2006-2007 Partnership Extension Grants:

Bronx

MS 118: William W. Niles Middle School
Region: 1
District: 10
Grades: 6-8
Student Population: 1500
Partner: DreamYard Drama Project

MS 118 in partnership with DreamYard will be documenting three students in one 7th grade Theatre class (co taught by MS 118 teacher Rebecca Lowry and DreamYard artist Kenny Finkle) as they adapt the novel “The Skin I’m In” for the stage. In this semester long class, the promising practice we will be looking at is “How does integrating theatre and literature enhance/effect student’s understanding of social issues?”. The students will be identifying the social issues in the novel and through reflection, art making, discussion and performance will be exploring this issue from every angle. The class and the three students will be documented through video (shot and edited by fellow 7th graders) as well as written and performative work.

Bronx High School of Visual Arts
Region: 2
District: 11
Grades: 9-12
Student Population: 160
Partners: The Bronx Museum

The Bronx Museum Student Docent Program is a yearlong course taught by two museum artist educators through the exhibitions in the museum’s galleries and using their art education facility. One class of 24 selected juniors participate along with two school-based art specialists. The Student Docent Program is distinguished from conventional school art classes by its emphasis on learning critical thinking skills through looking and talking about art works and making concrete connections to society in a professional and real world environment. This promising practice supports the New York City Blueprint for the Learning in the Visual Arts and the New York State Arts Standards by addressing four of the strands: Literacy in the Arts, Making Connections, Community and Cultural Resources, and Careers and Life Long Learning.

Through their participation in this program, high school students: develop confidence in themselves as artists; strengthen their communication skills and enhance their ability to present and discuss art; deepen their understanding, knowledge and appreciation of the breath and meaning of contemporary art and its relationship to society; expand their perception of careers in the visual arts and museums; and improve their leadership skills and ability to work in teams. Using a curriculum designed by the Museum’s education faculty, students first learning how to use dialogical strategies to engage peers, family members and museum community in exploring artworks in an exhibition. Then, building on these skills, students design, curate and install a thematic exhibition of student artwork at the museum in the second half of the program.

There are other benefits to the Program. By team teaching with the museum artist teachers, participating school-based faculty receives professional development in museum education approaches. The school community benefits from the Museum tours with the docents acting as teachers and role models to their peers. The students whose work is selected to be exhibited at the museum also gain from being professionally recognized by the museum community.

Marble Hill School for International Studies
Region: 1
District: 11
Grades: 9-12
Student Population: 160
Partners: DreamYard Drama Project

At Marble Hill School for International Studies, the arts provides our students a chance to communicate through visual, dramatic, and kinetic mediums. This is invaluable in our school since there are over 40 different languages spoken by our student population alone. Our Wednesday DreamYard arts program for our 9th and 10th graders provides a common language in our multi-lingual school.

Language skills are developed weekly through writing, reading, speaking and listening activities in each discipline. Yet it is through our “Sharings” that we feel our students gain valuable experience in critical thinking and communication skills. The sharing format is structured to build confidence and ability in students as they go from a simple sharing with their own classmates in their class to the final sharing with the entire school community in a large auditorium.

Through these sharings, students learn to reflect, analyze and critique their own and their classmates artwork in both oral and written formats. Students discuss their work, the process they went through to create it, the intent they had for the work and reflect on what they may or may not have done differently. While critiquing the art of their peers, students are pushed to first objectively reflect on the work, then analyze and critique the work; making sure to support their opinions with evidence they find in the work itself.

By the time the final sharing with the entire school community arrives in June, all students have been through this reflective cycle at least 2-3 times formally in their DreamYard classes. Students are able easily share their work with the school community of upper classmen, teachers, and family members; easily.

Brooklyn

PS 200 K: The Benson Elementary School
Region: 7
District: 20
Grades: PreK-5
Student Population: 1197
Partners: City Lore, Inc.; Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA)

City Lore’s artist residency program engages students in exploring and conveying historical narratives through the arts for personal connection and cultural understanding. Our Promising Practice for the Extension Grant at PS 200 is that we are documenting how dramatic tableau increases students’ understanding of historical narrative, deepens students’ personal connection to another culture, and develops students’ confidence in their own artistic skills.

