Well, hello, and welcome to the Hillbrook school podcast. My name is Bill Selleck. I am director of technology. And Vanessa. And Vanessa. This is going to be tricky. There's two Vanessa's here. One has an extra n, but we.
Both have two s's.
You do?
And one v. We are like one person sometimes.
So the Vanessa I'm pointing to. Welcome.
Hi, I'm Vanessa Fernandez, program and research lead for the Scott Center.
Perfect. And Vanessa.
Vanessa Holmes Silberman, and I am the performing arts director here at Hillbrook.
You know what? I taught second grade for a number of years. I'll just be Vanessa F. Vanessa Hs.
Perfect.
Or VHS.
That's what we call her during sil.
VHS.
Few of us understand the other reference.
Fun fact. Do you know what VHS stands for?
Video home system.
There it is.
None of our students know what that is.
Bill, is that what that is? Is it video home system?
I think so.
I like that.
So, last year, when we did a reach beyond week, actually an art reach beyond week, we took the kids to one of local colors places, and I'll talk later about what local color is. It's an organization, nonprofit that supports art in San Jose. And there was this painting, like, on the mural, there was a cassette, and the kids were having a blast, like, oh, my God, there's this really old thing from old people. And I was like, are you calling me old? I had a walkman.
Yeah, we could have a whole episode. Just about mean.
Didn't you guys use the eight? Didn't you have some eight tracks when you were.
My aunt had an eight track. She lived in Oakland. That's the only time I saw an eight track, though.
Oh, really?
Yeah. I was not cool enough as a kid.
Oh, man.
Yeah. No, I didn't have eight tracks, but.
I did have one.
I had Menudo, cassettes and records.
Did you have records?
I still have my records. Are you kidding me?
Oh, yeah.
My mom still has the John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album record.
That's awesome.
Priceless. I mean, it might actually be priceless.
It might be, yeah. Absolutely. Well, we just jumped right into it. Art and activism.
Yes.
Let's just get into it.
Yes.
There's so much. Vanessa, go.
All right. So, wow. I came to the Scott center as a former professor of Spanish, and the area I studied and taught as a professor was early 20th century. How do you teach early 20th century literature without teaching the art? And actually, I've used art as a teacher forever because visual learning, I mean, it makes it so clear for the kids. So in order to understand these crazy novels and poems that are cut up in pieces and they don't follow the normal cadence, you say, well, Picasso, cubism. Right? You use art to teach culture, literature, and it talks about understanding avantgarde art from the 1920s. You have to understand the technological shifts going on because they're responding to that. And right now, we are going through something similar only like on steroids, because it's so much faster. Right. And that's how we react. So I come to the Scott center, and it's all about experiential learning. And the city has the classroom, and the school is expanding into downtown San Jose. And what's happening in downtown San Jose right now is what I would call, like, a public art renaissance. It's just everywhere, and it makes teaching so much more fun, so much more tangible, and the kids are just really into it. And our first, what was it like? Employee welcome back week, or, you know, Hillbrook had the pulse on it. They hired students from San Jose State to give us an art walk. And that art walk led to the Scott center hiring one of those students to give 8th graders a talk on Sophie holds the world together, which is a mural about a little girl who jumped a line at a march in Washington to give the pope a letter advocating for her parents'immigrant rights. Anyway, the long story short is like preparing students for social impact and leadership. We did an art activism field trip, and Lou Jimenez, the artist in question, gave them a talk on Sophie holding the world together. Fast forward. Fast forward. Lou ends up being our artist in residence, supporting students who decided that their SIL project should be murals.
Pause for a moment.
Sil, social impact and leadership. 8th grade course.
Yeah, think like 8th grade capstone.
Yes, it's an 8th grade capstone. It's where we teach students to take their passion and their skills and bring them together and come up with a project that is doable for their age but connected to social impact.
Perfect. Back to Lou. Back to their SaL projects.
So I will summarize the story because it's a really fun story, but Lou helped a group of students who proposed a mural on campus on ocean pollution. They designed a mural. It was going to be on the third 4th grade pod, but they graduated. It didn't happen. Scott Center Lunch club this year, newly created, decided we want to make this happen. First grade teachers were like, we want a mural. And right now there is a beautiful mural by Lou Jimenez and painted by first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, 8th graders. And alumni on the first and second grade pod, I saw that.
