Brown is Beautiful

For the past three weeks, I've been working on "The Body" unit with all of my students. In order to reinforce the lessons, my students have worked on self-portraits and self-evaluations. Both are fascinating projects. I've had the pleasure of observing how my students see and portray themselves. A lot of them drew themselves as not necessarily how they look literally, but what they fantasize themselves to be--cartoon characters with comically sized muscles and brightly colored hair. Kids at this age take full advantage the freedom to imagine themselves as whatever they want to be, superpowers or not, unshackled by their present realities. So what if their family lives in a tiny village? They can be Goku if they want. This particular imagination is what I dearly hope will not dissolve over time. However, the desires to be someone else different is also two-pronged.

One of my aims in these exercises is to instill the notion that being beautiful or handsome does not require a specific set of characteristics. Here, is it widely accepted that lighter skin, an aquiline nose, and being thin as beautiful. I want to take a hammer and squash these perceptions to pieces. I want them to understand that beautiful comes in different shapes, sizes, and colors. I wanted them to realize that brown is not the apricot crayon that comes in a box. There are no "Dove" campaigns here to disrupt the conventional notions of beauty, so there might be no one around telling my students that they are beautiful the way they are. I wanted them to realize that being beautiful is something one can independently claim and assert, and not some aesthetic value, appropriated by society, to aspire to. I want them to understand that imagining themselves as something else, something that holds more power, might not even be necessary, when they realize the kinds of powers they already have.

Yes all these I hoped from a simple exercise. It may have not succeeded the way I wanted to, but who knows. They will hearken back to this simple school project and at least they know that they can indeed think of themselves as beautiful.

Here are some sample projects. I apologize for using photobooth, my camera is currently in the repair shop...

My name is King.

I have short hair. I am tall. I am fat. I have a big nose. I am handsome.

My name is Pbit.

I have short. I am thin. I have a small nose. I am brown. I am handsome.

My name is Ai.

I have long black hair. I have small black eyes. I have a small nose. I have brown skin.

I am short. I am fat. I am beautiful.

My name is Urn.

I have short black hair. I have small black eyes. I have a small nose. I have brown skin.

I am short. I am thin. I am beautiful.

Here are some photos of my students drawing their self-portraits. Eventually, I plan to post a gallery of some of their works.