In The Peaceable Classroom, Mary O'Reilley (1993) asks, "What would it be like to teach from the conviction that our students are artists, poets, indeed, from the knowledge that we ourselves are poets?" (p. 87). Throughout the 2002-2003 school year, I have been facilitating a photography and writing elective course entitled "Sistahs" with a small group of young women at a charter high school in Philadelphia¹. Starting with the premise that we are all artists and poets, we have pursued critical engagements with autobiographical writing and photography both in and out of school. In conceptualizing our work together, I have been inspired by Lois Weis & Michelle Fine's (2000) contention that it is in the transgression of boundaries between schools, communities, and students' lives where "youths' sense of possibility, imagination, social critique, outrage, despair, aesthetics, and social action lie" (p. xii). Within the artistic and reflective practices we have been engaged in through the literacy and photography work of this year, recurrent themes of home, neighborhood, sisterhood, and self-representation have emerged. We have gathered these themes into the four sections represented above, which you can enter by clicking on the photographs above.

The work we have collected here provides only a partial, yet hopefully suggestive, representation of the young women's artistic and activist endeavors as poets and artists who, as Sonia Sanchez writes, "can't let it all go unsaid." Collected here are works-in-progress. Here are poems written in school while gathered around an oval-shaped table covered with journals, photographs, cameras, and photocopies. Here are poems written after the voices of June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, Sandra Cisneros, and Ntozake Shange have filled the room. Listen closely and you will hear these voices in the background, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting their connection. Here also are poems written on scraps of paper on a long bus ride home and poems written surreptitiously in math class. Here are poems composed in ten moments of concentration and poems desperate to be shared immediately and here also are poems painstakingly revised and worked through over time. Here are works written to and about the members of the Sistahs community and here are works created purposefully to make a statement to a larger audience. Here are writings composed in a flash of brilliance and sometimes in a cloudy atmosphere of doubt, boredom, confusion. Here are writings that find their source in the reflection on a photograph and a collaborative endeavor to make meaning from each other's images. Here we include images that speak to us in ways words cannot and that challenge dominant representations of young women of color. Here we have collected images of friendship, home, community, culture - images and words collected not solely for their aesthetic merits, but also for their personal and political meanings.

As a collaborative group, we made decisions together about how to present our work in this on-line journal. Here is how two of the students in Sistahs, Madonna Delfish and Yasmein James, describe the work collected here and the choices we made in the process:

We would like to share with you the writing and photography we have created together. We think this work is a reflection of the things that are left unsaid because of the scarcity of opportunities that are placed in schools for young, strong sistahs to find a way. As we do in almost all of our classes, we will share poetry written by women of color. We will also share our own poetry that was written in and out of the classroom. Our individual poems emerged from our past and present experiences, the problems we face as young females trying to make our way, and the way we are being represented in society. We start with a section on sisterhood, since this is a very important part of Sistahs; it shows how women have come a long way through writing in terms of expressing themselves. We also include two sections on our photography projects - "Where I'm From" and "Self Portraits" - that we are working on. Finally, we share some reflections on writing.

The Sistahs course also serves as the site for my practitioner inquiry dissertation². In my research, I seek to develop and document an educational arena for young women of color that is collaborative in nature and that recognizes young women as meaning-makers, image-makers, and storytellers of their own lives. I am curious about the possibilities of creating feminist and anti-racist arenas in schools and I wish to explore how young women - to paraphrase Paulo Freire (1987) - read, write, and image their worlds. I am also exploring the nature of the literacy and photographic practices that occur within a setting designed to provide opportunities for making explicit and on-going connections to students' out-of-school lives³. Perhaps most importantly I am curious about exploring with the young women how we - as educators, students, activists, community members - can work toward the creation of educational spaces that support young urban women in "making a way."⁴

I would like to extend special thanks to the staff of High Tech High Philadelphia Charter School, particularly Deborah Stern and William Walker, for their support of this work. I would also like to thank Lalitha Vasudevan who devoted her considerable creative vision and technical knowledge to bringing the Sistahs' work to this venue.

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