Fall 2021 DAYTIME CLASSES
SEMPTEMBER 27 - NOVEMBER 19, 2021
OUR NEST
Thursdays, September 30 - November 18 | 10am - 2pm | Ages 8-14
A collaborative open work day for independent projects, study groups, youth-led workshops, and more
“Our Nest” was a curiosity-driven workshop class for students to pursue independent projects and collaborations, exchanging knowledge through youth-led skill shares and visits from guest teachers. With the support of a community of peers and mentors, our young people identified their passions and pursued projects in visual arts, writing, engineering and invention, fashion, construction, and ecology. It was an exploration of process and community every step of the way.
We began by surveying one another to help identify our passions, interests, and learning styles. From there, we built project ideas, questions, and plans. Each week, we used journaling prompts to identify next steps, resources, challenges, and celebrations in our individual processes. We practiced providing one another with accountability and encouragement, through peer interviews, check-ins, and inspiration exchanges. Our weekly volunteers, Jamie Gerber and Marissa Codey, supported these projects by mentoring young people and helping them set goals and supporting follow through.
Visits from guest artists and teachers helped us understand the theme of process, through shared problem-solving, reflection, and play. We traced the passage of seed to grain to donut in a fall cooking workshop with Char Azad, decorated ritual candles with Xóchicoatl Bello, and developed [our] reproducible images in a creative screen printing workshop with Jef Scharf. These artists, along with our volunteers and a community of Kite’s Nest educators, provided our youth with intergenerational support and mentorship as they develop a sense of themselves as makers and doers in the world.
Sharing knowledge was an important part of how young people learned in this class. Over the course of the semester, students shared their own knowledge with one another, with student skill-share workshops that focused on topics like crafting, jewelry-making, recycling, political debate, and comic writing. At the end of the 8 weeks, we celebrated the array of projects produced by our collective of makers and doers, from a film project about local queer artists, to a TikTok channel for making recycled sculpture, to painting, dress-making, and re-engineering a remote control car.
TIME TRAVELERS ATLAS
Tuesdays, April 6 - June 1 | 10am-2pm | Ages 8-14
Astronomy, art, and actively exploring our celestial selves—with Rebecca Posner and scrap
This group of daytime learners began our explorations close to home. In response to the site development process taking place in and around our garden classroom, the class started by studying the history of our land, highlighting the ecological, indigenous, and industrial layers. We debated “big questions” about history, considering which stories are told and how our young historians could ask questions to seek out and share those untold.
We took an ecological scavenger hunt to understand the topographical and climatic qualities of our site. We learned about Mohican culture along the Hudson, and researched the history of both the old knitting factory and the fishing village on our site. We examined primary and secondary sources, asking questions about perspective and bias, which we then shared back to one another through storytelling, drawing, and sound.
We boarded the schooner Appollonia with the Hudson Sloop Club and witnessed how history, contemporary culture, and industry live side-by-side on the river. Thanks to a visit from guest expert Adrianne Pierce, we became archeologists in our own backyard, identifying and analyzing the artifacts around us.
Using our explorations of the past as a basis for imagining the future, we dreamt up our own future visions of our site. We explored the idea of “utopia” and looked at historical moments such as Transcendentalism, Communism, and the Zapatista movement, when perfect societies were attempted. Were the results really utopian, or were they actually dystopian? Using the realm of Science Fiction, we designed our own utopian (or dystopian!) societies based on technological, ecological, and humanitarian ideals.
We visited Art Omi to view the work of Jeffrey Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee artist based in Hudson, who uses his culture and history to build hope-filled, alternative worlds. We discussed ways to weave the untold stories of the past into our future visions, and enjoyed the wonder of art and land in our region. On our final day, we worked with artist Jeannette Rodriguez Pineda to explore transforming narratives and planting seeds of change through a personal storytelling and a group paper-making process.
UPROOTING RACISM
Monthly on Fridays, April - October | 10am-2pm | Ages 8-17 plus adult family members
A 5-session anti-racist learning journey for white youth and adult family members—with Briggin Scharf and Andrea Mitchell
Uprooting Racism is the first intergenerational, family course Kite’s Nest has offered for a full season! Four families, with youth ages 7 - 15 years old, met 5 times from April through October, to reflect on how white supremacy surfaces in our personal and daily lives, with the goal of increasing awareness of systemic racism. Guided by frameworks and anti-oppression resources developed by BIPOC educators (such as AORTA, Deepa Iyer, Resmaa Menakem, and Audre Lorde), families challenged themselves by sitting in discomfort in order to grow, expand their perceptions, and unlearn toxic stereotypes and internalized biases. Using interactive games, group conversations about current events, lineage/ancestry storytelling, and thinking through real-life scenarios, our collective addressed white accountability, cultural appropriation vs cultural appreciation, race as an invention, and identity privileges and disadvantages. As we learned, we developed a toolkit filled with practices for how to be a healthy white anti-racist, inlcuding listening to BIPOC leadership (especially in organizing spaces), trusting your gut, leaning into discomfort, and not getting stuck in guilt or shame. We are humbled that so many of the participants were already actively engaged in anti-racism work in their communities, and want to give an extra shout-out to Sasha and Pheonix for modeling anti-racist activism and youth leadership for the younger participants!