Discovering the Power of Story: Nava Elementary
Capturing the El Otro Lado experience in the schools can be difficult. An emerging experience that grows over the course of the weeks, it is individual and yet, it is universal. Every one comes to the classroom with their own stories, but as the teachers, teaching artists, and young minds deepen their understanding of themselves and explore their sense of belonging, a community is formed.
We asked each of this years’ Teaching Artists to reflect on the first semester in EOL and their words were shared with students, families, and the school community. Now we would like to share them with you:
Image Transfer Self portraits
Looking in the mirror and looking at pictures of oneself can bring up a lot of different emotions. Some of these emotions can be difficult to face, and some are easier to come to grips with. This El Otro Lado project provided a vehicle via which the students were allowed to play around with both their emotional and visual self image.
This project consisted of two parts. All the students were given a black and white photograph print outs of themselves which they then transferred onto two different sheets of paper. With the first sheet, they transferred the outline and they colored in the face and background in whatever way they wanted. For the second sheet they were first asked to write in their journal about things that they don’t like about themselves and ways that they could change those things. They then filled in the outlined image of themselves on the second sheet with words from this paragraph.
Nathalie Nuñez
Teaching Artist
