Newark Arts High: Honoring a Legacy While Looking Ahead

Hello. I’m Daniel Kurz, a history teacher at Newark’s prestigious Arts High. Our school has a lot of be proud of and offers its students many transformative lifetime opportunities. Its storied history goes back to its founding in 1931, when it served as a beacon of hope to a city in the throes of the Great Depression. Our building is a national historic landmark, an art deco masterpiece that overlooks the entire downtown. Our graduates are many, successful, with some notable names like Jazz great Sarah Vaughn and award winning actor Tisha Campbell among their ranks. But we’re not sitting on our laurels, not by a long shot. I’d like to use this blog to keep the community informed on the innovative, technology-based activities that are keeping us on the cutting edge of education.

Under the leadership of our principal Lynn Irby-Jackson, teachers have been encouraged and given the freedom to experiment with new modes of instruction, many which are technology-based. One of the most exciting new developments has come from using Skype in the Classroom.

 Skype is a free teleconferencing program and service from Microsoft that enables any network-enabled computer to be used in “Star Trek” like fashion to talk to another. The image and voice of the participants are instantly and (usually) clearly transmitted, whether the Skype call is across the city or from Newark to Shanghai. And the results are amazing, both personally and educationally, for students and adult participants alike.

My use of Skype in the classroom has brought my students voices from around the world on a wide variety of topics, and enriched them in a way that was just not possible when I went to high school in the 1980’s.

Here are just a few examples. When my students were learning about slave rebellions, I gave them a lesson and created a podcast. But Skype then enabled two of my classes to teleconference with park rangers and historians at the John Brown National Historical Park in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The students were simply mesmerized by the moment, but there was more. Our partners in West Virginia not only spoke about Brown and his family, but presented genuine artifacts from the period for the students to contemplate. One was a 5 foot wooden pike with a metal tip that Brown sought to arm slaves with during his doomed rebellion. The silent amazement of the class was more than noticeable as the students examined the pike and realized that, in short, “it really happened.”

Skype has also brought the world of current events right into the classroom. After the day of the horrendous bombing in Boston, my students were curious about how Russia could be an exporter of terrorists. So we spent 25 minutes teleconferencing with Michael Bukhtoyarova, a professor at Russia’s prestigious Siberian Federal University about religious conflicts in the world’s largest nation-state. Students buzzed as they questioned Bukhtoyarova about poverty, history and the brutality of Russia’s past governments.

Perhaps our most moving Skype occurred early in the year with an Iranian, Tehran-based educator named Sam. Sam spoke to the students about the major differences and hostilities between the United States and Iran, but most importantly, though the students and Sam had many disagreements, they were both able to acknowledge what they had in common…their mutual humanity. They were face to face. Suddenly, the well-known prospect of a potential war with Iran seemed more…human.

As our sessions continue both nationally and internationally, I’ll be sure to keep readers updated. Exciting, wonderful and innovative things are going in here in Newark’s public schools, and Arts High School in particular…but much more is to come!