As Dr. Cierra Kaler-Jones reminds her students, the most important person we tell our story to is ourselves.’
This week, Lincoln Elementary welcomed Kaler-Jones into Waterloo Schools’ third and final teaching artist residency for the 2022-2023 school year. Throughout the week-long program, fifth-grade students learned to outline their individual life maps, highlighting both individual scenes and lifetime summaries.
“I think it’s about letting students know that they have permission to write whatever they want to write, I think it’s all about choice and it’s all about options,” said Kaler-Jones. “Whatever you want to share, that is what you are meant to share in this moment.”
Students designed their own dual self-portrait, for the program’s capstone, showcasing both their internal sense of self and their contrasting external personas. This exercise helped fifth graders explore their own character development detailing their own various complexities, dualities, and nuance.
“We’re not one dimensional and there are multiple layers to who we are,” said Kaler-Jones. “This opens up the conversation to find ways of writing that let us be whole and complex and nuanced human beings in this world. For me, it’s about craft, it’s about writing, it’s about self-reflection, but it’s also about identity.”
According to Kaler-Jones, both students and adults, benefit from self-reflection and examining the lives we lead unattached from the hustle and grind culture around us. She challenges participants to ask themselves deeper questions such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How do I want to represent myself as a person in this world?’
“It’s really just about telling our own stories in our own way,” said Kaler-Jones. “We live in a society that often tried to tell our narratives and our stories for us, so I also see it as reclaiming, and also building self-confidence, it’s my story and it’s important.”
Whether students choose to write about the most joyous of their memories, the most difficult, or both, Kaler-Jones, says the most integral pieces for writing memoirs are creating space to open themselves up to the vulnerability of self-reflection, choosing their own narratives, and potentially sharing their writings with trusted others.
During this week’s professional development with staff, Kaler-Jones was able to share her personal experience with Waterloo Schools educators, sharing how teachers can further engage students in foundational content through arts integrations within the classroom.
“The thing that I love most about arts integration is that you don’t have to be trained in a particular art form – I think we all can dance, we all can sing, we all can create art, even if we think we are not good at it. We all can do it, and so it’s really about using creative methods to introduce and scaffold content.”
Lincoln Elementary has been overjoyed to have Kaler-Jones join them for this fun-filled week of arts integration and self-reflection. While the school year will soon be coming to an end, arts integration at Waterloo Schools has only just begun.
