Dan Holden grew up making mixtapes. As technology advanced, he switched to CDs. When he realized that he could record voices on those CDs, the English teacher decided to share that ability with his students at the Lieberman Learning Center, geared toward students who are catching up on credit hours.
“All of the students have a strong voice,” says Holden, who teaches in the University City School District. “They might not have the sentence structure or the organization, but they all have something to say.”
So he started Alternative Voices, a two-month poetry unit that culminates in recordings of students’ work. At the beginning of the program, students recorded the albums at school with the help of the principal’s computer. Then a student connected Holden with Wayne Adams Jr., owner of Gateway Digital Studios. Now, students record at the studio, adding another layer to the learning experience as students “learn how to do the big board,” he says. “They always ask Wayne if they can schedule time to record their own work.”
Holden doesn’t limit the topics; students may write about anything they’d like. He does, however, ask them to focus on details. “Students have a tendency, whenever they write, to be abstract,” he says. “Poetry gives us a chance to focus on actual images.” He also suggests that students follow the age-old adage to write what they know. “I try to get them to focus on what is actually going on in their life. It doesn’t have to be super important; I just want them to be as real and authentic as possible.”
Likewise, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis offers another outlet for students to express themselves. Each spring, the museum hosts an exhibition by students from Vashon High School as part of its ArtReach program, begun 15 years ago as a way for CAM to get more involved in the community.
In 2017, the program’s focus was changed after a survey administered by the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University found that most residents of the surrounding neighborhoods had never visited the museum. Many of the residents didn’t even know “who we were or what this big gray building was,” says Miriam Ruiz, CAM’s school and community programs manager. “A lot of them thought it was a warehouse.”
The museum made a concerted effort to put more resources into surrounding communities and populations who were underrepresented. “We decided our approach to outreach should be more equitable than equal,” says Ruiz.
So when Ruiz started reaching out to neighborhood schools in a 1-mile radius of CAM, she was surprised to learn that Vashon High School didn’t even have an art program. It was decided that CAM would organize and facilitate one, using local artists “who are practicing and working in St. Louis from all these different backgrounds,” says Ruiz. “We have a very small staff, but we have a great Rolodex of artists.”
Each quarter, a new artist teaches a specific project that meets state standards but concludes with a finished product that’s displayed in an annual show at the museum. “Learning is more meaningful when there is an end product that the students can be proud of,” Ruiz says. “They can walk away from class pointing to something and say, ‘Hey, I did that.’”