It's beautiful. It's incredible. I didn't know the story behind that.
Yeah. And it was pretty impactful to see the whole community come together and paint it. And Lou was just masterful at designing it, but in a way that the whole community could participate. So it really is a social impact project.
Yeah.
That's so awesome.
Just last week, I was at our upper school campus and parked farther away and got to walk a little bit through, and I was blown away by how many murals there are. There's so much art everywhere. And it felt like when Instagram was just about, like, photo filters before it became the thing it is now. And it's just like, oh, there's this cool app that lets you edit photos on your phone, which was such a novel idea. It reminded me of kind of those early days of like an Instagram photo walk. And almost every corner I walked around, I was just like, that's amazing. And just looking at that, San Jose is becoming a whole new city and a beautiful city, and the intersection between what's happening there and what you're doing is super, super exciting.
Well, it makes the kids see that the city can be their classroom and that they can have an impact no matter how old they are.
Yeah. So let's jump into that city is classroom. A lot of people say that, like, you say it on our website and whatever, and you're kind of dancing around the idea of kind of project based learning, of not teaching things in isolation. Right. Walk us through actually what art and activism means, what city as a classroom means. Maybe we start with 9th grade immersives, explain what those are, and then how you kind of went into that.
I'll have to rewind a teeny bit. In the spring last year, we did a reach beyond week for fifth and 6th graders, and we explored the difference between public art and museum art. And so we worked with local color, that is a local San Jose nonprofit that rents out spaces for cheap so that artists can have a space to do their craft. And they have a lot of projects. And they walked us around the city, and their focus is mostly public art. But we also went to San Jose Museum of Art, and at the end of that week, the students created their own art. And they created an art exhibition at a bakery, at Ms. TK's husband's bakery, which was really cool for immersives. In the 9th grade, we took it a step further because we wanted students. Not all students were from the know, the Los Gados campus. We had students coming from everywhere, and many of them did not know San Jose. So what better way to start off your 9th grade year than in getting fully immersed into the culture of the city that your school inhabits? And the purpose of having the upper school in downtown San Jose is precisely because San Jose is made up of so many cultures that intersect and sometimes collide on a daily basis across in the city streets. So the focus of the course was through art, introducing students to the cultures of San Jose. So we went to Mexican Heritage Plaza, we walked around with local color. We went to Japantown, to empire seven studios, and just really tried to understand how art can reflect culture and identity and help people feel seen and valued.
I need to take a moment and process that sentence. That was beautiful. That was intense.
I'm passionate about it.
And what I'm so proud of with our new high school is that the first three weeks of school are not the normal bill schedule.
Not at all.
Not math, then science, then English, then know. No. The first two weeks was art and activism. Two full weeks of that, from the beginning of school to the end of school, all day. And then the third week was preparing for the exhibition of learning. So it was a Ted style talk. It was a podcast, it was a documentary, something kind of in those veins. And that's what school was. And so I love that because that's what learning is like in real life. I love that because it sets the tone for what learning looks like at our brand new high school, because you.
Experience experiencing is learning, and then you transform it into an expression of what you learned. I mean, you can't get that from a textbook.
Well, and I also love, and this is a theme of this season's podcast, is this is not easy, fluffy, whatever. Learning. One of my favorite quotes I've ever heard from a student in 9th grade, she was like, at the end of the second week, this is really, really hard. I was like, cool. And she's like, can we go back to worksheets? At worksheets, my brain works at like 30%. I can go home, knock out a worksheet, and be done. And it's easy. And she's like, this is hard. I was like, yes, it is. It's like real learning.
It's hard, but it sticks with you. I don't know how you guys learned, but I would just memorize a whole bunch of stuff, dump it on a test, get a good grade, move on with my life, ask me an hour later what the test was about. I had no clue.
No.
Yeah, I was actually telling another student yesterday, who was talking, an 8th grader who was talking about homework, I was like, I'm going to tell on myself a little bit, because when I was in high school, I only worked for the goal. Like, if the goal was an a, I worked for the a. Yeah, it's.
Like a carrot and stick thing.
