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........THE
FAMILIAR Vol 1, Iss 2..............................................................................................................................
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BEHIND
THE SCENES OF AN EMOTION LITERACY E-ZINE MISSION
STATEMENT THE FAMILIAR VOL. 1 ISS. 2. Missed an issue of the familiar? Click here to browse through our entire back-issue archive! |
rodriguez-sackett interview This is the unedited interview from which reporter Ester Rodriguez built her article on the familiar upon. Click here for that piece. R: How long have you been teaching at Garfield High? S: I’m a teaching artist and have done several artist residencies at Garfield—the first one was through Seattle Repertory Theatre Company, as a playwright, in 1991. My work with Garfield’s language arts teacher, Christina Roux, began five or six years ago teaching emotion literacy to her students. She has been incorporating aspects of my program into her curriculum ever since. R: Which are the classes that you teach that relate to the on-line publication? S: This is a new publication, in development since last summer, up and running as of the end of March this year. The first issue was co-created, co-pioneered in a sense, by students at Garfield High School as part of Ms. Roux’s language arts curriculum beginning September 1999. Our second issue should be up on the site not too long after the end of this semester (June, 2000). We invite active participation from the community as a whole. the familiar is an arts venue, an emotion literacy learning environment and publishing opportunity for any and everybody and, most particularly, parents, teachers and teens. I am interested in working with other special interest groups—teaching emotion literacy and facilitating a creative writing process from which to generate issues for the familiar. I invite site visitors who are inspired by the writing currently on the site to write for it. There are a number of adult visual artists and writers who are affiliated with my company, Emotion Literacy Advocates™, who will be contributing, on a regular basis, to each issue. R: Have you had any response or feedback by parents? S: I had occasion to speak to the step-parent of one of our student contributors. She expressed enthusiasm for it…thought the familiar is a great idea. I invited her to write for it and she shied away from the prospect. I recently taught a course entitled "Parenting and The Language of Love" through Powerful Schools and all the parents expressed interest in the familiar when it was in development. Now that it’s up and running, I am very interested in establishing ways for parents to write for the site. R: Why do you emphasize public dialogue with your students? S: I’m not sure I understand what exactly you mean by "public dialogue." If you mean: why publish writings with a personal edge on the Internet? I would say it’s important to learn about personal/internal process and to share that process. We are social beings and, more often than not, look to others to see what is acceptable. The more we can make public our personal process, especially the process involving feelings and the way we think about feelings, the less fearful and the more knowledgeable we will ALL be about who we are internally. We, as a culture, are coming out of a long history of not only keeping feelings hidden from each other, but also keeping them hidden from ourselves. …except for those feelings, or I should say those emotions, that are deemed permissible—the happy stuff is seen as good, the sad stuff—something to bury or get over as fast as possible. Realistically speaking, we cycle through the full-spectrum of feelings several times a day whether we realize it or not. Being aware of that cycle of feelings gives us the option to choose ways to express any part of it at any given time. Violence grows out of a lack of awareness of feelings and a sort of internal isolation. Writing in community, which is an essential part of generating issues for the familiar is a potent tool for awareness. For those who are concerned about violence in the schools, I offer this venue for solace and a kind of guidance born of insight and inspiration. R: Why or who decided to call the on-line publication the familiar? S: I thought of the name last summer after becoming infuriated by something I read in the stranger. I decided, in the heat of that moment, to originate a publication and name it the familiar. I appreciate the stranger for prompting me to initiate a very tangible format by which to teach what I had been struggling to teach, without it, for several years. R: What prompted you to develop something like this? S: The answer to that question would fill more than the pages of this entire newspaper. I’ll give you the abridged version: working as a teaching artist and emotion literacy advocate in the schools has been a difficult job…difficult, in part, because the scope of what I am teaching is pretty huge, at the root of things, far-reaching and an arts in education program is very limited, relative to time and space. Class periods are short, classes are huge, my residency there is ephemeral and it’s rare that teachers have time in their busy schedules to participate in an in-service workshop with me… and parents, well, they are almost entirely out of that loop. Many people say it’s really important to teach young people how to "deal with" their emotions but many forget that young people grow in a soil that is cultivated by the adult community. A program that can be made available to young people as well as the adults who populate their world will be way more effective. The Internet is open twenty-four hours a day. So many of us are suffering from overload and we all benefit from improving our communication skills—given those two factors, a learning environment that can be accessed any time of day or night is sure to reach more people than one that can only occur within four walls for relatively brief and intermittent periods of time. It is really exciting to offer a venue that is so open-ended. We welcome your readers to visit www.thefamiliar.org For those who are interested in contributing to the familiar as a writer or sponsor, please see "Join Our List of Contributors" link, left column on the home page, contact Pamela at 206.985.7367 or write editor@thefamiliar.org
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