Imagining new futures

Brian Dang enters the classroom as the students rush to greet them (Brian uses they/them pronouns). The excitement of having a visiting teaching artist is palpable and the energy is high.

Dang makes their way through, greeting every student until all have landed together, sitting on the welcome mat. Here they begin … the shakeout. Dang’s theater game sets the class in motion as students lift their right arms up to the sky, shaking them while wildly counting out, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5!” Then the left arm, then the body, the shaking and the numbers repeating over and over as they shorten the count, to 4, to 3, to 2, then “1! 1! 1!”

Dang’s ritual beginning for every class in every series they teach for Writers in the Schools, is rooted in hearing the voices of each and every student. For youth who often have little say or voice in the world they live in, here, for this time, they know they will be heard. Dang’s cultivation of an intentional classroom is one they attribute to the lessons they learned from Riverways Education Partnerships, Riverways for short, while an undergraduate at the University of Washington.

The stories we share

As an undergraduate with a passion for storytelling, Dang originally planned on a degree and career in English, teaching in the most traditional sense: writing, discussing and analyzing literature with students. Yet as they moved through their freshman year, they began to see the endless possibilities and opportunities that the University afford them to create, shape and make. This freedom and space to discover led Dang to add a second major in drama to their studies, and seek out more dynamic, less conventional, teaching opportunities.

Leading with compassion

Founded in 1997 under the original name of the Pipeline Project, Riverways Education Partnerships connects UW students with public, rural and Indigenous communities and school partners. Riverways’ rural and tribal programs engage 100 UW students with over 2,000 K-12 youth across 15 schools throughout Washington state. Rooted in tribal sovereignty and racial justice, Riverways is a unique and transformative mentorship model where UW undergraduates dive headfirst into the inequities of educational systems.

“As I began to develop my teaching skills, I was drawn to creating alongside students. To allow students to have the freedom to express a wide range of ideas and feelings and emotions, and to see the classroom as a place to give us joy, [and] to be a guide for that,” Dang shared on what drew them to Riverways’ Literacy Arts program.

Dang began attending the Riverways training and meeting sessions in preparation for Alternative Spring Break, the week-long literacy arts program developed with partner rural and tribal schools. In these sessions they learned innovative and anti-racist-informed methodologies for mentoring, and they grappled with the massive inequity issues facing public education locally and nationally. Dang prepared to apply and engage with these understandings and newfound knowledge during Alternative Spring Break in Tonasket, Wash.

Rooted in the tranquil eastern bank of the Okanogan River, then-UW-junior Dang was welcomed into the Tonasket community where they spent the week living in a local host home while teaching in 4th grade classrooms. Developing stories connected to community and place, the Tonasket students shared who they were — and Dang witnessed. Through sharing meals, stories and unforgettable moments with students and host families, mindsets shifted across lived experiences and together, collective futures envisioned.

Dang recalled visiting the Okanogan River, sitting in the beauty of the waters that have long nourished the soils and lives of the people of Tonasket. Watching that river, Dang noted how it provided connection from one community to the next. How it offered travel, communication and storytelling. Dang marveled at how Riverways Education Partnerships existed much like the river, as a conduit, asking its UW participants to assess how one enters a community that is not one’s own?

Asking how and why one teaches and serves

Dang speaks to the reciprocal nature of teaching that they learned through Riverways, where “the overarching goal was to allow students to express through writing a connection to a place or community. I have felt my own disconnection with place and community, but seeing and witnessing students communicate their connections to place and community has led me to ask myself questions. It was moving, enlightening and enriching to learn alongside my students.”

Brian Dang, ’19, double-majored in English and drama. They are an arts educator and playwright today. Photo by Ian Teodoro

Expanding our definition of who “we” is

Dang’s experience teaching in Tonasket returned them there as an Alternative Spring Break lead their senior year. After graduation, they stayed on at Riverways as a staff member supported by AmeriCorps. Dang developed online learning methods and materials as they collaboratively navigated a new COVID-19 pandemic landscape.

The lessons mentoring students in Riverways were forever planted, “What I carry with me now is that I put the people first, before the work. Connecting to people as people before anything else,” Dang says. “I learned what it meant to be a stranger and to be welcomed somewhere.”

As Dang enters classrooms across King County every year, many old, and some new, Dang takes with them the act of welcoming learned from the people of Tonasket. As they greet each student settling in for the shakeout, Dang thinks back to their time in service at Riverways.

“I think what Riverways ingrained in me and my experience is the reciprocal relationship existing between people, in students and teachers alike,” Dang said.

As a leader, a teacher and an artist, “to be able to listen and make sure each student is heard. To learn from each of them. That recognition is beautiful and powerful.”