June 3, 2005

KEEPING THE ARTS ALIVE

One song: Celebrating diversity through visual and performing arts

By Bea Baechle
Editor

Don’t suggest that visual and performing arts are “fluff” around Bernadette Marcias, a fifth grade teacher at Carolyn Clark Elementary School.

Caleb Hooper models a Dashiki while Jayde Allen wears a traditional outfit from Ghana during the fashion show.

She openly shares her passion for the visual and performing arts, including photography and dance, with her students. If they didn’t know how to operate a digital camera, they learned during the first week of school. Can’t dance? Marcias incorporates dance into her physical education program from the start.

And just a few months after the opening of Carolyn Clark, she successfully wove those passions into a meaningful project: a show celebrating diversity through music, dance and fashion for the fifth grade classes and their buddies in kindergarten. She did a similar program at K. R. Smith with second graders in 2001 after the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed on 9-11.

“If somebody came into my classroom and saw what we did to get ready for this show every day, they’d see it wasn’t ‘fluff,’ ” said Marcias. As part of the project, her students wrote about something in their culture that was special to them. They also learned how to do a number of cultural dances, give an oral presentation and work on a team with a common goal.

“There are a lot of aspects in the visual and performing arts that often get overlooked,” she added. “Math is extremely important, but we also have to make sure these students know how to work with each other and appreciate other cultures.”

“Our kindergarten students benefited from having a cultural awareness program, especially because our school is brand new,” said kindergarten teacher Lourdes Lule-Licea. She watched how the show provided a good opportunity for everyone to bond, including kids and parents, and to see the many things we have in common, despite cultural differences.

So for those burning questions about why people follow certain traditions or wear certain types of clothes, Marcias’ students learned some of the answers through song, dance and a multicultural fashion show. Several multimedia presentations interspersed between the live performances added a high tech touch to the show.

Dances
A parent from Marcias’ classroom, Nisha Sharma, volunteered her time to teach the Punjabi dance. And Maryann Perucho, Marcias’ teacher’s aide, taught the ancient Hawaiian hula dance.

Kindergartner Julissa Taitano in Hawaiian outfit modeling during the fashion show.

Students learned that hula was much more than just a fun dance. It was also very sacred, comprised of chants and hand movements that told a story. This tradition teaches how to respect family, appreciate nature, memorize lengthy chants and love the land.

Students also learned that the roots for line dances, found in many modern music styles, go back far in history. Folk dances, including the Virginia Reel, were danced in line formation.

Perhaps the most demanding dance the students learned was the popular Filipino dance called Tinikling, which means “bamboo dance” in English. The dance imitates the movement of the tikling birds as they dodge bamboo traps set by rice farmers. Dancers imitate the tikling bird’s legendary grace and speed by skillfully maneuvering between large bamboo poles.

Parent volunteers at the show quickly realized that this dance required plenty of speed and coordination.

“This was one way to showcase to the parents what the kids have been learning,” said Marcias. “The parents really enjoyed the performance. They had never seen that aspect of their kids before. They really appreciated that.”

Student feedback
The fifth grade students at Carolyn Clark raved about the show.

“It was fun to watch the volunteers come up and try to dance,” said Chloe Rasmussen. “I liked learning about different traditions and different dances for other cultures. I also liked to be in front of all the people.”

Caleb Hooper said he had fun doing the show, even though “the dances were kind of hard to learn. Whoever watched it would learn how other people dance.”

(From left) Justin Wong and Henry Chan model Asian outfits during the fashion show finale.

Aatika Thanbi commented, “It was so awesome and so cool. This was my first time performing and I just loved it. Everyone was cheering for us. And we want to be popular.”

“It was a good experience to learn about other people’s cultures,” said Caroline Coquia. Komal Sharma added that it was also important for other kids to learn about her dance culture, and she enjoyed helping her mom teach her peers the Punjabi dance.

“Our play was really fun, and we learned a lot about everyone’s diversity and cultures,” said Bianca Garcia, “because we gave a description of our dancing and how important it was to people. Our class had a lot of fun performing.”

Justin Giang, Matthew Do, Kunal Shalia and Diego Flores all agreed that it was it was a great show and everyone did great job.

Kay Von added, “I’d like to say thank you to my teacher for letting us do it.”

And that’s why Bernadette Marcias ended the show with an impassioned plea to support visual and performing arts.