Poet Loryn Brantz's Inauguration 2025 has resonated deeply with me- and other educators- navigating these challenging times. Her words remind us that the daily work of teaching, building community, and creating spaces for critical thinking is itself an act of resistance.
Inauguration 2025
In a time of hate
Love is an act of resistance
In a time of fear
Faith is a resistance
In a time of misinformation
Education is an act of resistance
In a time of poor leadership
Community is an act of resistance
In a time like this
Joy is an act of resistance
Resist. Resist. Resist.
Loryn Brantz
These words have become my touchstone this spring, guiding both my teaching and my own processing of a world that often feels overwhelming. I started this year wondering how I would be able to teach with hope and optimism in an unstable global arena; what I found in response was a new appreciation for the bravery that hope demands. Watching protestors use art, song, social media, and language to remind us all of our humanity taught me, as well as my students, the power of community and the dangers of silence.
In a year in which every news day seems to hold seismic global events, teaching Social Studies and English Language Arts has changed immensely. As an adult, I find myself confused and worried at times when I am watching the nightly news. For students, it can be even more confusing. To help understand current events like the protests in Minneapolis, we return repeatedly to our iceberg diagram from Facing History and Ourselves. The iceberg allows students to identify what they are seeing in the news and explore causes and underlying processes that have led to it. See, Think, Wonder also works well for this type of contextualization. This year, I have found that at least once every week or two, I have needed to add a new lesson to unpack news stories. This is when Facing History & Ourselves becomes a cornerstone to helping students dig deeper and think critically beyond the headlines. The Poetry & Power and Poetry & Civic Agency activities work so well in both Social Studies and ELA classrooms to examine current events and abstract concepts. I find it incredibly helpful to have robust resources that contain so many activities, poems, and strategies. From something as integral as creating a personal mantra to trying to answer an important question by creating a found or blackout poem, these resources offer multiple ways for students to go beyond understanding what is happening and connect it to their own ethical code and creative eye.
In February, I used Loryn Brantz’s poem, Inauguration 2025, to spark my students into writing their own poems about what they see in their local, national, and global communities. For many years, I have used My Honest Poem as a way to get to know my students; using a loose format has eased my past students into feeling more confident writing unstructured poetry. The poetry we wrote in class has a simple framework: identify a local/national/global issue, explain its roots, and put forward your idea of what is needed to help. Some students found poetry to be such a powerful tool, they have continued to use it as we study the Red River Resistance in class. Here are a few stanzas from my students’ poems:
The air is clogged, our waters filthy.
The parks are suffocated in manmade venom.
The soil yearns to breathe
Our children play with toxins.
To clean is to cure
is to save
is to spare
the life of the ground we walk on.
The government far away made decisions
like the land was empty, like no one was there
But families had roots deeper than the river
and they refused to just disappear
The people gathered, wise and keen,
To guide the herds, a patient scene.
With shouts and cloaks, and measured pace,
They herded giants to their place.
Towards the cliff, a precipice grand,
A sacred offering, from the land.
No wasteful act, no reckless might,
But careful planning, day and night.
Money writes the rules and names who belongs. Rewrite the books:
Index human dignity alongside GDP, turn credits into care.
A house is more than bricks and escrow; it is the hum of a life allowed to stay.
Open the windows. Let policy be human. Let value be kind.
As my students work with poetry, I invite all of us educators to explore it as well. I return again and again to the lines in Inauguration 2025 which say, “In a time of misinformation, education is an act of resistance; In a time of poor leadership, community is an act of resistance”. What we teach and how we teach it matters. How we support one another and create space for discourse matters. I find myself wondering if Brantz ended her poem with the words resist, resist, resist not only to emphasize this act but also to remind us that resistance to division and dehumanization takes countless forms and is a choice we must make repeatedly.
Excited to use poetry in your classroom and curious about poems that speak to important concepts? Here are a few poems to use in your class or just enjoy:
Growth: Kindness- Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
Resilience: Still I Rise- Maya Angelou (1978)
Nature- The Peace of Wild Things- Wendell Berry (2018)
Conflict- There Will Come Soft Rains- Sara Teasdale (1918)
Hope- Beannacht- John O’Donohue (2016)
Support- How to Speak Love in a Storm- Stewart Henderson (1993)
Wealth & Poverty- In Defense of Gold- José Olivarez (2026)
Climate Crisis- The Index- Rena Priest (2020)
Identity- I, Too- Langston Hughes (1926)
Immigration/Belonging- The Outsider- Sholeh Wolpé (2008)
Graduation- Ms. Schadenfreude’s AntiValedictory- Grace Bauer (2018)
