SPEAKER_00: We gotta break out of that and get them to enjoy us, embrace their bodies, and then find their voice within their body language.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Queering Education, where we challenge what school is and build what it should be.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: This is a Teaching While Queer podcast about inclusive teaching, queer pedagogy, and showing up authentically in every classroom.
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's do the work.
SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Queering Education, a Teaching While Queer podcast.
SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: My pronouns are they, them.
SPEAKER_01: Today I am at the New Jersey Education Association's Carol Watchlers LGBTQIA plus advocacy conference, and I'm so excited to be sitting down with Micah.
SPEAKER_01: Hi, Micah, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_01: I'm fine, Brian.
SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
SPEAKER_01: Can you take a second to introduce yourself to those who are listening?
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm Micah Gary Fryer, and I am actually at the Donald Payne Senior High School in Essex County, and that's part of Essex County Vocational School.
SPEAKER_00: But I commute from uh Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_01: Oh wow.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's a little fun drive.
SPEAKER_01: The Tri-State area is so interesting because there's so many commuters going into different states for work.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that would be me.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So what got you into education?
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm a dance educator, so it took a while.
SPEAKER_00: Uh State of New Jersey was one of the first ones, I think then in California, to actually give a certification in dance.
SPEAKER_00: But at that time, I was running my own nonprofit dance company.
SPEAKER_00: And I regret now, because I'm in year 20, and I probably would have been retiring this year if I had gone in immediately.
SPEAKER_00: I think it was 96 when they did it.
SPEAKER_00: Um it's funny when I was running my dance company, hoping to be the next Alvinelli and choreography and all that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Um, the parents kept saying, Could you teach my kid?
SPEAKER_00: Could you teach my kid?
SPEAKER_00: And so that's when I thought, hey, you know, I've always wanted to be an educator.
SPEAKER_00: I thought maybe back in high school I was going to be uh a language arts kind of teacher.
SPEAKER_00: I mean like French or Latin or something of that nature because I love, you know, various languages.
SPEAKER_00: And I was known as Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Broadway by my high school principal, and it just kind of happened, you know, when I got to college, I actually went to Rutgers for theater, but the department chair of dance said, I'm not going to sign you up for another course unless you change your major.
SPEAKER_00: And I did.
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, the the rest is major history.
SPEAKER_01: I love that so much.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a theater educator, so I appreciate performing arts educators.
SPEAKER_01: And I also appreciate that we're seeing more of the extensive artwork show up in curricular spaces, like seeing dance as a certified subject.
SPEAKER_01: I love the fact that my daughter, she's in uh middle school and she takes dance class in middle school.
SPEAKER_01: And not only does she get uh the basics of ballet and jazz and whatnot, but she's learning African dance, and she's learning all these other aspects of dance that I didn't have exposure to at a at a nonprofit dance uh studio in San Diego when I was dancing.
SPEAKER_01: So like I love that um we're seeing dance pop up and just the physicality of I feel like there's so much to be gained from understanding your body, and dance is the place to do it.
SPEAKER_01: So I I just love your work.
SPEAKER_00: I love your work so much.
SPEAKER_00: We've added another dimension to it.
SPEAKER_00: I have a wonderful colleague, I kind of say she's my work wife, Brenda Pepper.
SPEAKER_00: And uh Brenda and I developed a program right before COVID, so it was very timely and helped us out because it's kind of hard to teach dance over the internet and Zoom and all that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: But we do um visual performing arts for social justice.
SPEAKER_00: So we added that component in it.
SPEAKER_00: Like you said, doing different dance styles and techniques um has a cultural base to it.
SPEAKER_00: And and we find that a lot of our students in the inner city of Newark, New Jersey, um, it they can relate to that a lot more.
SPEAKER_00: We also find that uh we were able to get kids to find their voice, especially when they were in isolation, you know, during COVID and everything like that.
SPEAKER_00: So we've kind of kept that.
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's a wonderful, wonderful program.
SPEAKER_00: It helps to have your administration support too.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell me more about the program?
SPEAKER_01: What what kind of things have you seen your students create in a program centered on social justice?
SPEAKER_00: Well, this year, um, unfortunately, we didn't do our big senior musical.
SPEAKER_00: Usually every year, I'm crazy enough to put 250 students into a high school musical.
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00: Literally, we did high school musical, but we've done like In the Heights and and um uh Once on the Silent, you know, a lot of different plays that, you know, aren't just musicals, but they have some sort of social context.
