Today, we read and listened to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “Mir in Ukraine.” We talked about why she chose to write a poem about Ukraine by erasing Putin’s words instead of starting from scratch. The students had brilliant insights about power and political commentary and art. We discussed what it means to erase different types of documents and our relationship to them. Students then chose from a list of documents to do erasures–including articles about serious topics like Gaza and climate change and more playful articles about things like aliens. After completing their erasure, they made a choice about how to present it, including using black-out, re-writing onto a new page, or cutting out their chosen words. Here are a few of their insightful erasures:
