Rationale
Oak Grove High School (OGHS) hosts 1,982 students as part of the East Side Union High School District. Declining enrollment has been the trend for my seven-year tenure at OGHS, resulting from alternate educational opportunities such as charter schools and internet options, as well as increasing rent prices. By far our largest ethnicity is Latino/Mexican students at 49%, followed by 21% Asian, 11% Caucasian, 8% African American, 5% Filipino and 1% Pacific Islander (4% claimed multiple ethnicities). Overall, there are 215 students designated as Special Education, 642 categorized as ELL (English Language Learners), and 1076 categorized as Socio-Economically Disadvantaged (53% of our students qualify for the free and reduced lunch program). In the 2011-2012 school year, our graduation rate was 72.28%. In 2013, OGHS achieved an API score of 717 (a 24 point gain), primarily owing to a marked increase by the English Language Arts scores. Regardless of our improvement, our overall target growth, AYP, was not achieved and we are still classified as a Program Improvement site. Despite our improvement, the struggle with literacy is also evident in the fact that 47% of my freshmen read at, or below, a sixth grade level.
Given these statistics, success is clearly a struggle for students at OGHS. Beyond all of this data, there are other considerations that make life challenging. The Bay Area has a notoriously high cost of living, which often necessitates every able-bodied person in a household to contribute financially, including teens. There often is not an adult capable of helping or even supporting our students academically, and lack of supervision is significant. Access to technology and even an internet connection is not universal, so a small portion of every class has no ability to reliably utilize those tools. Gang activity is significant in the area, and many young people struggle with safety concerns just to arrive to class.
With a decline in support for all types of art in our community, I feel it incumbent upon educators to create access to art. 3 In an area of funding cuts that have eliminated field trips to museums and plays, bringing as many forms of art as possible into the classroom becomes imperative. Exposure to a variety of forms of art has multiple positive outcomes. The arts enrich lives, promote self-directed learning, improve school attendance, and sharpen both critical and creative skills and even correlate to higher scores on achievement tests (artsforlifeaward.org). According to the NEA report, The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies, students of low socioeconomic status involved in the arts have better academic outcomes, higher goals for professional careers, and are more civically engaged. All of these facts and observations lead an educator to the conclusion that now, more than ever, we need to be superb practitioners of the art of teaching. We need to expose students to new ideas, new possibilities, and nurture their development if we hope for them to grow into civic minded, responsible, independent adults. "The arts serve as expressive scaffolding that taps emotive and affective ways of knowing so that students can begin to make empathetic connections to human rights issues." 4
Given that the Common Core State Standards were designed with the intention of developing students who no longer merely regurgitate facts, but who are able to engage in complex critical thinking activities; the introduction of art into the English classroom is imperative. Using art to both teach and support reading comprehension allows students to apply strategies in a text-free environment prior to a text-based application. 5 They need to engage in creative inquiry that develops their ability to synthesize information and clearly express their thoughts about ambiguous and often subjective qualities.
Creative inquiry is a circular or spiral process of interpretation whereby the learner creates a unique representation of understanding through the personal investment of prior knowledge, active engagement in creative processes for understanding, and the creation and reflection of representations for learning. In this case, the focus is on…the creative response to an image. 6
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