A Renaissance in the Classroom

The second-graders in Ana Infante’s class have turned themselves into other beings: wind, sun, alligators, turtles. “Onstage,” in front of the blackboard, they are doing battle.

“Sun hurled a rain of fire darts at Wind,” said 7-year-old narrator Genesis Reyes, reading a script.

“Then Wind howled and unleashed his thunder,” read 8-year-old Cynthia Zavala, in a studied voice. “Black clouds spilled forth. Darkness covered the face of Sun, and his light grew dim.”

The play includes a musical storm--created by students on bells, rattles and drums. It ends with victory for Wind, who frees the musicians from Sun so they can fill the Earth with beautiful sounds.

But the real winners, experts say, may be children like Genesis and Cynthia. In their English immersion class at 186th Street School in Gardena, the girls have acted, danced and sung their way to literacy.

“In September I couldn’t read nothing,” Cynthia said with a shy smile, after delivering words like “turquoise” and “horizon” in the class’ adaptation of the Aztec legend “Musicians of the Sun.”

A Vehicle for Instruction

Ana Infante is convinced that “readers theaters,” dance, song and book-making have played a key role in speeding her students’ development into English readers and speakers.

“It’s not just singing and dancing,” Infante said. “There’s a lot of instruction going on. We use the arts as a vehicle for delivering our instruction. By putting it into a script, the kids develop fluency, reading with expression, vocabulary and vocabulary sequencing.”

Infante belongs to a body of educators who view arts education as a major component of a child’s education--not an “extra.” After decades of cutbacks in funding for the arts, this philosophy has fueled a resurgence in the status of the arts in public schools.

“The battle over people saying the arts are a frill has been won,” said Joan Boyett, who has been executive director of the Music Center’s education division since 1979. “You don’t hear that any more. The day is brightening.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, an effort is underway to ensure that the arts are part of the curriculum in every grade.

“In the elementary schools we have a traveling music teacher who comes once a week,” said Valerie Fields, a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, who has championed the arts.

“We have each elementary school equipped to buy art supplies, which could include textbooks. We have specialists [dance, music, visual arts, drama] downtown who will begin the training of elementary school teachers. It’s a small beginning but we will expand.”

That beginning was made possible last year, when the school approved a $2.5-million arts budget.

The board also decided that students must demonstrate an ability to interpret and create art as a requirement for graduation.

An Increased Public Awareness

“My hat’s off to [the school district]--they have brought it back,” said Diane Watanabe, a curriculum consultant in visual and performing arts for the Los Angeles County Board of Education. “They have hired so many new people to come on board. I think that a lot of other schools will follow suit.”

The developments in recent years are a result of increased public awareness of the value of the arts, Watanabe said. The arts offer students a means of expression. Later in life, some will find careers in arts and arts-related fields. Study after study indicates that children involved in the arts perform better in other academic studies.

This month Gordon Shaw, a professor of physics at UC Irvine, will release the findings of a yearlong study conducted with second-graders at 95th Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles.

“We’ve already shown with 3-year-olds that keyboard training enhances spatial temporal reasoning,” Shaw said. “We’re saying, ‘Wow, that’s good,’ but you really want to raise their math skills. Proportional mathematics, where you compare ratios, is notoriously difficult to teach.”

The second-graders have been studying the piano keyboard and working with new math software. The study aims to determine whether the combination of piano keyboard training and the new way of teaching math will help students handle the math concepts better.

Although the public has grown increasingly familiar with the concept of arts as a tool, it has also found new ways to provide arts education.

When arts were the low subjects on the academic totem pole, parents who could afford it simply offered their children private lessons.

But arts organizations also stepped in to fill the need, Boyett said. In the past 20 years they established a tradition of offering programs for public schools, students and teachers.

“I think teachers and parents were turning to the arts organizations, and at the same time the arts organizations were saying, ‘We really believe in this and we have to raise money to do it,’ ” said Boyett, whose division of the Music Center was founded in response to this need.

Institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Music Center and the Getty Center offer programs for students, teachers and schools.

The Music Center offers 17 programs, including in-school workshops, artist-in-residence programs, school performances in 21 languages, teacher training, scholarships and awards.

“I did a little dancing in college,” Infante said, “and a lot of training through the arts agencies in Los Angeles.”

This year Infante was a finalist for the BRAVO Arts Education Award. The award is presented each year by the Music Center education division and Club 100, which promotes the performing arts through education, advocacy and fund-raising.