SPEAKER_00: So we weren't able to do that this year.
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, right around April or so, I'm like, let's let's go into a different page and really get rooted in in social justice.
SPEAKER_00: So we took a look at Amistad, the entire movie, and we took a look at Shinlou's list, and then we had the kids randomly pick, and they had to look at it and say, how does that social injustice relate to me in my life?
SPEAKER_00: So we broke them up into small groups of six to ten, and we asked them to create a new statement of art, you know, based on that.
SPEAKER_00: They could use any music, they could use poetry, and they did a presentation more like performance art, five to ten minutes, and they could put video work on the cyclorama in the background.
SPEAKER_00: They could incorporate, you know, like I said, poetry or prose, they could do narration and kind of tell a story.
SPEAKER_00: And we just finished grading them on Friday yesterday, and I have to say I'm exhausted for them, but there's some were some really, really beautiful statements.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're up there with Delaney Hall, so the immigration issue is very, very heavy, and it's really on the mind of a lot of our students, which I think we're about 60, 65% Hispanic.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I bet.
SPEAKER_01: I I think about that.
SPEAKER_01: I work at a middle school in Inwood in uh uptown Manhattan, and we've had ICE agents on the streets, you know, down the street, and many of the students are um Dominican.
SPEAKER_01: Uh they go to the Dominican Republic, you know, constantly throughout the year visiting families.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And so um, you know, immigration is, I think, on top of mind.
SPEAKER_01: And what I think is so frustrating for myself is I look at my 12-year-old and then also my 12-year-old students and just how connected they are to what's happening, that's which is great, yeah, but at the same time, I hate the fact that they have to grow up so quickly, that they are forced to have all these um adult problems thrust upon them.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_00: And the stress.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: The stress about exactly the anxiety that goes along with that.
SPEAKER_01: Um, some of my favorite dance pieces this year um I've seen at New York City Center, and they were about immigration stories and whatnot.
SPEAKER_01: And so I really love this idea of um connecting multiple mediums.
SPEAKER_01: You're talking about taking film, and how does this film and the injustices you see in this film relate to me?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'm taking this medium and I'm relating it to me, and now I'm gonna relay it in a new medium, and I think that is so wonderful because we should have had you come out and help me practice because our students were looking at us like, what?
SPEAKER_00: What what do you want us to do?
SPEAKER_00: How do you want us to do this?
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things we showed them was resistance dance.
SPEAKER_00: If you if you kind of YouTube that, it was really, really neat because they took um the Renee Goods story and the Alex Petty story, and the dancers created that moment.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've ever seen it.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen it.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen it, yes.
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, it's stunning, it's it's it's heartbreaking, you know, and we we want people, especially our students, to feel something of that moment and then be able to understand what they're feeling and why they're feeling that way and and uh bring verbal context to that.
SPEAKER_00: I I find that young people today sometimes, even though they have the internet and you know, Instagram and all this other stuff, they're not able to communicate verbally what they're feeling.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: I I'm putting this challenge out there to anybody who's listening who does project-based learning with their students and you are asking them to create a skid or to build a post or a slide presentation, like throw dance in there and see what happens, because I think that you'll be surprised by what your students are willing to do and how vulnerable they can be.
SPEAKER_01: We're also working with a group of students who is heavily on TikTok and learning choreography consistently.
SPEAKER_01: I had I had a guest artist come in to teach my musical theater classes, and they we did three days of dance.
SPEAKER_01: And I was so impressed with how quickly they learned the choreography, and they're like, Well, yeah, we're in TikTok on the time.
SPEAKER_00: This is a TikTok.
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, you know, you're right.
SPEAKER_01: I never thought about that.
SPEAKER_01: You're constantly learning choreography, and that's a great, yeah, that's a great asset to take away from something that is often seen only as like a deficit or a problem.
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: Um the other thing that we tried to emphasize so they're not intimidated, it doesn't have to be classically trained.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, it don't have to have a classical chain ballet, although we do bring that into the curriculum.
SPEAKER_00: We give them a little bit of modern, you know, very short amount, with like I said, from the A technique of Fortin, you know, and Graham.
SPEAKER_00: But we try to introduce it as movement, physical, authentic, organic movement that they're doing, you know.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's very, very helpful to our young men who are in the program, and even maybe our students who aren't body comfortable.
SPEAKER_00: You know, so that's also another, you know, step that we have to get through.
SPEAKER_01: Yep, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about units that I've done with my students on movement and just how one, it helped build us as an ensemble in each class.
