History Cont.
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Schools. In the summer of 2011, a call for teachers was put out and from the 28 applications received, 12 teachers were selected and paired with the 8 DFM artists.
While Detroit has a number of long-standing arts-integration programs, such as Living Arts, Inside Out Literary Arts and Y-Arts, no other educational organization in Detroit merges digital media arts with critical pedagogy, community-school interaction and documentation and evaluation at all levels of our programming. DFS is also unique for the support it provides not only to students but also to teachers learning new and challenging pedagogy.
In many of the 12 classrooms of our inaugural year, we saw increases in student attendance, test scores and overall engagement. Even more profound than these baseline metrics were the transformation we saw in students’ sense of ownership of their education and by extension, their lives and the fate of their communities. In one DFS classroom students successfully organized a “freedom school” in the park across the street from their school to protest injustices within the school and project a vision for what real education could look like. In a student interview, the 11th grader stated that his classroom was different than others in his school because “it makes me feel more human.”
As 8th graders, students were studying the Emancipation Proclamation in their U.S. History class. We asked, what do we need freedom from today, and how can we get it? Students made storyboards about different types of oppression in our modern world, and what can be done about them. They then made different types of art based on their storyboards. This is one of the songs from the project.