salgado is a multi-disciplinary artist/educator. His art has exhibited throughout the Bay. As an actor, he has performed at Brava Theater, Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Intersection for the Arts. Salgado’s spoken word has traveled throughout the Bay Area, New York, Honolulu, and Manila. His fiction appears in anthologies, Field of Mirrors and I Saw My Ex at a Party. He is an artist-in-residence at Downtown High School, and sits on the board of educators’ network Mind Power Collective. Anthem Salgado received a Philippines Fulbright-Hays scholarship, and he was elected Young Leader of Color by Theatre Communications Group. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Panel/Roundtable) Barbara Jane Reyes with Aimee Suzara, Elsa Valmidiano, Irene Faye Duller, Karen Llagas, Maiana Minahal, and Niki Escobar We know the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to teaching our multicultural histories and political movements. Indeed, art and cultural production play great and crucial parts of these historical and political movements, and are effective educational tools. Whereas legalese, academic and other professional terminology and jargon can alienate the people who live our lives outside of institutional spaces, art serves our movements by stirring emotions and imaginations, affirming and challenging via word, image, and movement what the people know intuitively and experientially about our social conditions. In our art, we need not lecture nor prove our authenticity, our “down-ness.” Art is the mirror we hold up, so that all of us may see ourselves and become inspired to act. In many indigenous communities, the storyteller, the holder of community memory and wisdom, is the one around whom the people gather, upon whom they rely for her lifetime of learned skills in keeping, meticulously crafting, and sharing story. Poetry is a specific and distilled, concentrated use of language. As poets, drawing from our linguistic, cultural, mythological, spiritual/religious, historical wells, we tell our personal and community stories using figurative language, metered, musical lines, litany and anaphora, alliteration and assonance. We work with nuances of tone and timbre. In contemporary times, informed by traditional poetic and musical forms of various diverse cultures, and by vers libre, we are free to subvert and rearticulate traditions and to invent new ways of composing the poem. We craft poems with page and stage as our canvases, as as polyglot, polyvocal, multidisciplinary productions. We work with fractured form, fractured language, stitching, weaving, remixing, Hip-Hop, found and appropriated text. My proposed presentation places contemporary Pinay poets within the above contexts of wholeness and invites them to speak for themselves. Bio: I am an Oakland based Pinay poet. I have authored Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco, which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the forthcoming Diwata. I am interested in discussing the wholeness of poetic craft together with political/cultural/historical subject matter and engagement. Frequently, we who study poetic craft seriously and professionally are unfairly dismissed by our own communities as participating in “whiting” programs, revoking our community membership. But learning to write effectively is to sharpen a tool to be used for personal and community empowerment. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Address) Bio: I was born and raised in the Philippines. I immigrated to the US in June 2004 due a series of unfortunate events and financial difficulties. I started off living in Motel 6, Bellflower, CA with my brother, his wife and two infant children. I eventually moved to San Francisco in May 2005. In 2006, I started piecing puzzles together, connecting my life experiences to the historical context of the US’ socio political relationship to the Philippines. This inspired me to write creatively and become involved in community organizing. I became serious about spoken word poetry and hip-hop MC’ing and I started performing everywhere around the Bay Area. I would eventually make it to Youth Speaks’ Bay Area slam finals and represent the Bay Area in the Brave New Voices international poetry slam in 2008. As for organizing, I was involved in several organizations, but mainly Active Leadership to Advance the Youth (ALAY.) Today, I am continually attempting to improve as an artist, not individually, but as a group with my hip-hop/rock band, Boondock Squad. I am also a college sophomore at the Dominican University of California, studying Humanities and Cultural Studies with a focus on community development and a minor in Leadership Studies. My stretch goal is to become a social entrepreneur who will create or help develop a school that focuses on giving needy immigrant youth and inner city youth resources and an education that is relevant to their well being and future. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Workshop) Jack “Kiwi” Dejesus Being a man can be confusing. Being a Filipino man can be especially confusing. Whether it is the pressure from family and friends, or colonial and religious influences, these daunting expectations can impact how young Pinoys view their own masculinity and manhood. Not to mention the standards of what it means to be a “real man” in American society (compared to how it is in the Philippines), and other issues such as racism, economic status, and so forth. These factors have a huge impact on how young men relate to each other, and more importantly, to women. And as educators, it is important for us to engage the young men we work with in identifying these things, to be critical and challenge themselves to go from being perpetuators to being allies. This workshop will begin by having participants level off on common issues that occur with the young men they know. We will then go a little deeper and tie these issues with a couple exercises such as “Man in a Box” (with a Filipino twist), which has been used the last few years in the area of Men’s Work. We will then spend the last half-hour doing several case studies in small groups, where each group will practice some of the lessons learned to come up with intervention strategies. Though time is limited, participants will hopefully come out of the workshop with a few tools and activities that they can apply in their work with young men. And although this workshop is geared towards Filipino men, it can also be adapted and applied to young men in various communities who have similar histories. Bio: For nearly a decade, Kiwi (Jack DeJesus) has been holding it down in the independent hip hop scene, rocking shows from California to New York to the Philippines. Formerly of renowned Filipino rap group Native Guns, Kiwi is currently working on an upcoming full-length album, and is the lead subject for the documentary film “Sounds of the New Hope.” When not on stage or in the studio, Kiwi is a community organizer in San Francisco’s South of Market district, as well as Deputy Secretary General of BAYAN-USA, a national alliance of groups organizing for the rights and welfare of Filipinos both in the Philippines and the U.S. Kiwi is interested in engaging with other educators and organizers around the particular issues of the young Filipino men they work with, and brainstorming strategies on how to address them. He especially is excited to share a few of the tools and activities he has learned and developed from his past work with young men. