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![experienced very early events of significant trauma, which made interactions with spaces of authority feel
inherently violent. This is something that goes unaddressed in conversations about education reform. If
this is true for most of the nation, why is there such limited focus on traumacentered education?
“Changes in society, employment, entertainment, and family have
contributed to changes in early childhood experiences of many students
which has resulted in altered brain development and traumatic stress.
[Schore,2001; ; Siegel, 2007;Solomon & Siegel, 2004]. Effectively
teaching today’s students requires alternative techniques and school
policies in order for the school to meet academic expectations. Electronic
imaging techniques clearly illustrate that brain structure and chemistry is
altered for children who are anxious, insecure, and have experienced
uncompleted attachments.” (Oehlburg, Trauma and Loss, 2008)
To successfully educate students with histories of trauma, new approaches have to be taken with
curriculum. The quote above demonstrates the fact that students who have histories of trauma learn
differently from students without. It is becoming increasingly important that our methods of education are
studentcentered and consider the holistic child before choosing courses of action.
In the early 90’s, Arts Education was understood as a possibly innovative solution to the problem
I outline above. In 2009 Johns Hopkins researchers shared findings from a study entitled
“Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts and the Brain” showing that arts education can help rewire the brain in
positive ways. In this John Hopkins study, In this John Hopkin’s study, Michael Gazzaniga, director of
the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, summarized some
key highlights of the consortium’s finding:
“1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that
produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/c42a4c43-c7e7-412d-a9ee-e6dd450d4d5f-160122231927/75/CulturalEquityFinal-5-2048.jpg)
![Glenn, clement e[1]. fundamental needs of the whole child](https://cdn.slidesharecdn.com/ss_thumbnails/glennclemente1-fundamentalneedsofthewholechild-100916174747-phpapp01-thumbnail.jpg?width=640&height=640&fit=bounds)
CulturalEquityFinal
- 1. Proposal: The StudioArts High School of New York Cultural Equity Final Professor Marta M. Vega Camonghne Felix December 5th, 2015
- 2. I grew upin the Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the country, a district known best for its creation of Hip Hop, political corruption and mismanagement. After transferring to three different schools, I finally graduated from Bronx Community High School in 2010 with a 1.2 GPA. Of the fifteen other students I graduated with, only five of them have chosen to pursue college degrees. This is not from lack of desire or ambition or cognitive ability but a failed public educational system and a lack of options. We were a diverse group of students, but there were some basic things that made us alike: We were young people who had experienced significant childhood trauma, had learning and behavioral disorders, and were chronically depressed and convinced of our intellectual inferiority. We wanted to learn, but had no clue where, or how, to begin. At sixteen, I discovered Urban Word NYC. Urban Word NYC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of young writers through various forms of poetry, prose, and musicianship. It serves young people between th ages of 12 and 21, and most facilitators are practicing artists of prestige who dedicate valuable afternoon hours to young people like myself frustrated, thrown away by public schools, and artistically inclined. Through my experiences with this organization, I fell in love with creative and expository writing, developed a concentrated practice that would eventually make me one of the youngest published poets in my city, and gained a community of young artists, scholars, and incredibly successful mentors who helped me cultivate the political, academic, and artistic talents I didn’t know I had. My exposure to the arts as a young woman allowed me to begin an investigation into the systemic and sociological limitations that led me and so many other students like me, to believe that we were ‘unable.’Arts Education has made me feel fully equipped when entering any academic space. Arts education helped me learn how to discipline myself, and how to let my work speak for me. It made me able to exceed my own expectations while dealing with the pressure of being the only black and youngest
- 3. person in myMFA program. Arts education has led me to activism and given me agency to take on the big issues, locally and globally. It has made me aware of what I bring to any table, and dully aware of what I’ve yet to gain. In the years following that transformation, the word “exception” has been a point of contention and frustration for me. When people refer to me as an exception, they insinuate that people who share similar backgrounds would not be able to achieve my level of success. It insinuates that I am more special than my counterpart. This notion of exceptionalism is disruptive, and erases the many ways that race and class are socially constructed and, therefore, destructible. I believe that disrupting that notion lies in transforming the way we educate young people who come from urban communities. The educational opportunities we provide must respond to and engage with the contexts and truths that young people bring into the classroom with them when they enter. In this proposal, I intend to present a new educational framework: New York City’s Premiere Studio Arts High School. The Problem In 2012, 90% of the Bronx’s High School students were deemed unfit for collegelevel work. In 2010, 76% of all New York City High School Students were deemed unfit for collegelevel work. On a national scale, this means that New York City students underperform when compared to students in other states. When our students go to college, they have a hard time competing with their peers. This leads to higher dropout levels and a culture of catchup. Why is it that NYC students underperform? There are a few factors that hold relevance. New York City is an Urban City, which means that the experiences young people have here differ greatly from the comfort of rural settings. “Where detailed urban data are available, they reveal wide disparities in children’s rates of survival, nutritional status and education resulting from unequal access to services. Where detailed urban data are available, they reveal disparities in children’s
- 4. rates of survival,nutritional status and education resulting from unequal access to services. All over the world, hundreds of millions of children in impoverished urban neighbourhoods and informal settlements confront daily violations of their rights despite living close to institutions and services. In many countries, children living in urban poverty fare as badly as, or worse than, children living in rural poverty when it comes to undernutrition and underfive mortality. ” (Unicef, 2012) As of 2015, 22% of New York City’s children were living under the poverty line. In a report released by the Southern Education Foundation, researchers found that 51 percent of children in public schools qualified for the lunches in 2013, which means that most of them come from lowincome families. In the image above, (National Survey of Children’s Health, 2009), you’ll see that young people living in NYC’s urban areas experience trauma at a higher rate than those in rural areas and the rest of the nation. You’ll also see that young people nationwide who live in Urban areas experienced childhood trauma at a higher rate than those in rural areas. Most of the young people I grew up around, including myself,
