WNED to air 'Writing with Light: Picturing Poetry'
While it's not unusual for parents and educators to pay tribute to the unique ability of the arts to capture and engage the imagination of young people, unless you've actually been in the presence of the kind of raw, unmediated enthusiasm kids have for self-expression when they're given the opportunity to develop the skills empowering it, you might think the entire arts-in-education movement overrated and increasingly irrelevant in an era where the only thing that matters in our schools is "teaching to the test."
At at 10 tonight, Buffalo public television viewers will have a rare opportunity to witness that kind of enthusiasm in action and go behind the scenes of a successful arts-in-education program when WNED-TV Channel 17, Cable 3 will broadcast "Writing with Light: Picturing Poetry," a documentary film by Jon R. Hand that follows the progress of a group of fifth-grade students in Buffalo's Native American Magnet School (NAMS) as they proceed through a signature 10-week joint education project designed and administered by Buffalo's CEPA Gallery and Just Buffalo Literary Center.
The documentary follows teaching artists Karen Lewis of Just Buffalo and Amy Leza Luraschi of CEPA as they join with Native American Magnet School teacher Robin Fischer to develop a theme ("Connection") for the project that will be both relevant and challenging to the students, and will engage them both academically and socially. It proceeds through the implementation of the program, showing 10- and 11-year-olds actively developing their reading and writing skills, their imaginative and critical thinking abilities, and their general communication and social skills as they work on creating first images (in the form of photographs), then poems, and finally, narratives expressing both their individual and cultural point of view.
Do we even need to mention here that they have lots of fun in the process? Nothing challenges and elevates us more than when we ask ourselves who we are, where did we come from, and what do we aim to be? Those are universal human questions, but over the ages art, music, literature and drama have done a more compelling job of exploring them than any standardized curriculum yet devised.
The function of arts-in-education is not to challenge or undermine the standard curriculum, but rather to suggest what life possibilities lie beyond it. The 10- and 11-year-olds at the North American Magnet School learn that the process of art-making -- of saying something about yourself and the world around you -- is the first step toward taking responsibility for changing ourselves and conditions that surround us.
The 29-minute documentary is scheduled for rebroadcast at 3:30 a.m. (set your video recording devices) on Tuesday, March 9, if you miss it tonight. To learn more about the project, and to see examples of the student work produced by it, visit the Writing With Light website.
---R.D. Pohl