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Workshop) Liza Gesuden and Stephanie Cariaga As educators who are teaching students to fight injustice, we often neglect the health of our own minds and bodies when we enter the classroom. This workshop will explore multiple ways to promote physical and spiritual health and wellness in our personal lives, so that we can be effective educators. We believe that to take care of the community, we must also take care of self. Drawing on our lolas’ wisdom and our own personal experiences as Pinay educators, we will practice introductory guided meditation, movement and breathing exercises to encourage others to develop their own wellness practices. We will also discuss methods for creative application and spend time in written reflection. Bio: Liza Gesuden is a second-generation Pinay educator, born in New York City, raised in Southern Cali, now in the Bay. With the belief that education is a tool to transform one’s self and community, she has committed her life to this work. Liza has served as a high school English teacher for the over seven years and is currently a teacher with Pin@y Educational Partnerships and Oakland School for the Arts. She is pursuing her masters in education at SFSU and learning the art of herbalism. She hopes to one day ride a fixie with no hands. Bio: Born and raised in Southern California, Stephanie Cariaga currently teaches English at Animo Locke Tech Charter High School in Watts, CA, where she is inspired, challenged, and enlightened by her awesome students. She first became inspired to teach through work at UC Berkeley by workshopping/writing/teaching poetry through June Jordan’s Poetry for the People Collective, and later earned her Masters Degree in Education with the The Teacher Education Program at UCLA. 3 years into her teaching career, despite the dreaded lesson planning, tears in the classroom, district bureaucracy, Stephanie continues to hustle for equity and social justice for all youth. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Workshop) This will be an advanced and interactive workshop where participants will have an opportunity to consider our socialization around race and racism in the U.S. and the impact of that socialization on our ability to build strong diverse communities. We will discuss horizontal hostility. We will specifically focus on the ways in which transgressing racial construction begins by considering our conscious and unconscious internalized beliefs and actions. Using a combination of interactive programming and activities as well as facilitated dialogue, I hope to engage folks in a space where they can work with and challenge one another to develop advanced thinking about race based systems of domination, subordination and collusion. Workshop participants should have a basic understanding of how racism works on an institutional, cultural and individual level. They should also have a working understanding of racial identities represented in the U.S. The workshop will challenge those in attendance to critically consider their role in colluding with racist systems and the ways in which they can deconstruct, challenge and change both thought and action. · Participants will understand the vocabulary and definitions necessary to engage in a dialogue about racism and horizontal hostility as well as an understanding of the terms stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, social power and oppression · Participants will explore their own racial and cultural identities and explore the ways in which their behavior challenges or supports sex and gender based oppressions · Participants will enhance their ability to identify horizontal hostility and racism that occurs in the QPOC community · Participants will increase their ability to think critically about the intersections of their varied identities · Participants will increase their ability to respond to racism within our queer community and act as change agents Bio: Natalie J. Thoreson’s background in psychology, work as a behavior specialist and M.Ed. in Social Justice Education have informed her 10 years of training experience in social justice education, youth empowerment, working with LGBTQ identified youth, behavior modification, communication skills, staff development and effective leadership. Natalie has designed and facilitated workshops on cultural competency, diversity and discrimination for numerous audiences. Teachers, students, administrators, youth care providers, city police, social workers, community centers, religious organizations and youth from a variety of backgrounds have benefited from her passion and talent for social justice education. In 2007 Natalie was a featured presenter at the California Social Work Education Center (CalSWEC) Title IV-E Student Conference in San Diego. She is also a member of the Community College of San Francisco’s training department specializing in cultural diversity training. She possesses an exceptional ability to convey an understanding of complex theories through the use of metaphor, concrete examples and interactive group process. It is important for her to present workshops in the most interactive accessible fashion and with the goal of empowering participants as leaders, mentors, role models and community builders in an increasingly pluralistic society. __________________________________ __________________________________ (Workshop) Ray San Diego As libratory educators, we often look to our lived experiences as a means of connecting our students to the curriculum. However, the experiential knowledge of our sexualities is often excluded from these conversations. Although highly contested within education (particularly at the K-12 level), when sexuality is present it is often disconnected from a racial or cultural context. For Pin@y students, this could have serious consequences in relation to their mental and physical health, intimate and familial relationships, and ability to resist intersectional oppressions. By recognizing how moral based assumptions of sexuality as “private”, “taboo”, and “inappropriate” are stifling us as educators, we can begin incorporating ways of locating sexuality within the Pin@y classroom that are anti-oppressive and empowering. __________________________________ __________________________________
PERSONAL
(Workshop)
Anthem Salgado
(Presentation and Roundtable)
Barbara Jane Reyes with Aimee Suzara, Elsa Valmidiano, Irene Faye Duller, Karen Llagas, Maiana Minahal, and Niki Escobar
(Address)
Jean Teodoro
(Workshop)
Kiwi
(Workshop)
Liza Gesuden and Stephanie Cariaga
(Workshop)
Natalie J. Thoreson, M.Ed.
(Workshop)
Ray San DiegoAct Write: Authoring Your Future
Pinay Poetics: Process, Politics, and Community
Personal Session Welcome
Jean TeodoroBarrel Men – Examining Masculinity and Nurturing Manhood among Young Filipino Males
Pause: Taking a Breath to Teach
Up, Down, Across: The Effects of Racism and Horizontal Hostility on Community Building
Natalie J. Thoreson, M.Ed.Resisting the Missionary Position: Integrating Sexual Literacy in Pin@y Studies
[...] Presenters: PERSONAL [...]