A Year to Remember at Everett Middle School
Streetside's Media Arts Integration Specialist, Daven Gee, reflects on his 2017-18 workshops
This past school year I had the teaching experience of a lifetime while working intensively with newcomer students and two incredible English Language Development teachers, Ariana Diaz and Hilary Blackstone, at Everett Middle School in San Francisco. In these classes I worked with many students from Central America – El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua – and others from Mexico, Yemen, China, the Philippines, India, Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Students improved their vocabulary and grammar while creating media arts projects that investigated four academic units: The Art of Getting Along [social interactions and directions], How’s the Weather?, Ecology, and Healthy Living [self-care and helping others]. Together, we created podcasts, non-fiction movies, stories, music, self-portraits, expressive typography, digital photo collages, stop-motion animation and more. Students created absolutely arresting work.
Two projects really stand out: while making I Am Like the Weather digital books, students innovated beyond expectation in their use of Photoshop Mix to combine self-portraits with photos and words about different kinds of weather. Their composited images are breathtaking, humorous and cleverly self-aware. For So, You Know…, the podcast project, students wrote scripts about interpersonal and life challenges they face, recorded them with peers, created original music in GarageBand, and edited it all together. These podcasts activated so much in the students: storytelling, speaking and listening practice, musical experimentation, and persistence. They are as fun to hear as they were difficult to make.
I think it’s important not to gloss over the inherent rigor of combining language acquisition, cultural integration, academic achievement and creative production in the classroom: this demands everything from everyone involved. Add in the additional challenges of being a teenager, in an unfamiliar place, without your usual network of family and friends, and you can imagine the joy and fear felt while holding the ultimate sleek device—an iPad—in your hands. This year my understanding of the many ways students learn, express themselves and participate has truly grown and, I hope, their growth has equalled, if not surpassed, mine.
-Daven Gee, Media Arts Integration Specialist