Born in Cuba, Infante spoke no English when she came to the United States. A self-proclaimed “lover of the arts,” she sees more than academic value in offering arts to students.

Again and again, her mostly low-income immigrant students would write in their journals, “I hate the United States. The United States is ugly. I want to go back to Mexico.”

“Through the arts,” Infante said, “I can show them there’s a lot of beauty and lot of hope and that there’s a whole world out there beyond their neighborhood.

“I didn’t always have the opportunity to take lessons. We were a family of immigrants, we couldn’t afford it. That’s why I feel this urgency to be able to offer them these experiences.”

Infante organizes units around what she says are classics that a well-read person should be exposed to: “The Phantom of the Opera,” “The Nutcracker,” “Peter and the Wolf.” “The Nutcracker” exposed the students to the story as well as to the music of Tchaikovsky, ballet and the works of the French painter Edgar Degas, who painted ballerinas.

By January, students who started the year reading no English, were able to write the story of “Peter and the Wolf.”

“I was amazed they had enough English, not only speaking and reading it, but to write their stories,” Infante said. “I don’t think I would have had those kinds of results with conventional Mat the Rat books.”

For the students and their families, the progress is a source of pride and confidence. “My mom says it is good to learn how to read and spell letters,” said Blanca Herrera, 8.

Infante also teaches an after-school folk dance class for older students and has staged school-wide musicals that have helped break down racial walls between students.

Students who once segregated themselves into racial cliques became friends because they were all pirates in “Peter Pan,” or ballerinas in “Pinocchio.” “You would see them at recess, walking around the school singing at the top of their lungs, or teaching each other the dance steps,” she said.

The arts are especially crucial in a diverse city like Los Angeles, Boyett said.

“They talk about it being the universal language,” she said. “In this great mix there is not only an appreciation that develops, but an understanding begins to take place, and that can lead to respect.”

Other Institutions Create Programs

In addition to programs offered by major arts organizations, other institutions have sought ways to promote the arts--and nurture a new generation of arts lovers.

The Pasadena Playhouse recently announced the creation of TeachersTix, a program designed to support educators in their promotion of the arts. The theater offers half-price subscriptions to educators, as well as study guides for teachers and students.

Later this month, the California African American Museum will begin a free after-school art program for students in grades 8 to 12. Taught by artist June Edmonds, whose work appears on the Metro Blue Line Pacific Station, the students will explore drawing, painting and sculpture. The eight-week program will culminate in a student art exhibit.

But the goal of the program extends beyond art.

“If the students can heighten their perception skills and creative thinking skills, when they go to write an essay or solve a math problem, those skills carry over,” said Karen Hayes, director of outreach programs for the African American museum. “You need creative thinking for all that.”

Despite the good news about arts in education, schools still get the effects of an old way of thinking. When the district decreased its arts classes, jobs dried up and aspiring arts teachers sought other career options.

“We haven’t been grooming music teachers, so there’s a shortage,” Watanabe said. “Some of my districts really want more people, but you can’t find enough teachers.”

Matthew McKagan, a band teacher at Lindero Canyon Middle School in Agoura and a BRAVO winner, always wanted to teach music and share with other students what music gave him.

“One of the things it taught me was discipline,” McKagan said. “When I went to my math class and I didn’t get it right away, it was like [music] practice; I’d get it.”

Instilling Pride, Confidence

In a statement to BRAVO judges, McKagan said he does not teach music to create “400 Mozarts” but to instill in his students a sense of personal pride and a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement.

“So they will have something to cling to,” he wrote. “So they will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good, in short, more life.”

Those lessons are being learned in Infante’s class.

Blanca and Genesis are retelling the story of “The Phantom of the Opera,” using a book written and illustrated by the class.

“The phantom has a mask because his face on this side is too ugly,” Genesis said, pointing to a picture. “He put a mask on so Christine wouldn’t see.”

Brenda Galvan, 7, is singing a song from “Phantom,” hitting the high notes with abandon, full of expression: The phantom of the opera, sing for me, my angel of music.

“I like it when we practice and practice; then we read good,” she says after the song.

“The boys don’t know how. I read a book with some of the boys and I showed them how, and they start reading.”

“What do you want to become when you grow up?”

Brenda says: “I want to be a teacher.”

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‘Through the arts I can show them there’s a lot of beauty and lot of hope and that there’s a whole world out there beyond their neighborhood.’

ANA INFANTE Second-grade teacher