AllGirls is delighted to welcome guest blogger Jeff Harlan, sixth grade English teacher and Director of The Dream Flag Project at Agnes Irwin, a K-12 girls’ school in Rosemont, PA. In the tradition of Tibetan prayer flags, Dream Flags elevate, honor and transmit gently on the breeze, the dreams, hopes, and wishes of young people the world over. (In addition to many states in the US, Dream Flags have been made and flown in China, Japan, Costa Rica, Canada, South Africa, Rwanda and Nepal.) Jeff and colleague Sandy Crow are the inspiration and energy behind this enchanting and heartfelt project.
“And according to Winnicott, this transitional space is the space of play and creativity — where love can grow, where teaching and learning take place, where art is made, and where culture is created.”
I loved this comment that Sally made in her last blog entry about Donald Winnicott’s writing. When I think of it, I think of those spaces we make in our classrooms where play, creativity, teaching and learning take place—almost by themselves. It’s the feeling we get when some lesson we dreamed up takes hold, and we know it really works.
That’s exactly what happened with our sixth grade girls in English class eight years ago when we first made Dream Flags. Our girls created poems about the value of dreams and their own dreams—for themselves and for the world. But we do lots of poetry writing assignments. This was just another good one, inspired by our reading of Langston Hughes poems. What made it take flight and create that transitional space was when the girls put the poems on fabric, created a visual space around them with watercolor, and then sewed each one to a line to imitate the form of the Buddhist prayer flags we had seen in a school assembly by National Geographic photographer Anne Keiser just a few weeks before. When the lines were hung outside, when the beauty they felt free to create fluttered in the breeze on a spring day as sixty silent girls quietly read and admired each other’s work, (When do quiet girls and spring go together??) that’s when my colleague Sandy Crow and I knew we’d stumbled on something that worked. Maybe it was a transitional space, and we didn’t yet know the word for it.
And, as it turns out that, it’s worked for many others as well. As soon as we saw how the form of this poetry—the art, the metaphorical connection of the dreams to each other, the public good it all did—was a way to build our community, we could see that it could connect us to others. And it has in more ways than we could possibly imagine.
The next fall, we made a web page and a flyer to give out at a local Philadelphia conference. We invited our fellow schools to join in and we thought a few might. But twenty-six schools joined us that first year—both independent and public–and the idea of connecting the Dream Flags in our gym just wasn’t going to work. A few phone calls later, the doors of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) opened for us and we were invited to have our first Dream Flag Celebration right there with dozens of student poets reading their work, musicians improvising while they read, and with the connection and exhibition of more than 1,000 Dream Flags, all in one great line. This was a transitional space—a place to play and learn and love—that we never imagined and that we never in a million years could create by ourselves.
From then on, it’s been one opening of doors after another. This April, we’ll celebrate again, as will more than 90 schools in 36 states and four countries who are creating Dream Flags with us this year. Since we first started, a total of more than 50,000 Dream Flags have been created by students in K-12 from Alaska to Florida and from Nepal to South Africa. And we know it’s because teachers tell teachers about what happens when students look in to dream, look out to create, and find in the space between, something that transforms us all.
We’d love to dream with you too. Check out our web site and join us.
Yours dreaming,
—Jeff Harlan
