From Our Teachers

Growing an Arab Garden

May 2011

Having worked on a city farm in London and seen the endless possibilities and benefits of planting an edible garden with young people, my imagination went wild when one of Northeast High School’s Vice Principals suggested that we revitalize the Alumni Garden for our National Arab American Service Day project. Using gardening as the medium for reaching out to Northeast High School students, specifically Arab students, was a way to address many of the issues facing these young people while making reference to the community plot that Al-Bustan once maintained in the Morris Arboretum.

Our plan was multifaceted with the process and the outcome holding equal importance. In addition to ostensibly beautifying an underappreciated courtyard, we also planned to foster mentoring relationships between the Arab students and members of the Network of Arab American Professionals (NAAP) through this day of volunteering side by side.

By planting herbs and vegetables that are staples in Arab cooking, we hoped to encourage Arab students to share their background with the rest of the student body, promoting a cultural-exchange centered on food. This garden provides a large number of the ingredients necessary for making tabbouleh. The garden’s ability to promote cross-cultural exchange was no more obvious than on the Service Day itself when more than 35 Chinese students showed up. Some students made illustrated labels for the plants with the plant names written in Arabic, Mandarin, and English.

Growing a vegetable garden at a school has clear nutritional value as well. As we have become increasingly disconnected from our food supply, the health benefits of being involved in growing our own food are manifold. In growing their own food, the students control the amount of pesticides they eat and foster a greater appreciation for whole foods.

Not only has the garden served as an educational tool in many capacities, but we hope it will continue to empower the students by giving them the opportunity to donate some of their harvest to a local soup kitchen.

While this service day was just the beginning of what could be an ongoing project with continuing opportunities to plant, harvest, prepare and cook from the garden it was a successful day in itself. Though many of my ideas behind the project will only come to fruition over time it was clear that the students had enjoyed the day when they approached me only two days later, wondering when they would be able to get to work on the garden next.

-Miranda Bennett, Outreach Coordinator

Posted on June 13, 2011 by mirandabennett | Comments (0)

Writing Injustice

April 2011

The ability for individuals to express themselves freely is a primary ingredient to effective education. This is why the arts in particular are such a force in education, and why many are actively fighting for our children’s right to artistic self-expression in school. The creative vitality of our youth is dependent on their ability to intellectually connect with art forms validated in school, popular culture, and elsewhere.

Q&A with Chakaki, Wattad, and Gonzales after "Brooklyn Beats to Beirut Streets" at UPenn Museum

Traditionally, Hip-hop in its variety of forms has been seen as a cultural force working in opposition to positive social and academic achievement. Hip-hop is often characterized by media pundits as inherently misogynist, materialist, and concerned not with the ills of the world, but instead only personal gain. In this pursuit of inflammatory headlines, the media actively ignores the tremendous potential for hip-hop as a force for social change. And it is this potential that the Human Writes Project wishes to utilize.

The Human Writes Project, comprised of Mexican-American poet/educator Mark Gonzales, Syrian-American MC/architect Omar Chakaki, and Palestinian-American MC/writer Nizar Wattad, is a presentation in spoken word that traces the personal development of the artists alongside hip-hop’s development as an art form. Touching on many diverse issues such as growing up ‘other’ in the United States, personal trauma, and 9/11, they performed in Philadelphia on March 31, in the morning at North East High School, and in the afternoon at University of Pennsylvania.

“Hip hop was born in 1975…and so was I,” begins Mark Gonzales, before tracing landmark moments in his life in conjunction with hip hop, and in doing so, uses spoken word and rap as an effective means of self exploration. As the three artists mature in their personal and professional lives, hip-hop grows from a little known musical genre to the most popular genre amongst youth in the world. This interplay between their personal journey and the journey of hip-hop was one of the most engaging parts of the performance, and speaks to the universality hip-hop can have in giving voice to the voiceless. The title of the performance, Brooklyn Beats to Beirut Streets, reflects this universality as Hip-Hop is adopted by people all over the world as a language of resistance.