Yeah. But that was what I just thought classes were. But then in all the other things I was doing, the president of this club or the vice president of this club or involved in this, then those were the moments where I was, like, reaching further and doing things that weren't formatted.
Were you involved in arts in high school?
So my high school was about 30 miles from the border, from the Nogalis, Arizona border.
No way.
Yeah. And we didn't have a formal arts program at our high school, so I sought out outside experiences and then kind of brought them into my school.
Oh, that's amazing.
Yeah. And then I was in literally every club I could be in because I just wanted to learn and have leadership and things like that. But, yeah, I didn't experience an arts program, which is probably why I'm so passionate about it now.
Yeah, I was going to say because.
I didn't have it when I was a kid.
And you kind of built it for yourself when you were a kid.
Yeah, I definitely did. Which, it's good that I was able to do that, because now I'm a builder. So everywhere I go, I see, like, how could I grow this? How can I build this more? How can I flesh this out?
Because it wasn't handed to you. Because it's experiential. You had to make it happen.
That's right.
Yeah. Other Vanessa, how did you get going on the arts? How did you look at, like, what was the name of the course you were doing? Early 20th century literature.
That's a great story.
How do you look at that and just go, oh, let's bring in Picasso? Because that's not a normal thing.
Well, something about me is that, you know, Robert Frost, the road last traveled? Right. I'm very proud to have always taken the other one. And I keep that poem, like, in my office at San Jose State, I have that poem up because I always choose kind of like the road less traveled. It's just kind of my personality part of it. I did ballet my whole life since I was like five years old. So the arts, in that way, was always a part of my life. And my mom put us in art classes. I did painting and ceramics. So that was just kind of like something I was exposed to. And when I was in graduate school for literature and I took this course, I'm going to be really open here. I was going through a divorce, and life was hard. And something about this art that was very hard because it's like avantgarde art, especially, like, early 1920s. You have to think. It really makes you think. You have to put the pieces together. So, like cubism, there is a figure there. There is a guitar or a mandolin or whatever, but your brain has to work to put those pieces together to see it. Right. And I thought that was unlike a realist landscape. Or here I'm looking at Vanessa's van Gogh, and I'm like, exactly. Impressionism. Expressionism is van Gogh. There you go. Yeah, I was just passionate about that. And it connected with this phase of my life where I was going through something very difficult. And then I saw how these artists had pulled it together through art. I don't know. I connected with it, and then it just became something I always brought, as I was always a spanish teacher, so I'd bring it into the classroom, because how easy can you teach colors and shapes and simple things using art? I don't know if that answers your question.
I love that.
It's so interesting because as Vanessa and I have worked together, I think we have such similar outlooks and passions, but we came at it from the opposite direction. She kind of has always been an activist and had the influence of art and then brought art. And I've always been an artist as profession, but then always had this underlying thing of activism, and they sort of collided opposite. But at the same time, for me, I was always doing art. And then I think it was about 2006 when some friends and I got together and founded this nonprofit called beyond the stage.
That's awesome.
Yeah. So we knew we were going to do art. We knew we were going to do shows, but we also wanted to do something that was a little different and that made a difference. And so our whole platform was we never did a show, and they were dance shows, they were instrumentalists and vocalists and all kinds of things, but we never did a show where we didn't have a platform that we were standing on, so to speak. And we partnered with other organizations in Los Angeles.
That's amazing.
It was super cool. I remember we took Carmen, the opera.
Oh, yes. I know Carmen very well.
Okay, so listen to what we did with it. This is probably one of. I try not to have too much personal pride in my own work. I have pride in my students work. But this one I can say. I have a lot of pride in it.
Good.
So we took the show and we rewrote it or flipped it around. We had a group of dancers that were from all genres, classical dance all the way to hip hop. And this amazing choreographer named Jose de la Vega, who is puerto rican. Vanessa, of course he is. And one of my greatest friends. And he choreographed. Every singer had a dancer that embodied the spirit of their character.
Oh, that's amazing.
Yes, it was amazing. And then we created another storyline for Carmen. And this angsty character that Carmen is never fits in, never has really a home to call her own. We created a homeless character.
Oh, I love it.
Who was Carmen as an old woman.
