Arts Transform Students' Achievements At Bay Area Hewlett-Annenberg High School.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 5, 1998--Last year, the great abolitionist Fredrick Douglass dropped into an 11th grade class at San Jose's Gunderson High unannounced.

His firebrand oratory stunned and electrified first Mr. Lippman's class, then Mr. Sharon's class, then finally more than 250 teachers, parents, and community leaders who gathered to hear "Douglass" and others examine the promises of democracy in an exhibition called "Is There a Place Called America?"

That academic exhibition not only filled the auditorium -- something theater rarely does at Gunderson High -- it also transformed the academic lives of students in teacher Jennifer Andaluz' American Studies class. "Both our Frederick Douglass and our master of ceremonies had struggled in school not because they're not intelligent, but because they had resisted what school is about," says Andaluz.

"Most of our academic assessments are very condescending to students, and students don't perceive them as extensions of their learning. But when we gave students a meaningful context to discover their talents, they performed. Now they accept that tests have a place. In fact, they salivate for tests, because now they know what they're capable of."

Andaluz' American Studies symposium began as an integrated English/history/photography class. By degrees, live performance became the thread that stitched its parts together. Early in the year, students read the "Grapes of Wrath," projecting dustbowl images in the background and working with an occasional box or chair as a prop.

Their incursion into neighboring classes was spontaneous: While studying Frederick Douglass, Andaluz had asked, "What would it mean to become this speech?" Students were first nervous about performing. But after visiting other classes, they felt empowered -- having an audience made a difference. Senior Brad Bonnifield, who took American Studies last year, says that "performing in front of peers and teachers makes you take studies more seriously" and provides "a feeling of accomplishment."

Classmate Tyrus Mosqueda says the interdisciplinary class was rigorous and intellectually challenging. It taught her "how to deconstruct information, which means if you have a big lump of information, you analyze each part and put it back together again." Before experiencing this new way of learning, she says, "I was always spoon-fed information. But this is a better teaching utensil, because it makes you want to do the work."

Both Mosqueda and Bonnifield will graduate this year, taking a changed outlook with them. Mosqueda, who aspires to be a writer, says that before last year's learning experience, her conversations with friends "would always be about movies, TV, or some guy. I didn't know students who would talk about history in their spare time."

Bonnifield nods and confesses that his interest has grown too: last week, on the way home from a surfing trip to Santa Cruz, he debated his girlfriend over whether Martin Luther King or the NAACP had had a bigger impact on the civil rights movement!

Andaluz is not surprised by the impact of her teaching. She is one of a handful of Gunderson High teachers who vowed several years ago to "make learning in classrooms as exciting as the learning we experience as adults."

Building on work started almost a decade ago by a visionary principal, the school's reform team began integrating traditional academic disciplines into unified two-hour "core" classes about three years ago, then last year won support for their efforts in the form of a Hewlett-Annenberg leadership grant from the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC).

In addition to teaching, Andaluz spends half her time as a "reform coordinator" who monitors standards and assessments to ensure that the school's reform effort is improving -- and inspiring student achievement.

Unlike many of the nation's schools, Gunderson is fortunate enough to still have an art department. But Andaluz says that arts shouldn't be relegated to a department; instead, they should infuse the entire curriculum. One important role arts can play is to relate academics to students' contemporary lives, as they did in last year's colloquium.

That performance included a "public service announcement" that parodied a familiar commercial: Four students appeared on stage, announcing that they were Japanese-American, Korean-American, Filipino-American, and Chinese-American. In turn, each showed a "green card," declaring, "I never leave home without it!"

Andaluz says that the academic colloquium was not an end-of-the-year spectacular, but an exhibition made up of projects done by the American Studies class throughout the year. While sharing what the class had learned with the school at large, it also attracted the attention of people beyond the school's walls.

As a result, Gunderson received an arts grant from the San Jose Unified School District and a call from Paulette Peterson, a professional artist who volunteered to work with students on art installations. Their first installation, "The Yellow Wallpaper," dramatized a novel about a young, turn-of-the-century wife who is suffering from post-natal depression and who is imprisoned in her room by her controlling husband.

Peterson and 11th grade students constructed a second installation called "Just Below the Surface" to celebrate Women's History Month. Working together, boys and girls transformed an entire room by removing the furniture and installing a spotlight. Highlighted in the center of the black room was a stool, on top of which sat an enamel washbasin filled with water and a sponge.

In the bottom of the bowl was a message that said that women were absent from history because they hadn't done anything worth remembering. Students had draped the walls of the room with paper covered with the biographies of hundreds of women who had excelled in all aspects of life -- but the life stories of these pioneers had been painted over with black paint.

Student docents invited visitors to sponge off the paint, and as the sponge was repeatedly rinsed in the bowl, the washbasin's negative message about the value of women's achievements was gradually obscured. What was left on the walls was the panoply of women's history, a collection of stories that revealed the world of possibilities open to today's young women.

Andaluz believes the teacher's job is to uncover those possibilities. "We are free to do as much or as little as we can imagine," she says. "The job of the teacher is to open the doors of the imagination." In her classroom, a quote from Brazilian educator Paulo Frerie puts it another way: "Education is the practice of freedom."

BASRC and the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge were established when former U.S. ambassador Walter Annenberg matched industrialist William Hewlett's $25 million grant to Bay Area public schools. When fully matched, the Hewlett-Annenberg Challenge will provide $100 million for school reform over five years.