In the cause of social justice, Gonzales, Wattad, and Chakaki see hip-hop as providing a foundation for resistance to the ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples everywhere, and their own identities are intertwined in this presentation. Be it the tragedy of the Chicano people, who are vilified in public discourse as “illegal aliens” in an area historically connected to both their people and culture, or the Palestinian people, whose ongoing ethnic cleansing is a humanitarian crisis 60 years in the making.

Northeast High was an especially pertinent location to hold such a workshop: as the largest and most diverse high school in Philadelphia county, the audience consisted of primarily recent immigrants, or the children of recent immigrants. Instead of monopolizing the performance, the artists also created a safe space for students and adults to perform their own work impromptu.

Ultimately, the goal that hip-hop and spoken word in an educational context works toward is that of self-definition. It is the work of narratives, empowering students to write their own in a world where the media and politicians increasingly monopolize the power to narrate. And through challenging these narratives, people find ways to forge a future that is better for those around us. Mark best sums up this sentiment in the last line of the performance:

So mothers fall asleep to the beats of bones crumbling and children give new meaning to the words head knocking and body rocking while praying to Allah for one night’s good sleep. We must learn that we have infinitely better rhythms that we can learn to dance to.

- Musa Hamideh, Program Assistant

Posted on April 18, 2011 by musahamideh | Also posted in News | Comments (0)

Reflections on My First Year

“How has the Arab American Resource Corps changed your life?” I pause. I immediately think: “what a pretentious question.” It was not from disbelief that my position as an ARC volunteer was able to change my life, but from a discomfort with the idea that the full implications of my ARC service would be evident the day I finished.

I have always lived in an in-between place. Growing up in suburban Florida, the son of a Palestinian immigrant and American mother, my place in the world was always called into question. With close family, I was too white to be Arab, and with Americans, too Arab to be white. Otherness had been projected on me from both sides of my already bifurcated identity, constantly calling into question where I was and what I should be doing. In the summer of 2000, I moved to my father’s childhood village in Occupied Palestine. The second intifada started that fall, yet the two years that I spent under brutal occupation didn’t have an immediate psychological effect on me. At the time, you do and think what you can to lift yourself from the misery, and fantasies of coming back to America became my psychological escape from the teargas, checkpoints, and unmitigated violence that I witnessed.

I came to Philadelphia in Fall 2005 to attend Haverford College, and I graduated in Spring 2009 with a degree in Archaeology. I had little contact with the Arab American community in Philadelphia, or other Arabs in general. The Arab side of my identity was intensely personal, and not necessarily a shared experience. After graduating, through a fellow graduate of Haverford, I found out about the program assistant position with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an Arab culture and education organization dedicated to bringing the arts, culture, and language of the Arab world to Philadelphia youth.

It was through Al-Bustan that I was first able to interact and navigate my dual and sometimes conflicting identities. Every year, Al-Bustan Camp chooses a different area and figure of the Arab world on which to focus. This method stresses the internal diversity of the Arab world, so as not to be seen as a homogenous whole, but a quilted fabric; with different cultures, dialects, cuisines, and costume, all sewn on to the common fabric of the Arabic language. This past summer, the theme was the United Arab Emirates and the famous navigator, Ibn Majid. The theme of navigation was present in every manifestation of camp, from the nature classes to art. In art with Tremain Smith, campers created a large compass rose using the letters of the Arabic alphabet and the encaustic method, in which mixed media are used to create a piece of art on a wooden slab, and wax is used to seal in the rich color and gives the whole piece texture.

The purpose behind the theme is that identity is one of the most important aspects of a child’s development, and the ability to navigate all the different aspects of one’s own identity is a beneficial and life changing ability. For many of our campers, who come from a diverse set of backgrounds, using Ibn Majid as a figure was a metaphor through which they could explore their own identities, finding it within themselves to be able to define who they are in the broader context of multiple cultural influences. That is how ARC has changed my life. It has equipped me with the skills necessary to not only navigate my own identities, but to use them in a context that equips others with the tools necessary to derive great joy and happiness from their own.

