REDEFINING ELDERSHIP: The "Difficult" Kids

By Katie Rainey

I remember being so angry all the time. So frustrated and boxed in like I was trapped in my own skin, unable to breathe properly, feeling adrift, hopeless. That’s what high school felt like to me. 

Today, I met with my supervisee El Tapia-Kwan, one of our new participants in Creative Generation’s Summer Residency Program. El is an arts educator, social justice advocate, and multi-disciplinary artist living in Central Florida and already I feel a kindred spirit in my fellow southerner. We met one-on-one for the first time today to chat about his summer capstone project and tasks that come with being a Summer Resident. El’s capstone project focuses on arts programming for justice involved youth, and so our conversation was both logistical—talking about the details of his project—and emotional—discussing how we were as kids, and the frustrations we felt as teenagers. El will be working with incarcerated teenagers over the coming weeks, developing art projects that they want to create. It was refreshing to hear another arts educator talk about how “challenging teenagers” were who they also loved working with the most, because they were considered challenging themselves. I say this because I was considered a difficult teenager.

I’ve written about the teenagers I’ve worked with and how I’ve learned as much from them as they might from me. I’ve written about how I teach in the classroom that leads to a balance of eldership, but I haven’t written about why I teach the way I do. 

Learning from My Unlearning

When I first started out as a teaching artist some 15ish years ago, I was thrust into a classroom of high schoolers with little more than theoretical training under my belt. I’d later work for arts organizations who provided me with more holistic and experiential training in the classroom, giving me the tools to work with various kinds of learners, but at the time I was in a program in grad school that just dropped me into a school like a castaway on an island with teaching experience up until that point that had been largely informal and unstructured. And so, the tools I had were limited and I had to dust off my improv skills I learned as a kid and just go with it in the classroom.

However, while the tools at my disposal were limited, there was one thing I found came to me quite easily, something that the teaching artists I would go on to train would comment on time and time again. That was the ability to engage “difficult” kids. 

I remember how “top-down” high school (and school in general) was for me. Growing up in Little Rock, AR, my mind as a young person was not valued. I was, for lack of a better way to put it, a dumb kid. And so I felt angry. All the time. I felt unseen and unheard and unvalued, especially by my teachers but also by other “elders” in my life. I was young and therefore my opinions didn’t matter. The arts are the only place where I felt I had power, where my mind felt valued, where my personhood mattered. And that’s why I continued a career in the arts. But I think teaching, for me, was a far less conscious choice. I suddenly found myself a teaching artist and, not to brag, but a good one at that because I naturally felt the vibrations of frustration and anger in certain students and knew how to provide a place where they could release them and feel understood. 

Did you get what I said there? I didn’t tell them how to feel or how to process those feelings. I provided a space for them to explore and take charge, a place where I was a tool they could use when they wanted. I never felt phased by a student who threw their frustrations my way. I felt I get it. I get that feeling. So here’s a space for you to explore that, a place where I see you and I value those frustrations.

And those “difficult” kids, ones teachers complained to me over and over again, were always the kids I grew closest to. The ones I wrote award-winning essays with and about. Those were the kids who would confide in me and come to me in order to process the difficulties they had in their own lives. In the end, they were never difficult kids. They were kids in difficult spaces, bucking against a system that didn’t see them and so didn’t work for them.  

Looking Ahead

I feel lucky that I stepped into “eldership” with less of feeling that I had all the answers and more of the feeling that I wanted to be a vessel for those I mentor. A place where they could come when they needed. 

While I might be considered El’s “elder” in his role as a Summer Resident, it feels natural for me to fall back and let him take charge and play my role more as a guide and supporter, rather than a supervisor. Not that I’m saying El is by any means difficult, but power in this dynamic is something that is easy for me to hand over. As we move forward with his capstone project, I’ll let El take the reins and show me how my “eldership” is useful and where it isn’t. Something I can already see El will be doing with the students in his project.