Focus on PS 142-The Amalia Castro School, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Description of our Learning Community
PS 142-The Amalia Castro School, a PreK to Grade 5 school on Manhattan's Lower East Side, has a student population of 526 in 26 classes (46 teachers/25 educational paraprofessionals). It is within 1 mile of the World Trade Center/Ground Zero. The surrounding neighborhood is rich in the heritage of many cultures. The student population is 77% Hispanic, 19% African American, & 4% Asian & nonHispanic White. The predominant language spoken in the immediate neighborhood is Spanish. There is an English as a second Langauage program in place for 15% of the students who qualify as English Language Learners.
As a barrier free school, PS 142 is able to serve regular education children with special needs as well as a special education population. Most of the children come from economically disadvantaged homes. 96.5% of children qualify for free lunch. Our PS 142-Mark DeGarmo & Dancers' partnership goal is to increase the literacy and mathematical thinking skills of students by using dance, dramatic arts, and creativity as an alternative methodology. Students and teachers directly served during our 2005-06 Partnership: 18 classes total of 410 students include: PreK (2 classes of 18), K (3 classes of 25), & K-1 special education (1 class of 12), Grade 1 (2 classes of 25), Grade 2 (5 classes of 25), Grade 2-3 special education (1 class of 12), Grade 3 (3 classes of 25), and Grade 4 (1 Dance Ensemble of 25). A total of 54 teachers include: 26 classroom, 5 certified specialist music, visual arts, computer, reading, and literacy, 16 paraprofessionals, and 7 occupational and physical therapists.
Mark DeGarmo & Dancers/Dynamic Forms Inc. is located two blocks from PS 142 in the heart of the Lower East Side at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. MDDF is the only resident member organization of Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center that is a not-for-profit dance company and arts and dance education institute. Partnerships in Literacy through Dance & Creativity© with PS 142-The Amalia Castro School
Summary
Our partnership enters Year 7 in 2008-09. MDDF's educational mission includes partnerships with NYC DOE schools. We use skills-based, arts-integrated, and aesthetic education methods to foster school-wide arts- and dance-integrated teaching and learning. Use of multimodal reflection is critical to our methods for teaching, learning, assessing and evaluating.
Mark DeGarmo & Dancers' goal is to annually provide 28-32 weeks of integrated arts and dance instruction for all students, teachers, supervisors, parents, and staff at PS 142. Mark DeGarmo & Dancers teaches dance skills combined with the aesthetic education skills of observation, description, reflection, analysis, and interpretation. Our use of reflective methods includes extensive dance journal writing and visual arts entries. English language arts, social studies, math, science, technology, health, physical education, music, theater, and visual arts are the other disciplines that are interwoven throughout and used as a springboard from which dance study progresses and our Partnership achieves our arts integrated and interdisciplinary approach. Our Stories of the Lower East Side was an integrative curricular focus through Phase One: 2002-05.
Since 2002 at PS 142, we have:
We co-conducted a three-year longitudinal quasi-experimental study (02-05). Unexpectedly, student math scores increased as those of our control group decreased on city-wide standardized tests. The control group included students similar to ours at a neighborhood school. We followed this study with a two-year inquiry into academic, dance, social, and emotional effects of our work. We produced four videos of our dance and literacy interventions, three with Center for Arts Education coaching of our inquiry group (05-07). We have developed a grades 4 and 5 dance ensemble using a school chorus model.
List of Annual Achievements
2001-02: Six-month needs assessment, pilot PreK & K activities, and grants writing leading to the award of The Center for Arts Education Partnership Grant 2002-05, one of 32 awarded in NYC.
2002-03: PreK and K pilot continued with 6 classes. Students viewed three professional dance performances, including choreographer DeGarmo's Bitter Grounds: A Portrait of El Salvador. Six classes of Grade 1 students and teachers worked for 28 dance sessions all year connecting dance skills, symbols, graphs, and mapping from Labanotation, arts and dance integration using the book The Ancestor Tree, dance journal writing, and culminating performance: The Wisdom in Our Community. Partnership sustainability challenges were addressed from day one of our partnership's development.