Posted on January 31, 2011 by musahamideh | Comments (0)

Navigating Through Art

Tremain Smith, wearing t-shirt with geometric designs, demonstrates sponge painting

July 2010 at Al-Bustan Camp

Intelligent, creative, eager young people come rushing in. “What are we doing today?” Art. We are doing art. Sit down and I’ll tell you. Ibn Majid, Master Navigator, traveling the seas, exploring the winds, currents, coast lines, stars, ports. How do you get from here to there? North, South, East, West. . . Shamal, Janoob, Sharq, Gharb. The compass rose, the eight-point star. Make your own. With compass and straight edge, build the geometric constructions for discovering infinite patterns. Fill them with color. Red, yellow, blue, green, orange, violet. . . ahmar, asfar, azraq, akhdar, burtakali, banafsaji. Paint them, draw them, print them, collage them, mold them, design them, create them.

Each young person that entered the room was an artist, using the tools of an artist, choosing materials, learning the alphabet of art, naturally and with instruction, following through with ideas freely and with guidance. The creative works gathered in abundance with each hour of art-making. By the end of two weeks, these young artists had enthusiastically engaged in multiple media and produced piles of artwork. Some were explorations left unfinished, the process more exciting, more important than the product, and some were fully developed pieces ready to be displayed. They persisted when challenged in complex designs. They reveled in lush colors, in drips, in thick paint. They simply enjoyed their time drawing and sharing their pictures, the stories they told in lines and color. They collaborated in large pieces, making decisions together that ultimately led to visual harmony. They delighted in unexpected outcomes that suddenly happened. Look at that! They were artists, fully engaged, fulfilled and wanting more. I was impressed, exhausted and happy.

Where will they go from here, these intelligent, creative and eager young people? If they continue to navigate from their creativity, and explore with their intelligence, they will go far.

- Tremain Smith, visual artist
visit her website: www.tremainsmith.com

: Tremain Smith, wearing t-shirt with geometric designs, demonstrates sponge painting

: Displaying encaustic panel of alphabet and compass rose

: Enjoying geometric-shaped sugar cookies

: Making collective 8-pointed star designs

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Hazami Sayed | Also posted in Camp, News | Comments Off

Multicultural Arts Takes Center Stage

June 2010

Where can you spend the day enjoying music, dance, and poetry from all corners of the globe; not to mention a tap dance by Tony Danza? Multicultural Day at Northeast High School is the place!

On June 9th, Philadelphia public school students participating in various after-school cultural clubs, representative of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the school, performed to approximately 2,500 of their fellow students throughout the day. Due to the sheer size of the student body (approximately 3,600 students), students came to the auditorium in groups according to their class periods, which meant that the dedicated singers, dancers, and performers repeated their pieces five times! The impressive line-up included a meringue dance by the Latino Club, a South Asian dance by the Indo-Pak Club, an African dance by the African Club, an instrumental piece played on the traditional Chinese string instrument, a Martial Arts dance demonstration, a collaborative poem written and read by several students from the Poetry Club, and a tap dance performed by actor Tony Danza, who happens to be teaching at NEHS this year.

Students in Al-Bustan’s dance workshops performed the dabkeh, a traditional line dance common in Palestine/Lebanon/Syria, under the guidance of Al-Bustan’s music and dance instructor Hafez El Ali Kotain. Another group of students presented a percussion routine of solo arrangements created by the students with instructor Hafez.

Several of the students who signed up for the after-school class with Hafez were Arab, mostly from Iraq and Palestine, but many of the students came from other countried, including Turkey and Albania. With only 8 weeks of instruction with Hafez, the students’ accomplishments were astounding. Students danced and drummed with confidence, joy and enthusiasm. Especially exciting was the fact that students brought much of their own personality, rhythms and ideas into their performance. Mixed in with the traditional Arab rhythms were hip hop beats, and even the faintest hints of marching band drum beats as well. The Multicultural Dancers also added their own style to the dabkeh dance. After he had guided them through the basics of the dabke, students creatively added their own steps to it. Double kicks here, an extra jump there, it was clear that the students were making this dance their own. “This is all them!” Hafez told me proudly at the dress rehearsal. As an educator, I could understand the pride in Hafez’s voice.

