During the 2023-24 school year, BLTN Awarded two rounds of Change Action Grants to teachers eager to empower their students and colleagues to make change through aspects of Conflict Transformation. These grants are funded by the Bread Loaf School of English through Middlebury College’s Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. Below are lists of the awards followed by a report by awardee Hailey Neal Elles.

First Round Awards

• Colin Baumgartner (Henrico, VA) secured funds for change-related mini-grants proposed by students and engaging community partners.
• Danika Robison (Washington, DC) applied funding to an oral history project connecting her students with others in Panama. (See “Travelers, Interviewers & Historians: DC Students Take on a New Way of Learning in Panama” in this issue.)
• Erin Tabor (Dearborn, MI) purchased a library of Arab-American texts to foster discussion about racism and gender roles.
• Hailey (Neal) Elles partnered with Beyond the Page for a community literacy event designed to encourage students and families to break down barriers and promote justice. (See details below.)
• Kate Cusick (Middletown, DE) wrote on behalf of herself, Nora Britton, and Rebecca Rose to support students using MapMe (digital mapping tool) in a place-centered project generating conversations across communities and facilitating connection across differences. (See article)
• Kayla Hostetler‘s (Aiken, SC) grant supports youth travel between NextGen Aiken and NextGen Lawrence to address conflict resolution and activism.
• Kendra Bauer (MA ’18, Lowell, MA) received support for training students on anti-racism workshop facilitation and the subsequent publication of a book on their experiences.
• Tim O’Leary (MA ’06, Ripton, VT) supported affiliate site mentors in What’s the Story? The Young Filmmakers’ Social Action Team.

Second Round Awards

• Yaneris Collado (MA ’21) is supporting a speaker series with Chelsea (MA) REACH after school program.
• Kayla Hostetler organized and paid for performances by the Shakespeare Tavern Company at Aiken High School (SC).
• Susan Miera (MA ’97) applied funding to for planning writing workshops and making documentary films at Santa Fe Indian School (NM).
• Yulissa Nuñez (MA ’20) launched a slam poetry club at the Carol Morgan School in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
• Danika Robison added filmmaking and editing components to her oral history project among Washington D.C. and Panamanian youth.

Hailey Elles, Change Action Grant Reflection

Editor’s Note: We hope you’ll find Hailey’s detailed descriptions of her purpose, action, collaboration, and school reform work to be a useful annotation to the rich narrative about the project’s culminating literacy night from The Sharon Academy (TSA) website. Elles and the Sharon Middle School team applied the Change Action Grant to engage Craig Maravich, Madison Middleton, and Lindsay Pontious with Middlebury’s Beyond the Page, and to provide a communal meal for families during the December Literacy Night. We encourage you to read that short piece as context for the analysis provided here.

Finding “Turning Points”

My co-teacher Margaret Gish and I planned three visits from Beyond the Page (BTP) during our Romeo and Juliet unit to walk students through some embodied language exercises that would help them to explore the theme of justice. The first visit, the BTP team acted out the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio is killed (with swords!). They stopped at turning points in the scene and got kids to call out and share where they saw those pivotal turning points. Turning points was one of the entry ways into our conversation about justice. We asked kids to think about turning points in relation to justice both in the play and also around issues of justice in our world. Then, we walked the kids through some physicalizing exercises to illustrate the concept of embodied language and serialize our conversation. Between each visit, students worked on creative writing pieces (mostly theatrical) that centered the theme of justice and built off our work with the play in some way. Then, BTP came back and workshopped a few pieces of student work, once again engaging in embodied language exercises with their work and facilitating conversations around the themes of justice that work explored. It was helpful for students to think about their own work as we workshopped other pieces, and we had some of our most profoundly analytical discussions all year in these sessions. 

The final visit from BTP was the literacy night, where we explored some of the same pieces we workshopped in the earlier session and engaged parents and community members in embodied language exercises centered around that student work. Our aim for the night was to be joyful and “in progress.” We talked about how the student work was intentionally unfinished at this point in the process and how we hoped to engage wider community members in talking further with the students about justice and art. Three student pieces we worked with during the literacy night were a poem about the pandemic, a rap about the Magna Carta, and a short play about climate change. Each student had the opportunity to talk about the connection to justice and take questions. At the end of the night, we offered writing prompts closely connected to the prompts the students explored, asking people to reflect on turning points in their own lives or the world. 

My head of school, Mary Newman, had this to say about our literacy night: “I haven’t been to a ‘community’ event that felt so entirely, completely, comfortably, warmly, accessibly ‘COMMUNITY’ in a very, very long time.  We use that word a lot at TSA and sometimes its power is more palpable than others. Tonight it caught fire, thanks to your work and collaboration with the Bread Loaf team.”

Art, Embodiment, and Play: Connections to the Conflict Transformation Initiative

The Conflict Transformation Initiative seeks to focus on conflict transformation and the “development of creative solutions.” Additionally, it hopes to “[equip] students with civic skills to address the conflicts that arise in a diverse society.” For this project, we focused on experimenting with modalities for student-led community engagement, specifically centered around student-voice in art. As a wider community we are navigating dissonance as we move forward and try to align our curricular values, specifically when it comes to decolonizing and diversifying our literacy instruction. This event addressed Conflict Transformation goals by providing students with leadership opportunities and an “at-bat” for engaging their wider community in the complex discussions we already navigate in ELA. We saw, in this instance, art, embodiment, and play as an avenue for building community connection and trust, which we saw as essential for creating the grounds for necessary development and change. 

While we may not have the resources to conduct a literacy night every year, we have fundamentally rewritten our year-long scope and sequence to include the embodied language work we developed with this grant. We culminated that work with a student literary magazine that came out of this process. Approaching teaching ELA with the pedagogical framework of embodied language has been a major shift for my practice.