Brooklyn Museum
P.S. 200 3rd grade students are understanding Egypt, Africa, and China by viewing, discussing and interpreting museum objects at the Brooklyn Museum. Our Promising Practice is that when museum educators and classroom teacher collaborate to provide multiple opportunities for students to view, write about, discuss and make art, students show more engagement with and retention of the content and they increase their thinking skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

IS 392: The School for the Gifted and Talented

Region: 5

District: 23

Grades: 6-8

Student Population: 269

Partners: Studio in a School

At Intermediate School 392, the Gifted and Talented School, arts education is part of the everyday experiences of youngsters. Through-out the year, sixth graders engage in the study of ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, and India in their classrooms. This social studies content is integrated into study of ceramics indicative of those cultures in the visual arts classroom, as well as in the writing of stories, poems, and research projects with their classroom teachers and a consultant from Teachers and Writers Collaborative. The culmination of these units of study is a Living Museum, where children share their acquired knowledge through exhibiting their ceramic artifacts, dramatizing their myths, and dressing up to depict the culture they studied.
This arts integration approach is supported through the collaboration of residency artists, classroom teachers, strand leaders, arts consultants, parents, and a school administration that believe in the value of the arts. Common planning time and the many programming accommodations for arts planning teams, rehearsals, etc. facilitate the meaningful integration of the arts and other subject areas. As part of our Curriculum Extension grant provided by the Center for Arts Education, we are exploring and documenting how arts integration can enrich the learning experiences of our students. We have found that it is through the enrichment of art, that our students are able to find multiple ways in which to demonstrate their knowledge and express themselves.

PS 115: Daniel Mucatel School
Region: 6
District: 18
Grades: PreK-5
Student Population: 460
Partner: Brooklyn Arts Exchange

PS 115, the Daniel Mucatel School, located in Canarsie, Brooklyn has been in partnership with Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) for the past year three years.
The grant’s purpose was to integrate dance/theater into the NYS 3rd grade Social Studies curriculum as a means to find alternative entry points to the curriculum for our students and emphasis student centered learning.

Over the course of the three years we have decided to document the Promising Practice: “How does collaborative, arts based kinesetic learning promote student creativity and increase the understanding of the NYS Social Studies curriculum? We are documenting the skills, language acquisition, and students ability to translate learned skills from their movement work with BAX into successful acquisition of the 3rd grade Social studies curriculum through student centered collaborative work. (This year the focus is Puerto Rico.)

PS 249: The Caton School
Region: 6
District: 17
Grades: K-3
Student Population: 900
Partners: Ifetayo Cultural Arts Facility, Inc.

Ifetayo and the PS 249 family are currently working on qualifying that there is a link between culturally focused dance and the academic growth in students. Our intent is to generate a tool or tools that will help us measure the progress of participants within the residency. We are confident that there are physical and behavioral progressions which can be easily documented. However, we would like to solidify our speculation of the arts enhancing intellectual ability in individual students.

Another component that we have been collaborating on is the attitudes of the male students and their interest and dedication to cultural dance. This year we have seen the boys working with greater passion than in previous years. The young ladies have provided the essence of poise and grace as the synchronized balance to the contribution of the boys. We, on the other have given credence of the boys’ avid involvement to the cohort of male influences who serve as facilitators in the areas of dance, music and academics.

Manhattan

PS 146: Anna Short School

Region: 9

District: 4

Grades: K-6

Student Population: 600

Partner: 92nd Street Y

PS 146, in an 8 year partnership with the 92nd St. Y, has created Theatermakers Workshop. Now in its third year, Theatermakers Workshop teaches improvisation, playwriting, and enactment to fourth grade students though an in-depth program that lasts 42 sessions. In a groundbreaking process, in which instruction is provided by a guest theater artist and the teachers, students learn theater-making history, language, and skills while utilizing a playwriting process that parallels the strategies used during Writer’s Workshop. Teachers assist students in making explicit connections between the processes, drawing on the organic connections between the ELA standards and the New York City Theater Blueprint. By delving into rigorous study of student work through collaborative action research, the partnership team is able to respond directly to student needs, helping them find their own voices, and developing their understanding of character and elements of theater. In their pursuit of quality work as they learn to improvise scenes, transpose these scenes into play scripts and enact the characters they have imagined and designed, students begin to meet standards in both the blueprint and ELA.