The students’ performance went off without a hitch, despite the many hours it spanned. The solo created by the percussion students was creative, exciting, and masterfully performed. The applause for the percussion group was almost defeaning each time they played! The dancers (adeptly named the Multicultural Dance Group) were led by a student who had recently emigrated from Iraq. He was the head of the dabke line, traditionally a spot reserved for the leader of the dance. Their performance was graceful, flowed beautifully and was received enthusiastically by an audience who eagerly clapped to the beat. By the end of the five hours of performing for their peers, the students told me their feet hurt from pounding on the hardwood floor, and hands hurt from beating on their tablas (Arab drum). But I could see in their proud smiles at the end of the day that they felt it was all worth it.

Sally Bonet – Education Director

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Hazami Sayed | Also posted in School Programs | Comments (0)

A Day with Nathalie Handal

On June 4, Al-Bustan hosted acclaimed poet, playwright and writer Nathalie Handal for a day in Philadelphia. She gave a highly engaging talk and poetry reading with public school students at Science Leadership Academy, followed by a reading at the Friends Center from her recently published book Love and Strange Horses, The Lives of Rain, and other works. Some photos are shown below.

Samee Sulaiman, a recent graduate of Haverford College and new staff member at Al-Bustan, shares his reflections…

* * * *

The sense of being between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say that’s the single strongest strand running through my life: the fact that I’m always in and out of things, and never really of anything for very long. -Edward Said

I kept thinking of this quote by Edward Said while spending time with Nathalie Handal. When we first arrived at 30th Street Station to pick her up I was struck at first that she did not have a typical Arabic accent. In fact I was not sure where to place her accent. The more I learned about her the more I realized that perhaps this was more my problem than hers. When we arrived at the Science Leadership Academy, where she was to lead two poetry workshops with 9^th and 11^th graders, one of the first things she brought up was her accent. She asked the students, quite openly, where they thought she was from. The answers were perhaps as diverse, though incorrect, as her actual upbringing. We learned that she had spent significant parts of her life on four continents.

The first words that came to my mind about her experience were exile and displacement. Perhaps this was true in diction but certainly not in connotation. Normally we think of exile as an experience of horrific trauma that needs to be corrected. There is good reason for this. Displacement is truly a horrible experience. From Ms. Handal, however, we learned the experience of being “between cultures” is not simply an experience of victimhood but one of active engagement with all aspects of the world. Nathalie Handal took Edward Said’s seemingly sad quote above and transformed it into her joyful strength. When asked by the students what region or country she was shaped by the most, or which she thought of as home, she stated that she could not pinpoint one country or area. She simply said, “I am very global.” This was the message she espoused throughout the day among the school children she was speaking with, all of whom seemed enchanted by her charismatic embracement of their experiences. We had the joy of being able to listen to not only her poetry but the students’ as well. The students’ poetry was equally inspiring and enlightening. I found myself no longer just focusing on her as the center of activities. Rather, I was more intrigued by the energetic group dynamic she was facilitating.

I initially thought that getting these high school students to be excited about poetry would be a difficult task, but I quickly realized that they were excited about it before she even arrived. The discussion about poetry and how everyone related to it quickly delved into the kinds of poetry students were interested in. The impressive list of favorite poets included e.e. cummings, Shel Silverstein, and Edgar Allen Poe. It was also quickly apparent that the students were really interested in spoken word poetry. We got into a great discussion about the differences between poetry for the stage and poetry for the page. As a spoken word poet I always wondered if someone like Nathalie Handal would look down on something like Slam poetry but rather she seemed quite open to it. In fact, most of the poetry we heard from the students were spoken word pieces including one from a student named Saneea, who will be representing Philadelphia at Brave New Voices this year. It was a great example of poetry that was good for both performance and for the page.

