We had an assignment for ICLT to create an identity box, containing artifacts representing ourselves. I didn’t want to do the assignment. It seemed random, not connected to any specific outcome: just a general exercise in self-revelation. Further, this was shortly after my incident with the professor, so I, formerly open, was especially disinclined to put effort and heart into a project that entailed my revealing aspects of myself. I was frustrated at my disinclination, because I believe that the way I get the most out of the program is to jump into it fully, suspending disbelief. But my trust is gone, and with it my willingness to do anything but skim the surface. I know this hurts me, but I am afraid of getting hurt again, and angry that it happened the first time. And again, the apparent randomness of this assignment made it especially unattractive.

The teaching lesson is that it’s important to let students know what are the learning objectives driving a given exercise, especially if it involves personal or emotional investment. Perhaps those objectives are obvious to our faculty, particularly because they may have been doing the same things for years. For one thing, I imagine that they’re modeling this identity box idea as something we can use in our classrooms. In that case I think it would have been sufficient to describe it rather than live it. It seems an exercise better suited for community building at the start of a class. Beyond that, I can’t imagine why we did it. This is a unit on cultural identity. From the written materials they’ve given us, I believe they’re trying to get us to see ourselves as cultural beings. I think that idea would be appropriate for college freshmen, or even 60-year-olds if they’re refugees in a multicultural classroom, needing their own identities to be acknowledged and to build community and understanding with people very different than themselves. But this is such simple, surface stuff that I haven’t learned a single thing about cultural identity.

But I had to do the exercise, along with the others. So what to do, when I didn’t want to reveal anything about myself? I cut out a human shape and stuck things to both sides — mostly photographs of people I love, along with a few other artifacts — and presented it to the class. They seemed intrigued by its format. Perhaps people could tell I didn’t want to talk, because there was no deeper discussion as there had been for the others. Ironically, I felt kind of left out, even though I’d created that situation myself. It was sort of, “I’m not going to tell you anything. Why aren’t you asking me anything? Don’t you even care about me?”

Yeah, so the lessons, again: Feel out your group to ascertain their level of comfort with the assignment. Don’t assume that, just because you’re the teacher, it’s okay to require students to do an exercise that might make them uneasy. Doing so will result in undone homework (where one can get away with that) or superficial (and thus wasted) homework. Further, make sure you know the objectives for the assignment: not just “to explore cultural self,” but HOW does it explore cultural self for this particular population you’re working with. Does it really do that? And finally, ask the students to guess, or tell them, the purpose of the exercise. In our case, if it’s to know ourselves, does it really fit our demographic? If it’s to teach us an exercise, is there a better way to do so? Do we need to experience it to understand it?

Okay, so here’s what I did:

You can see the people, and bits of nature (rocks at my feet, birch bark on my leg), and I’m veiled, and honest at my core (subtle message to those who had hurt me), and Mom’s eye is at the back of my head, and I have a pen and paintbrush for arms, a South African flag for an earring, a dark chocolate butt, and Dad’s nail file for the back of my arm.

After class I disassembled the montage and put many of the photo pieces up on my kitchen window.