Students Get Into the Act

Natick Bulletin & Tab, 11/5/04

By Mary Kate Dubuss, Staff Writer

Reprinted with permission from the Natick Bulletin & Tab.

(November 5, 2004) - Each Friday at noon, about 30 students at Dorchester’s John Marshall Elementary School bound down the hallways, excited to work on special art projects with their student “arts mentors” from Walnut Hill School, an arts high school in Natick.

About 10 Walnut Hill sophomores volunteer to travel in to Boston each week and lead small groups of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in making short films.

Last Friday, they continued taping the scenes from skits each group wrote themselves. Using toilet paper for mummy costumes and tin foil for dancing alien crowns, each child rehearsed their lines and prepared for a close-up.

Working with his group of five “makes me feel really youthful,” said Conor Larson, a theatre student from Needham. “They are so imaginative. It reminds you to keep your mind open to absurd ideas.”

The Walnut Hill kids all know their films’ plots by hearts - for a little more than an hour each week, they guide their young students along and jump in to play roles too.

Aaron Barcelo, a theatre student from Braintree, is in charge of a group of seven girls. Working without a partner with a swarm a giggling girls “is kind of tough, but they are really into it,” he said.

The girls decided to base their film around “educationally obsessed zombies,” Barcelo said, explaining each group needs to incorporate the question ‘Why is one-half greater than onetenth?” into the plot.

The question is an example of a potential MCAS question. This way, “they are learning while having fun,” Barcelo.

“We’re excited, we want to start [filming] right now,” said group member Kiara Oyola.
“I like the part when I snatch up the kids,” said Dominique Chesterfield, who plays the main zombie.

As the girls screamed and ran from Dominique’s gruesomely masked face, Barcelo sat back, seeming to know they needed to get their energy out before the cameras roll.

“I like being able to teach people who are underprivileged with arts,” he said, adding he enjoys teaching what he learns everyday.

Marshall students “don’t have the opportunity to be in front of the camera, singing and dancing,” said Maureen O’Keefe, a second grade teacher at Marshall who organizes that school’s end of the project.

Each year, 30 students who are able to keep up with the class work they miss during the sessions and maintain good behavior are allowed to participate in the program. With 800 students at Marshall, finding children who fit that criteria is pretty simple. But students are selected on a first-come, first-serve basis, O’Keefe said, and over 80 applications were handed in the day after a letter went home to parents.

“It’s hard to say no to 50 kids,” she said.

Those who participate benefit from “talking to kids committed to an art,” since the elementary school students have little exposure to fine arts at school, O’Keefe said.

Directing each film is Steve Durning, an English teacher who has been organizing the Walnut Hill side of the project for five years. Walnut Hill and the National Arts and Learning Collaborative fund the arts mentor partnership, he said.

He treats the classroom as a bona fide movie set, calling out “cut” with seriousness as he instructed his camerawoman to do a close up on a child-size mummy.

“I do think making art is super fun,” he said. “With children, you don’t have to worry about making a living, but kids want the product to be good.”

He believes both sets of students get something important out of the project, even if its not immediately apparent.

“The Walnut Hill [students] get something from it, I’m not sure how observable it is as the time.
They learn about teaching. You hear it afterwards - ‘It was the most meaningful experience in high school,’” he said.

For the Marshall students, art is education, even if one isn’t seeing it on the surface, he said.
Many English Language Learners benefit from the project, O’Keefe said.

A language barrier may prevent some of these students from reading well, “but they can jump in front of the camera and be a zombie,” she said.

Anna Louisa Diaz, a soft spoken fifth-grader, said, despite being a little nervous, she liked being in front the camera.

“I like acting,” she said.

Working with the Walnut Hill students has taught Diaz “to respect your elders, not only teachers.”

“It’s really fun because they look up to us ... they always give us big hugs,” said Emily Hatch, a theatre student from Ashland.

Once completed, the Marshall students will visit Walnut Hill, where each film will be screened during an assembly, Durning said.