Nathalie Handal’s poetry itself was thematic in a few ways. One realized quickly the extent to which the social influenced her writing. She was quite open about the fact that human suffering was a major topic of her poetry. As a global woman who is of Palestinian origin and someone who has lived in places like Haiti, France, and the Middle East, it would be hard not to be influenced by these things. Yet her poetry does not settle for a description of suffering. It seems engaged in a search for a deeper human connection. We can see that in her poem Bethlehem where she describes the memory of Bethlehem in her dreams. She sees the man in her Grandfather’s dream and chases after him. “He looked at me and left. I followed him–asked him why he left? He continued walking. / I stopped, turned around and realized he had left me the secrets in the space between his footsteps.” Through the movement of pain we can find an answer to our questions. The answers she has been finding have been rooted not in the differences between people but in their similarities. Her global experiences give her expertise I think we should all have, but do not quite yet. I will believe her when she says that “most people are much more similar than they are different.” I have reflected much on my initial inability to place her accent. I now realize that the fact that I needed to reduce her to an identity, whether national, ethnic, or otherwise was a problem. It meant that I have a lot more to grow to achieve the intellectual and humanistic maturity that she has achieved.

- Samee Sulaiman, Program Assistant

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Hazami Sayed | Also posted in News, School Programs | Comments (0)

Arts and Community at Moffet School

May 2010

It is a wonderful feeling to watch a culminating performance by students who have spent months learning and rehearsing. The slow-building anxiety of going on stage, the excitement of the students, and the pride of their parents, these factors all intermingle in a single room, making the air thick with anticipation. This is how I would describe the auditorium at John Moffet Elementary School in the moments leading up to the Arab Arts and Culture Event.

It is May 27th and Moffet students who had participated in Al-Bustan’s afterschool Arab arts program are about to present to their peers, teachers and parents.

Al-Bustan’s music director Hanna Khoury and percussion teacher Hafez El Ali Kotain lead the students. Two members of Al-Bustan’s Philadelphia Arab Music Ensemble also join for the occasion, Jerrell Jackson on bass and Jessica Kassarjian in singing. Hanna and Hafez open the show with Mohammad Abdel-Wahab’s Aziza, a quick tempo instrumental piece that energizes the audience and prepares them with the style and flow of Arab music.

The program proceeds nicely. The two percussion ensembles at Moffet perform their arrangements, including a fusion piece with Brazilian rhythm that was included at the suggestion of Zahra, one of the students. Hafez leads the percussion ensembles and demonstrates their technical skills by ending their segment with a call-and-response, in which Hafez plays a 4-bar rhythm and the students respond by mimicking him. This part of the show engages the whole audience who began clapping along to the rhythms set by Hafez!

The percussion ensembles were also given voice instruction by Hanna and Hafez. They perform a set of classical Arab songs: Nassam Alayna composed by the Rahbani Brothers, a hugely popular song famed for Fairuz’s recording; Yallee Zara’atu El-burta-an and Toba by Mohammed Abdel Wahab. These classics are well known by the Arab parents in the audience, so they begin clapping and singing along with the children.

The show comes to an end with the Moffet folkloric dance performance. Debkeh is a form of dance practiced in many countries in the Blad-a-Sham, an area that includes Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. With his students of mixed heritage, dance teacher Hafez had taught them a blend of several Arab folklore dances.

The performance ends, but it is not the end of the event. Everyone browses around the auditorium to see the displayed artwork. All semester, visual artist Rachel Bliss had been teaching a weekly after-school art class at Moffet around the theme of “Home.” Students recycled donated cigar boxes along with tons of other objects in and around their home, from food wrappers, pictures, trinkets, etc., to create works of art that reflect what home means to them. The finished products took on the appearances of a person, decorated in the memories that anchor these students to their community and their home.

In fact, the whole performance took on this theme of community and home. John Moffett School resides in a neighborhood with a significant Arab population. Some of our program participants were able to share their Arab culture, while the others engaged in a culture previously unfamiliar to them and at the same time shared something of their own heritage. I believe these forged bonds of community within the school have created a space that these students feel comfortable calling HOME.