Oh, my goodness.
And she narrated the story.
That's amazing.
And this all came. Know, when I first thought of this concept, I was like, this is crazy. This is never going to work. As we did this, we partnered with some of the organizations in Los Angeles that serve skid row and the unhoused population. Just, that was our first show. That was how it took off. And this is what really ignited me for, like, oh, my gosh, we never really do art without a purpose. I mean, as an artist, we never do art without a purpose. But sometimes that purpose is really intrinsic. And it's not, like, shown to the public of this is the platform that we have for doing this. It's inside of us. But to be able to put that out and bring together the community, to really support the work of activism in the community, that was like. It blew me away that that could happen. And from that moment on, I just kind of always looked for opportunities.
Los Angeles is such a city, like, rich and so much art. You know, I lived there ten years, and if I had my druthers and I could live anywhere, that is where I would live.
Oh, me too.
I love that.
My husband, every week, just about, can we move back? I mean, it's not that I don't love it in San Jose, but Los Angeles is such a fertile zone for art and for activism and convergence of all kinds of different things that nothing ever seems crazy there because everyone's just pushing the envelope all the time.
Absolutely. And at UCLA, when I taught what I would do, so in my PhD studies, I studied mexican, argentine, and spanish literature. Those are kind of like my areas. And if you can't study mexican literature without studying mexican art.
Oh, my gosh, no, absolutely not.
The city of LA has such a beautiful tradition of muralism, and I would tell. So, going back to the core of the topic, we're talking about here, experiential learning city is classroom art as activism. Why do we all do this? Because it connects to our students reality. And when you connect to your students reality, they learn, they get invested, they get engaged in a different way. So they'd come into spanish class, and we're like, yeah, and this is Diego Rivera cicados. Blah, blah, blah. By the way, down the street, we have murals. Go check them out. That's your, like, connect what you're learning in the classroom with your community and your space and life will make more sense to you. The purpose of this class is not to be within these four walls, is to see it. That gives you a different lens, really.
I love it how last year when you were doing sil with the 8th graders, Vanessa, and you invited me to come and be a part of it, that was such a highlight for me, mentoring those students. But I'm thinking about the work that we did with Aleia Long and her project for the musical and for looking at the things that could be changed within that musical that don't stand up in today's society in terms of women's rights and body shaming and all of those things.
Well, yeah. So let's jump into that. I'm pretty sure we've lost people at this point. So Alaya's idea, and I think this goes to a podcast I have with Carla Silver. We look at movies that talk about schools or focus on schools or education in some way. And so many of the 80s movies do not hold up.
Right.
But we just kind of name that and kind of wonder. And so Alaya actually took that, and she took it.
She went through that script with a fine tooth comb.
Which script was it?
It was Willy wonka Wonka. She studied it, and she talked to her classmates and teachers and just kind of got everyone's opinion on what is it that needs to change. She became her own little activist in that experience because she suddenly was very passionate about changing the things that were considered not appropriate at this moment. And it was really interesting to see, I think, the ripples that happen when you start to make these changes and become your own activist through art. Everyone around started to have different opinions about the characters and the show and the way that things were presented.
So give us an example.
I have such a good example. Yeah.
Okay.
So my favorite was how we treated this character, Augustus Lup. If you're familiar with the show, Augustus Lup is considered, like, this overweight child who's often body. You know, you just eat neat, neat and that's all you care about. And in the end, in that story, he ends up eating from the chocolate.
Fountain and eating himself to eating his death, really?
Quote unquote.
Yeah.
And so the kids were really bothered by this, and they really took it personally that they didn't want to shame someone for their choices, so they ended up creating an underlying storyline that Augustus was a competitive eater.
That's awesome.
It's so subtle.
Shift.
Yeah. And it didn't really require a huge change. And there's rights, and we have to respect rights of composers and authorship, and so it didn't really change anything in terms of text, Julie, or anything like that. But the twist of having him wear 30 medals around his neck and this created a sense of we are actually making a difference in terms of thought and how humans think.