MS 255: The Salk School of Science

Region: 9

District: 2

Grades: 6-8

Student Population: 230

Partners: New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (Tisch)

This partnership combines the needs of Salk students and talents of Salk teachers with the skills offered by undergraduate acting and community education students at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Our program has two components that intertwine acting and theatrical production with the Humanities curriculum. The in-school portion of our partnership brings Interns from TSOA into the 7th and 8th grade Humanities classrooms to incorporate drama into reading, writing, and/or social studies units. After-school students are working with TSOA Interns (as acting coaches and directors) to produce two full-scale Shakespeare productions.

MS 131: Dr. Sun Yat Sen School

Region: 9

District: 2

Grades: 6-8

Student Population: 1027

Partners: Working Playground, Inc.

The collaboration between Working Playground and Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School 131 will focus on the use of storyboarding as a graphic organizer during the writing and film making process. Storyboarding is part of the filmmaking process, which provides the clearest steps in supporting skills related to language acquisition. The storyboards will demonstrate the students’ understanding of a character, setting, action, sequence and details. The process of digital filmmaking will be a catalyst for English Language Learning in order for ELL students to become better readers and writers and more confident in their verbal and presentation skills.

Queens

PS 78: The Robert F. Wagner Jr. School

Region: 4

District: 30

Grades: PreK-5

Student Population: 235

Partners: City Lore, Inc.

PS 78’s artist residency program with City Lore’s engages students in creating original artworks inspired by their research of social studies topics. For our CAE Extension Grant, we are documenting the promising practice interviewing as a tool for building a knowledge base that informs student artwork.”

Academy of American Studies

Region: 4

District: 77

Grades: 9-12

Student Population: 515

Partners: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

The Academy of American Studies and The Museum of Modern Art continue their partnership with the focus question: “Does the fusion of Art and English curricula foster personal voice?” The cross-curriculum, self-identity project serves as a vehicle for student expression and is our promising practice. The aligning of the Art and English disciplines allows the students to develop their ideas through multi-disciplined approaches and from varying approaches. Using MoMA’s collection of art as the foundation, the museum educators developed a three-part program tailored for each subject. The project promotes literacy development and the relationship between visual and written arts. This gives students greater ability to access their ideas and improve technique. Ultimately, a major goal of this project will allow students to experience the beneficial overlap between the content from by each course enforcing subject matter and the goal of exploring the theme of identity. From a pedagogical standpoint, this project applies Howard Gardner’s “Theory of Multiple Intelligences” to a task that involves student capacity to create, evaluate, describe and analyze their work in relation to themselves and a greater audience.

Staten Island

PS 4: Maurice Wollin Elementary School

Region: 7

District: 31

Grades: PreK-5

Student Population: 866

Partners: Snug Harbor Cultural Center

The Partnership Team of PS 4: Maurice Wollin Elementary School and The Education Department of Snug Harbor Cultural Center (SHCC) have developed a nationally recognized “Building Architects 4 The Future” program. Our promising practice infuses standards-based arts/architecture across the 5th grade curriculum, improves literacy and math skills/scores and builds school spirit for students, staff, and parents utilizing architecture as a common theme. As part of the process of documenting our work, we are refining and enhancing our excellent working relationship, deepening and strengthening our level of sustainability and demonstrating the longitudinal impact of the “Building Architects 4 The Future” program. The Partnership is creating an “I-Movie” presentation that identifies, documents, and shares these best practices. This presentation will enable us to enhance in-house sustainability, and share out with other schools and arts community members.