- Musa Hamideh, Program / 2010 AmeriCorps Member

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Hazami Sayed | Also posted in School Programs | Comments (0)

Learning with Simon Shaheen

February 2010

I had never played formal Classical Arabic music before joining Al-Bustan as the 2010 AmeriCorps member. At first, I joined the Philadelphia Arab Music Ensemble out of necessity: there was a noticeable absence of a male voice and I was already present at all the rehearsals for administrative support. Since I had a profound inexperience in playing Arabic music, let alone singing it, my reticence was palpable at the beginning. As we had more rehearsals, I found myself singing Qum Ya Mughani in the shower, and Lama Bada on my way home from work.

Simon Shaheen leads workshop with members of Philadelphia Arab Music Ensemble, February 7, 2010

What has set this semester of the Arabic Music Ensemble apart from the last is the presence of Simon Shaheen, an internationally acclaimed musician whose scope and influence in bringing the Arab music scene into the concert halls of the United States is unparalleled. Simon held a workshop with the Philadelphia Arabic Music Ensemble and the Kimmel Center Youth Jazz Ensemble at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. As he walked into the room, everyone tensed up, and I felt a sense of doom come over me: here I am, in the presence of one of the greatest classical Arab musicians alive, and I had been singing Arabic music for all of three weeks. Surely my inexperience would be quickly identified and chastised.

My sense of doom was quickly alleviated. Simon was responsive and helpful, terse at moments, but always bouncing back with a friendly demeanor that left the entire ensemble encouraged. He used visual imagery often, most notably describing the quartertone as a hypothetical red key on a piano between a white key and a black key. As the workshop went on, it began to click for many in the ensemble, and hitting the quartertone accurately suddenly made sense. “Trill on the C”, he said at one point, “because it contextualizes the B half flat. Just playing the C then the B half flat can sound unnatural, but when you trill on the C, the B half flat is put in context and sounds beautiful.”

The workshop went on over an hour and a half past schedule. We spent long periods of time on only one or two bars of music, repeating until all sections were refined. He explained that the micro-tonality of Arabic music left very little leeway for mistakes. It takes the smallest amount of space on the violin, or in pitch, for a note to go from one tone to another. If you play the C even slightly off, it becomes a B half flat. Playing with Simon was exhausting; he is a demanding instructor and never satisfied unless his expectations are met. The workshop ended, but the ensemble seemed invigorated. Whereas before, self-consciousness hindered our playing in front of Simon, by the end of the workshop, we could all tell that the mechanics and tonality of Arabic music had begun taking hold, and the ensemble played with a confidence that will surely turn into a phenomenal show on April 25.

- Musa Hamideh, Program/Administrative Assistant

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Chloe Tucker | Tagged arab music ensemble, arabic music, simon shaheen | Comments (0)

Finding My Arabic Voice

January 2010

One of the most satisfying events during my time working at Al-Bustan last year is the Evening of Arab Music, a concert of classical Arab music held at U-Penn on December 4, 2009. I had worked on planning the program for this event since March, when Hazami Sayed, Al-Bustan’s Executive Director, told me her intention of beginning a new Arab Music Program. Locally, Al-Bustan is well-known for its percussion program, but the decision to expand the music education program beyond rhythm has allowed Al-Bustan to offer a broader and more nuanced experience of Arab music in Philadelphia.
singing

In the fall of 2009, as we launched the Arab Music Ensemble at the University of Pennsylvania, Hazami asked me to participate with the singers. I was a little reticent; while I had played in an orchestra for eight years, I have never considered myself a singer. To sing in a chorus was a completely new experience for me, and singing in a foreign language, with a foreign musical vocabulary that included tones my ears could not easily hear (raised as I was with Western classical music), was difficult. Luckily, this sense of estrangement yielded positive results for the group as a whole: the music director encouraged my mistakes and used them as learning opportunities for all of the singers. Finally, as the esprit de corps between singers solidified, and students from the Penn Arab Student Society and members of the Arab-American community in Philadelphia were attending rehearsals regularly, I began to learn the music much more quickly. By the end of November, I would find myself walking through Philadelphia humming “Ahwak” or “Nassam Alayna.”

