[This is a section introduction for The Long Ride, our Students At The Center history of social struggles in New Orleans written by students. A free PDF download is available at <SACNOLA.COM>.]
THE STUDENT LEARNS.
THE STUDENT TEACHES.
There are many, many ways to teach creative writing, but at the high school level the pedagogy is usually based on developing technical skills with an understandable emphasis on genre, form, grammar and vocabulary. SAC has a different approach.
For us “creative” does not mean simply doing something different or idiosyncratic. Although we certainly do encourage experimentation, we do not believe in arts for arts sake as a guiding principle. We believe in the student as author, i.e. an active thinking person who observes and questions their own existence and the whys and wherefores of the world within which the author lives.
Our goal is to encourage students to become active agents in identifying and analyzing their world, which includes their own dreams and speculations. We do not specifically offer lessons in poetry, fiction, journalism per se, rather we offer a topic and the student can choose a genre, an approach. This may seem to limit what a student learns, but our experience is that once we engage the student in the process, not only does the student learn faster, but inevitably the student wants to learn more. There are numerous books that teach form and genre, but few, if any, of those books are written for the average student in a New Orleans public school.
The Long Ride is a major project that calls for student writers to “Imagine” themselves within history and to write from their own perspective about factual events that took place before the student was born. We are fortunate in New Orleans; much of our history is documented. We are unfortunate in that 99% of the documentation is from the perspective of our historic exploiters and oppressors-after all those in power write history not simply to explain themselves but also to justify their actions.
The SAC approach is both deconstructive and reconstructive. We know that the bare facts are not only incomplete and sometimes misleading, we know that the bare facts are selective and thus we encourage not simply a reversal of perspectives, rather we suggest that our students question every historical fact and also, and more importantly, insert themselves into the process of interpreting history. So we break down the written history; we do research and critique what we find; we question what we find and speculate about what is missing; and then we rebuild history using our own perspectives and emotions.
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions: what did it feel like to…, what do you think is missing…, what would you do if… This is not formal history writing but rather creative writing at its best.
This chapter on Reconstruction focuses on a critical period in American history. Neither before nor since have Black people in America had such a rich and engaging connection to and with America; never before were we so fully engaged as human beings in the process of developing American society. During Reconstruction we had more elected leaders, owned more land, had more businesses, etc. than in any other period of our long ride to and through America.
This book, and particularly the work of Maria Hernandez, who is an American born daughter of Cuban parents, is an early example of the SAC approach to combining history and creative writing. From Maria's example, we SAC staff members are learning how to develop a bold and relevant approach to teaching creative writing. Maria learns how to write. We learn how to teach writing. This is the praxis of a liberatory pedagogy.
—kalamu ya salaam