Belonging, Part 3: Visual Genre

This is the first genre of four required in the Multi-Genre project that I'm completing alongside my students.  We had lots of choices within the visual genre: a collage, a drawing, a comic strip, etc.  I took the easy way out with a photograph, partly due to time constraints and partly because it seemed to lend itself well.  

Photograph Requirements: a photograph that I took myself, with a brief written description of its connection to the theme.

Description:

The boy in the center is Johann, an Austrian exchange student who spent a year at my parents’ house in 2011-2012.  He adapted really well: my parents said he really felt like an extra son to them, and he made close friends who even came to visit him in Austria.  His friends gave him this T-shirt as a going-away present.  It was kind of intended ironically because none of them would wear a T-shirt that was so blatantly patriotic.  But it also reflected their sense, and his, that in many ways he had succeeded at “belonging” in America, in my family, and in their social circle.  The next year, he experienced some “homesickness” for the US and his community there.