CITIZENS — NOT SPECTATORS — by Suzanne Sutliff During this time of separation, unanswerable questions and difficult realities, my class and I stayed connected through correspondence. Along with staying connected, my students needed to be empowered to know that they were a part of history and how they experienced these events mattered. At first, this correspondence looked like any other journaling activity with prompts that guided responses. But as the weeks of quarantine passed, my students’ writing evolved into something more important. Students started using this time to process events as they were happening to them. They began to open up about the personal ways they were being affected by living during a pandemic. The familiarity and comfort of working in pajamas among favorite pets and memorabilia removed the barrier between home and academia and emboldened their writing in a unique way. Without any prompting from me, they were archiving these memories as participants in their own history. Every week, through this quarantine, I sent a personal postcard to each student at their home. Later, parents told me that this was something their children looked forward to all week. How often do children today get “snail mail”? Students would show me their postcards on our daily zoom meetings and tell me where they were storing them for safekeeping. It seemed to me that this back and forth correspondence between my students and myself was not unlike letters written by soldiers or refugees to loved ones in any country in the world during any time in history. We go to these primary resources to understand the events, the emotions and the very personal reflections by those who lived that history. Like those soldiers or refugees, my students were hungry for connections. They were seeking an affirming response that said, “I am listening, and I understand.” Children and adults throughout history have had their lives interrupted by world events. By writing letters to loved ones and keeping records of events in journals, they were able to preserve these memories for
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PEN The Journal of the Progressive Education Network Spring 2021