SPEAKER_01: Like we are a cohesive unit because we were able to break down these barriers of how our bodies are supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: We have this perception of how our bodies are supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: And I relate it back to singing because I teach musical theater and I talk about how babies, babies, have natural projections, babies know how to have breath support, babies understand naturally what to do with their bodies that singers have to retrain themselves for several years to learn how to do.
SPEAKER_01: And why?
SPEAKER_01: It's because of how society expects us to hold our bodies and use our bodies.
SPEAKER_01: And so when we break down those body barriers, I think about the I teach my sixth graders Laban because it gives them it gives them very specific language for gesturing and movement.
SPEAKER_01: So for those of you who don't know the Laban technique, method, different places call it different things, but it's it's centered on this idea of movement that came out of dance, and then we kind of incorporate it into theater and it gives specific language things like flick, and flick has a specific direction, it's direct or indirect, it's fast or slow, qualities, right?
SPEAKER_01: It has all of these carbon, yeah, it has all of these qualities to it.
SPEAKER_01: And so when I teach my students, and then I go into we're doing or we did Disney's descendants.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, when you grab this wand, you snatch it away from her, I want it to flick up into the air, and then she was able to like hold her wand, and she had this she had a vocabulary for that.
SPEAKER_01: Exactly, a vocabulary on how to use your body, and I think that a lot of education has shied away from body confidence because we're afraid to talk about bodies, but um, we all have them, so we should be more comfortable talking about them.
SPEAKER_00: And we find that especially this generation, we've we've seen statistics that for some reason the internet gives people like body shaming issues more than anything else.
SPEAKER_00: So we gotta break out of that, get them to enjoy their bodies, and then find their voice within their body language.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, my favorite thing in school this past couple of months is listening to my kids take my lessons and then hearing them interact with their friends, and they're like, oh, we don't body shame, we don't body shame here.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Yes, succeed, I've succeeded.
SPEAKER_01: It is like even this, like, you know, they're just trying to be funny and they're like, oh no, we can't joke about body shaming either.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, we're done, we've arrived.
SPEAKER_00: It's even more enjoyable because we are we come to the students in their senior year.
SPEAKER_00: So when they come back three, five years later and they're still talking about different lessons and still doing some of the ballet, you know, exercises that we we had taught them.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you say, Yeah, it worked.
SPEAKER_00: I got them.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they they they succeeded.
SPEAKER_01: I love that so much.
SPEAKER_01: As we close out, I want to know what message do you want to send to queer educators who are listening?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I call myself and I've tag this um as being the old gay.
SPEAKER_00: You know, um, I'm I'm in my 60s now, looking towards the retirement, and I'm excited, you know, for the the young queer community that we have that is getting into education and starting their careers.
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I want to one say know the past and make sure that you are you are presenting that so we know where we've come from.
SPEAKER_00: I know where I've been, as that song comes from uh Queen of Jesus um, you know, in hairspray.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's very, very important.
SPEAKER_00: And um I think there's new challenges, but understand what the people whose shoulders are we stand on, you know, from the 50s and the 60s and even prior to that.
SPEAKER_00: What do they do?
SPEAKER_00: What do they have to go through?
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes I think um our younger people and our students don't understand what it took to get where it is.
SPEAKER_00: We are.
SPEAKER_00: And I know for them within my GSC's GSA, kids will say, we feel this is still discriminating.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going, you know, I was a little kid who was in the library looking up homosexual.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we didn't understand.
SPEAKER_00: And so this this generation has a whole different thing, but I understand the stress, the anxiety is different.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that the the educators, the young educators today need to go, what's the next level?
SPEAKER_00: How do we help them empower themselves?
SPEAKER_00: How do we help community and family understand, you know, what they're what their students are going through?
SPEAKER_00: And um hopefully, hopefully uh it will bring some of the other numbers down, like suicide and different, you know, things that happen within the community.
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm proud of the young people because you know they're they're more out than we ever could be, you know, at the ages that you know that they are comparatively when I think about it, and I I came into education late within my 40s because running my dance company.
SPEAKER_00: But I remember it was tough, and you you were concerned about keeping your job, you know, before New Jersey had passed all these laws.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm thinking the groundwork has been laid down.
SPEAKER_00: What can you do to take it to the next level?
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being a part of Queering Education.
SPEAKER_01: This is a Teaching Well Queer podcast.
SPEAKER_01: Take what you need from this conversation and bring it back into your classroom and your students.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: Until next time, keep showing up.