Well, he's a character that it's a choice he makes. It's not something that he has this character flaw. Like, that's a huge difference. And I just want to summarize a little bit, because the social impact project is supposed to know students seeing their community, connecting with their community and beyond their community, and creating something that has, like you said, ripple effects and enduring change. And what Alea did was huge. She rewrote with community engagement, community feedback, input. She rewrote the script that they performed, which impacted an audience. I mean, that is the definition of a social impact project.
Yeah.
And what's so beautiful about that is it's imagining what the world might be.
Yes.
My favorite example of this that's not connected with Hillbrook, but that really has stuck with me is, I think in 2018, I was at the ISTI conference presenting in Chicago.
Which conference is that?
Isti?
Yeah.
International ed tech organization. So hanging out with 20,000 of my closest friends. Last night I was there, got tickets for Hamilton, and this was when I was deep into it, like, listening to every episode of the Hamilton Great podcast, like, deep into it, researched all the people that were going to be playing all the parts. And I was there with various ed tech friends, but I had to seat by myself. And so I'm just kind of sitting there, like, taking in the moment. And the person playing Hamilton is Jin Ha, who's asian. And the person next to me, they were conversant with, I think, this play, but were not as deeply invested as I was. They're kind of whispering to each other, and I could very clearly hear because there was nothing else to do. And they're like, I thought Hamilton was.
Not.
He's quite.
Interesting, but they had such a specific vision of who each character should be. It was burr. Sorry, Burr was. Yeah, Burr is asian. Like, I thought bur was black. No, sorry. Miguel Cervantes was Hamilton, who's now Hamilton on Broadway. Great story for another day. Met him like, kindest, most generous, amazingly talented human. Does a lot of autism awareness and rights and fundraising for that. But the idea that these very white founding fathers, very white, like, mostly very racist and had many slaves and were problematic in many, many ways, that these people talking were like, these new iconic characters are like, the wrong race.
That's so funny, Bill, because the whole point of it is, like, what would be if it wasn't what it.
Right, right. And so what I loved about that is, in a lot of ways, and I've heard lint talk about this in many different ways, is that it's really this idea that Aleya was getting at is really imagining what the world might be.
You know, it's so funny that you brought up Hamilton, because over the Thanksgiving break, we watched Hamilton again, and I've watched it so many times, and I get caught up in the music sometimes. It's not that I miss the message, but it's just so brilliantly choreographed and staged and all of that that I get really into the production this time, I was like, oh, my gosh, I totally see the point. It took me a while to get to the point, which was, what would.
It be if it was, like, not all white men?
Yeah, well, and I'm waiting for the part because there's all the leads, and then the ensemble is man one to man five and then woman one to woman five. I'm waiting for the point where it's not binary genders.
Right.
Oh, that would be interesting.
We're going to get there. There's a whole discussion happening in the musician community, especially in the singer community, regarding transgender and how we can approach transgender voices and then non binary voices, and how do we stop using terms like soprano, alto, tenor, bass, which are so heavily associated, not that any of those words mean male or female, they're.
So associated with specific genders. Right.
Yes. So a lot of us have moved to treble voices, bass voices, or other terminologies. And I even catch myself, like, sometimes when you're working with a choir, it's really hard to think in terms of how do we relabel? But then also, I'd love to just not have to label. The whole thing about activism is, like, how do we see it in a different way than we've seen it all this other time. And the idea of not labeling some things to me feels so much better and so many less boundaries.
It can also be so subtle, though, because what Alea did was tweak a few things, and that changes your lens, and it changes your perspective, and it impacts a broader community with a new viewpoint. Right. When I was a teacher, and I know you've done this here, this is another thing we have in common. I wrote and I brought groups that practice afro caribbean bomba, and there's this huge movement in Puerto Rico of, it took a long time, but subtle things like women were not allowed to drum. Women always had to wear skirts. This was a dance and song form that came up in resistance to slavery. Right? So it's already activism as part of its definition, but it was still very gendered. And little by little, women started sitting behind the drums. They started wearing jeans to dance. Small things like that end up making a huge impact. And now there's like a huge group of women that in jeans on March eigth, which is International Women's Day, they have these big events, and then they take on a cause.
Vanessa, that is amazing. I'm going to interrupt for a moment, though. I see students lending up outside. So we're just going to have an abrupt end to this episode of the podcast. Vanessa and Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all for listening.