2003-04: Mark DeGarmo introduced his long-time friends and colleagues, the traditional Quiché Mayan Native American music and dance ensemble Grupo Cultural Uk'ux Pop Wuj from Chichicastenango, Guatemala to the PS 142 community. These performances kicked off the first of three Parents As Arts Partners' Arts Nights. Our Partnership expanded, thanks to New York State Council on the Arts Empire Stte Partnerships support, to include 32 sessions for 6 classes and their teachers of PreK and K creative movement and dance. First graders worked in dance. We taught Grade 2 students for 28 weeks combining dance with TA Maria Mitchell and theater with TA Karina Lynch. Our culminating Grade 2 March theater performance focus was fairy tales. Our Grade 2 June dance performance focus was the mathematical spatial and rhythmic formulations of an original tango dance-music-inspired choreography by MDDF Teaching Artist Maria Mitchell for over 100 students.
2004-05: We continued working, thanks to New York State Council on the Arts Empire State Partnership support, in early childhood for 28 sessions with two teaching artists and 6 classes. We introduced students to principles of dance and creativity, including responsible release of the imagination, problem solving, and healthy community living. There were 3 Grade 1 classes working in dance. There were 9 classes in Grades 2 and 3 working in theater with TA Ramona King and dance with TA Maria Mitchell with the theme Orpheus on the Lower East Side (our Grade 3 performance). Mark DeGarmo & Dancers created a short documentary video of our Partnership 02-05 after 28 weeks of dance and theater during 04-05 for grades 2 and 3. Throughout this year, Mark DeGarmo served as a consultant to the New York City Department of Education on the development of the Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts: Dance, Grades PreK-12.
2005-06: We were one of 8 partnerships in NYC awarded The Center for Arts Education's Leadership in Practice Grant 2005-07. In partnership with The Center for Arts Education, we continued developing and refining our grassroots distributed leadership model emphasizing professional development and documentation of our curricular methodology. The Center for Arts Education published the findings of our partnership's promising practices in its 10-year report (08). These practices include:
We were awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Empire State Partnership School-wide Arts Planning grant 2005-06. We continued to work closely with the New York City Department of Education, The Center for Arts Education, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Empire State Partnerships Professional Development Program.
2006-07: 21 classes of PreK-3 learners and 29 teachers and 16 paras worked with MDDF TAs Nuria Martinez and Maria Mitchell for a minimum of 16 lessons. 2 PreK classes had 25 lessons. Grade 5 students had 24 lessons. Our Grades 4-5 Dance Ensemble had 32 lessons. Students reflected after dance studio lessons via teacher-led discussion, journal writing, and visual arts.
Grades 3-5 students viewed Ailey's masterwork Revelations at City Center with their TAs in attendance with them. Grade 5 students also toured the Ailey School. Selected Grade 5 students worked with a dance research librarian at Lincoln Center Library using primary and secondary source materials to examine Alvin Ailey's contributions to U.S. culture. Grade 5 students created a writing chapbook, designed t-shirts on the theme of Freedom (i.e., from Revelations), and designed bi-lingual Spanish-English posters, fliers, and programs for their grade 5 sharing.
We continued an Inquiry Group meeting twice a month as professional development and created 2 videotaped Units of Study. Parents participated in 18 dance studio and auditorium sharing events and in 5 parents' workshops on merengue and modern dance.
We successfully implemented a National Endowment for the Arts Learning in the Arts grant.
2007-08: We provided a combined dance skills-based and arts-integrated curriculum for Grades PreK-K for 24 lessons and Grade 1 for 21 lessons. Our dance ensemble students participated in 46 sessions, including five concert performances for:
2008-09 (Projected): As a result of last year's evaluation efforts, we will improve our practice in 08-09 by: