October 22-24, 2025

Voice.
Agency.
Belonging.
Purpose.
If we were to graffiti our dreams across the walls of our classroom. If we were to
write the words that we know we need to hear each day to inspire and guide, to
empower and challenge, they would be this:
You belong here.
You will always have a home here.
This room is where you thrive.
Year after year, we aim to not only bring peace and belonging into the four walls of
a classroom. We want to also introduce grace. Introduce autonomy. Introduce
purpose.
We come into a classroom to find a home, to find a space where we can fail and
where we can pick ourselves up again.
We unpack and work on what’s happening outside these walls:
What are people talking about?
Protesting about?
Worried about?
We try to understand, engage with, and impact the world we live in as we make
writers, thinkers, leaders, and dreamers who want to make the world better.
We facilitate, and listen to conversations
We center on identity, equity, systemic injustice, and the ways in which we are
impacted by all three. We teach lessons about honesty and integrity, kindness, and
respect.
We turn to texts to land on how we see and are seen by the world. Sometimes we
dialogue, sometimes we meet the words with silence.
What we write inside the four walls of our classroom is generative, regenerative,
powerful, affirming.
Within these walls, there is movement and grace and noise and laughter and when
need be, silence.
Within these walls, we create, we critique, and we craft new ways to present the
world to our students as the world continues to spin through change.
Upon these walls, we graffiti our thoughts and dreams and what-can-we-dos and
erase them clean before ushering the next group of students through the door.
We show students how to hold their pen proud, how to make their own mark, how
to form their words into dreams into realities. Into hope.
Somewhere, in the layers of these walls, we see remnants of the past. The ways the
classroom has changed. The way students have changed. The ways we have
changed.
These walls are all we have some days to hold in the beauty of what we do.
Within these walls, hearts open wide, minds expand even wider.
Beyond these walls, students will go.
They will bring with them the experiences they have had in your classroom,
the hope they found in their work,
the purpose that helped form their dreams.
And you will continue, as you do, to make graffiti of new dreams.
Raising up new students, again and again—
and building, each year
Walls that hold-
Walls that lift-
Walls that inspire:
voice,
agency,
belonging,
purpose.