Months of work led up to the December concert, which had almost three hundred people in attendance, and only standing room available for those who arrived late. Youth who participate in our summer programs were there with their families, college students had brought their friends, and a cohort of world music students from Temple University gave up part of their Friday evening to help us run the event and enjoy the evening. As favorite songs filled the room, audience members began to smile and clap along, and by the last chorus of “Nassam Alayna,” the entire room was invigorated and echoing with the sounds of collective joy.

- Chloe Tucker, Program Assistant / 2009 AmeriCorps Member

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Chloe Tucker | Also posted in Music Instruction | Comments (0)

Scenes from Iraqi Daily Life

Drama Students at the End-of Camp Performance

Campers performing a scene about selling dates at an Iraqi market

July 2009

Before my two weeks in residence as drama teacher at Al-Bustan Camp, I had limited experience with Middle Eastern culture. I have close friends from Egypt, and I had spent time observing a community-based arts program in Vienna, Austria’s Turkish section as part of my dissertation research. Like many others, I followed the barrage of media reports on the war in Iraq and the recent political events surrounding Iran. However, I had never spent significant time considering the personal stories of people from this large and significant part of the world.

I began with several exercises designed to engage the students’ senses of play and their imaginations. During this time I led them in a word association game. This allowed me to confront the students’ prior knowledge of Iraq and also to help them begin to think of these cultures as material for their theatrical creations. Knowing that many of these children have Arab parents, I expected that this exercise would yield vastly different associations than the same would yield in a class full of students with no Arab heritage. I was surprised when the words the students gave me so completely matched words that the news media tends to emphasize in conversations of Iraq. Words such as “war”, “death”, “Bush”, and “Cheney” were as common as phrases such as “suicide bombing” and “U.S. occupation”.

Given these associations, it was clear to me that my students needed to explore issues not typically linked to Iraq in the news media. Even conventional, mundane stories about growing up in Iraq, I thought, would help to break down the stereotypes that the kids held and start to frame Iraqi culture in more human terms. Enter one of our counselors, an Iraqi student who recently came to the US as a refugee and was studying at a nearby college.

I asked her if she would be willing to share some stories of what it was like growing up in Iraq. She paused before agreeing to this, fearing that I was asking her to reveal stories of her later years in the war-torn country before she and her family fled and were relocated. She was relieved when I told her that I did not want her to tell the children the “dramatic” stories that many new acquaintances ask her to tell. I told her that I wanted her to focus on the many positive experiences she had while growing up in her homeland.

Campers singing Iraqi folk song "Fogh al-Nakhl"

She told me that some of her best memories revolved around the Ramadan celebration, especially Eid, the day after the fasting when her entire extended family in Baghdad would go to her grandfather’s home and she spent hours playing in his garden and climbing the date tree. Smiles accompanied Dina’s delivery as she told the students that one particular day she spent at her grandfather’s home was “the best day” of her life. A genuine exploration of the culture required the presence of someone who could tell the children stories rooted in her own personal experiences, and the play evolved in a fluid, organic manner from her stories.

Through the improvisation and story-telling exercises that we had practiced in the first classes, campers were primed to construct dramatic presentations from phrases, themes, and story fragments. I asked the 10-12 year old students to break into two small performance groups and construct a play based on their Iraqi counselor’s memories.

I already had much experience guiding students towards the creation of stage-worthy pieces of theatre, but the most transformative teaching moments (for the students and myself) were experienced when the children embodied the seemingly mundane, yet profoundly important memories of a girl who lost a great deal to the current events that remain at the forefront of public discourse and the news media. Sometimes the most seemingly quotidian elements of a culture are the most revealing and the most useful for confronting cultural stereotypes.

- Justin Poole, Drama Teacher