Teacher facilitates 'Facing Immigration'
The idea for her workshop on "Facing Immigration" came to Diane Sherman, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, artist and yoga teacher, as a way to use blind contour drawing with reflection questions to draw people into conversation about what it means to be an immigrant, who immigrants are and the reality that most people in the U.S. are descendants of immigrants.
She first facilitated it online with Church World Service's 2024 World Refugee Day event and then again at Spokane's 2025 World Refugee Day. Since then, she has facilitated it with Refugee and Immigrant Connections Spokane (RICS) and plans to present it with other local refugee groups.
In teaching refugees and immigrants ESL at Spokane Community College, Diane was inspired to connect with Spokane's international community.
"I see refugees every day, people from Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Congo and other places," she said.
"They are people trying to make a life. They did not leave their countries because they wanted to but because war, oppression of women and girls—excluding them from education and work—or economic dissolution—as in Venezuela—forced them to flee here to be alive," she commented.
"They did not come to take jobs," asserted Diane.
She seeks to counter such stereotypes, because she is disturbed by how immigrants and refugees are used as scapegoats for political purposes, as they have been in other eras.
For the blind contour drawing at World Refugee Day, she had people sit before 10 mirrors and, without looking at the page for two minutes, draw contours of their head and facial features. Then they look at what they drew and add colors.
Diane likens that blind drawing to the trust immigrants and refugees must have as they begin their journeys and leave all they have known without knowing where they will be living as they move along the road of immigrating to a new country and starting a new life.
"This art process is a somatic experience of stepping into the unknown and having to embody trust, just like immigrants do as they begin their journeys," she clarified.
Diane hopes the project grows as a way to awaken people to who refugees are, as good citizens who need to make a life after they left all they cared about to come here to rebuild themselves.
"I'm hoping to expand on "Facing Immigration" by offering stories of immigrants and their descendants to build a rich picture of immigration in our community and culture," she said, "and to have dialogue to connect people."
Diane, who earned a bachelor's degree in art history in 1985 from the University of California in Los Angeles and a master's degree in arts and consciousness in 1996 from JFK University in Berkeley, has taught workshops on creative process, writing and yoga.
In 2010, she and her then-husband moved from the San Francisco Bay area to Spokane, looking for a quieter place where they could have more contact with nature.
Diane attended Catholic schools for 12 years and accepted the faith but did not accept its patriarchal practices or its rules about morality.
"I had danced all my life until 1999, when a car hit me as a pedestrian," she said. "It led me into using yoga as a way to heal my body, mind and heart.
"I began teaching yoga, creative process and mindfulness based on care of self and on loving and doing no harm to others, the land, plants or the planet," said Diane, who taught yoga for 10 years in Oakland and Berkeley, and then for seven years at Harmony Yoga in Spokane.
She led retreats to India and the San Francisco Bay Area until the pandemic when she moved to teaching online.
After she and her husband divorced, she needed a job and began teaching ESL at Spokane Community College.
Diane said she is raffling some of her artwork to raise funds so she can facilitate more "Facing Immigration" workshops to better inform people about what is happening in the world and the issues immigrants face.