- 5. experienced very earlyevents of significant trauma, which made interactions with spaces of authority feel inherently violent. This is something that goes unaddressed in conversations about education reform. If this is true for most of the nation, why is there such limited focus on traumacentered education? “Changes in society, employment, entertainment, and family have contributed to changes in early childhood experiences of many students which has resulted in altered brain development and traumatic stress. [Schore,2001; ; Siegel, 2007;Solomon & Siegel, 2004]. Effectively teaching today’s students requires alternative techniques and school policies in order for the school to meet academic expectations. Electronic imaging techniques clearly illustrate that brain structure and chemistry is altered for children who are anxious, insecure, and have experienced uncompleted attachments.” (Oehlburg, Trauma and Loss, 2008) To successfully educate students with histories of trauma, new approaches have to be taken with curriculum. The quote above demonstrates the fact that students who have histories of trauma learn differently from students without. It is becoming increasingly important that our methods of education are studentcentered and consider the holistic child before choosing courses of action. In the early 90’s, Arts Education was understood as a possibly innovative solution to the problem I outline above. In 2009 Johns Hopkins researchers shared findings from a study entitled “Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts and the Brain” showing that arts education can help rewire the brain in positive ways. In this John Hopkins study, In this John Hopkin’s study, Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, summarized some key highlights of the consortium’s finding: “1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and
- 6. the training ofattention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition. 2. Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in interest in the arts. 3. Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training. 4. In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.” (Gazzaniga, Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts and the Brain, 2009) Here are some preexisting interventionist methods that have been created in response to this problem. Each carries its own sociopolitical or academic blind spot and none have been able to fully fulfill the intent behind their individual mission statements. 1. There are many non and nonforprofits that work with large cultural institutions like Guggenheim, MoMA, and Studio Museum, that bring young people from local high schools across the city to workshops on site. They are either oneoff workshops (a one time event) or a series of workshops that may run through the semester or for a few weeks. 2. Some of those nonforprofits hire their own rosters of working/teaching artists (some who are connected to large cultural institutions) who go into Public Schools and teach workshops. Content typically depends on availability and the school’s budget. Both of these methods are generally unsuccessful because the children get unstructured and nonscaffolded instruction that is divorced from inclass curriculum. It is typically
- 7. described to childrenas a reward for good behavior in school, but never described as an essential aspect of school. 3. Another method used by Public Schools and the nonprofits that serve them is after school artsprogramming. In some scenarios, Public Schools will hire nonprofits who have developed their own arts curriculums and ask them to develop after school arts instruction. This is a little bit more of a substantive experience for the student because they learn to expect and look forward to the programming, but often times funding for programming is cut on a year to year basis, and a student who began a particular arts practice with a certain facilitator or mentor would subsequently lose access to that resource. 4. The fourth method is a format made famous by organizations like Harlem Children Zone and Dreamyard Academy. Here is Harlem Children’s Zone’s Truce Academy mission statement: “Students who go through the awardwinning TRUCE® Media and Arts afterschool program are aspiring filmmakers, artists, writers, producers, and much more. Through rich and varied exposure and projectbased activities, they receive handson experiential learning in a wide range of artistic disciplines, as well as the wraparound academic support they need to pursue their passions and do their work well.” When I spent time as a teaching artist at Harlem Children’s Zone, I often felt misled by the mission statement. While it’s true that students are exposed to new and various forms of content, most students attend program from anywhere between two to four hours a day. Most students have an hour of “club”, which is when the exposure happens, and then the rest of the time is spent on homework, or discussing grades and college expectations with student advocates. While I had the opportunity to see my
- 8. students evolve asthinkers and as artists, I felt limited once I understood that they would be much better served they if their exposure to the arts lasted longer than an hour a day. 5. The final method I’ll share with you is a format made famous by the movie Fame, which is based on NYC’s first Performing Arts high school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School. It’s audition based and allows students the opportunity to study the following disciplines: Art, Dance, Drama and Technical Theater. This method is the most successful framework because it gives students the opportunity to have an immersive arts education, instead of a supplemental one. The problem lies in its admission process and its discipline offerings. Students graduating from Middle School who are applying to the program must have maintained an 85 90 average and audition well. Asking students to audition presupposes that students may have been trained (officially or unofficially) before applying to the program. Evidence provided above shows that students who would benefit most from arts education do not always have access to cultural education and may always display their individual aptitudes with good grades. Because of its focus on the Performing Arts, it alienates students who would benefit from a more individual studio arts process, and leaves students who like the performing arts in the dark about different methods of art production and dissemination. None of these methods feature specifically trauma or student centered approaches. The Solution We are seeking $50 Million for the development of New York City’s Premiere Studio & Fine Arts based High School that will be a public magnet, charter, specialized or alternative high school. The $70 Million would be used towards development, construction of housing, and four years of employment. How It Would Work:
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