Poetry Spotlight: How a Shared Love of Spider-Man Sparked a Creative Breakthrough
Have you ever struggled to connect with someone? It can be frustrating, but Teaching Artist Trae Banuelos found a way to connect with a reluctant student through a shared love of Spider-Man and visual art. As they bonded over their mutual interests, something amazing happened: the student's creativity began to flourish. With Trae’s guidance this student learned how to transform his thoughts and feelings into beautiful words. Listen to this heartwarming story, it’s a testament to the importance of connection, creativity, and believing in yourself.
Transcript:
So I have this one student who only ever showed up in the last five minutes of first period every day if he showed up.
By the time that he got to class, I had went through my whole lesson. We're all winding down, people are packing up. It was impossible to try to connect with this person.
Now, this kid is also a really, really great visual artist, he loves Spider-Man, Miles Morales. I'm like, Hey, I do too. My partner plays that video game. They have a Miles Morales. Tattoo, and they're like, whoa. Like he was really impressed by these pieces. So we were able just to be able to have a little bit more commonalities with each other. Just him getting to know me and, and I mean getting to know him, we built a little bit of, of a kinship because we have similar interests.
I noticed this kid showing up more and I'm like, okay, okay, okay, we got something that I can work with here. I leaned into him using his like 2D visual arts skills. I'm like, okay, let's try to level this up.
Let's try to get you to start expressing yourself through words. So he kind of gets it. He writes it's like a paragraph, but based on the paragraph, all of the words are kind of there. We just have to kind of reformat it a lot to shift it from a paragraph into something that may be more in the poetry family
So I sat down with, and I'm like, Hey, let's just workshop this. Explain this piece to me some more. Explain that piece some more. Why did you use those words? What are these feelings here? so As we talked about it more, I was getting quotes and I was typing down quotes of what he was saying. All I did was I took all the words he had written and other quotes and.
I put it on a Google Doc. I shifted some things around and I said, here, let's read this. All of these are your own words. All I've done is play with where you place them. So he read it back and was like, whoa, like this is me. These are my ideas, my concept, my words like this is myself on a poem.
We were having an upcoming writer's forum this was an opportunity for students to perform in front of other students And so he decided that he wanted to try to perform this poem like, you know what, I've written it. I might as well try..
He actually opened up our writer's forum. And so that was. Incredible on its own. It was amazing to see him go from not going to class at all to opening the writer's forum it was nice to see my students share his work to, to let go of his work.
At the poetry assembly, we had also had writer's organization and so after the poetry assembly, the students were talking to some of the organization leaders and the student gave one of the members of that organization their poem.
And I thought that that was the end of it. That organization actually selected two of my four student performers, to actually share their poems at an upcoming event of theirs.
Like this is, it's amazing. , it's something that I didn't even know was an opportunity, and now my students got selected, so I really couldn't wait to share this news with my student. But when he came into class that day, he was just kind of down, kind of morose. And he was just feeling kind of "meh".
He shared that there were a couple other students that were teasing him about some of the lines of his poem and that he wish he would've never said them, and that he was just feeling kind of down about it. And I was just like, Hey, I, I hear that. I honor that, and I want you to know that when you do good art, You get haters, , and he laughed about it.
But we just built such a moment of honesty that like the bravery that he had was so monumental that other folks may tease cuz they can't do it. And so then after that moment I got to tell him this good news of also you were selected to perform here and when you perform it here you're going to be around other folks who.
Really appreciate the art of poetry, even more so than some of the students, that were at the assembly and that made his day. It's huge and it's exciting. It was just nice to be able to, to give that to him and have that moment, I just feel spectacular.
Tracia Banuelos
Program Manager and Teaching Artist
Trae Banuelos-Rovaris (she/they) is a social researcher, facilitator, and writer passionate about creativity, arts education, and liberation. Currently pursuing a Masters of Science in Applied Social Research at CUNY Hunter College, Banuelos was recently published in the Journal of Black Sexuality and National Harm Reduction Coalition mini-course Black Becoming: A Legacy of HERstory. She graduated from Wichita State University in 2018 earning bachelor’s degrees in both Psychology and Women’s Studies with University Honors, and certificates in Community Psychology, and Tilford Diversity Studies. Banuelos is also the Vice President Abortion Conversation Projects, non-profit board that funds artists, activists, and community groups committed to destigmatizing abortion at the grassroots level with seed grants. Before moving to New York, Tracia was named a 2018 Kansas Civic Health Hero and won the Next Generation Award from Kansas Voices for Choice for their work in reproductive justice and comprehensive sexual education. Banuelos has organized social justice projects as a 2017 Fellow with Young People For, 2018 Member of the Young Women of Color for Reproductive Justice Leadership Council, and 2018 Real Change Fellow with RESULTS.
