ACE Spectrum
ACE Spectrum
Ace Spectrum is about you — the ACE Learning Centers.
It’s a quick sharing of ideas, inspiration, opinions and best practices among our continuing education organizations.
Please join the conversation.
From Election Coverage to Nipple Tattoos, KALW Crosscurrents is On It
By Guest Blogger Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio and Shereen Adel, Audio Academy ‘16
Hello! We had a crack team of reporters collaborate on some excellent, quick-turnaround election coverage, and members of the Audio Academy, past and present, played a big role. Angela Johnston (’14) and Liza Veal (’15) led our location reporting, each filing two stories Tuesday night. Shereen Adel (’16) and Ian Lewis (’16) helped out, in the field and the studio, giving us enough person-power to air three newscasts with up-to-the-minute results complete with field reports. We stayed up late into the night producing an eight-minute Crosscurrents Morning Report about the election for broadcast Wednesday morning at 6:50, including two scripted features, recapping everything that happened in the city. Really outstanding work!
This week, Hannah Kingsley-Ma (’15) made a really nice story about nipple tattoos, taking a great angle and getting great access to a process of healing for women that I had never heard before.
And one of our summer trainees, Tim Lou-Ly, engineered what was truly one of the best Storycorps pieces I’ve ever heard about how people’s lives changed after they were involved in a car accident. It’s a positive story with some real surprise twists. Listen!
I’d like to note, too, that the Sights & Sounds team of Jen Chien, Ted Muldoon (’15), and Chris Hambrick (’15) made another terrific edition, this week. It’s so fun to have a new product that’s so engaging, so representative of the Bay Area, and so well-produced.
It’s been a great couple of months to start this year’s Academy. And here are some thoughts from current Academy member Shereen Adel on her early experience in our newsroom:
By Shereen Adel, Audio Academy ‘16
Shereen Adel, Audio Academy ’16
Crosscurrents host Hana Baba spoke at a conference I attended earlier this year, and when she mentioned the Audio Academy at the end of her talk, my ears perked up. I was working on an audio project with some of my colleagues at the time, and I was eager to go from amateur to pro. This would be just the opportunity to do it!
I couldn’t have hoped for a more creative and nurturing environment. We’re involved in the day-to-day of the newsroom so we get to see the big picture of what goes in to making the show, and our weekly seminars cover the essentials in audio journalism. It’s clear that a lot of care has gone into making this a truly fulfilling educational experience. One of my favorite things we do during our seminars is listen to selected Crosscurrents archives. I have been totally blown away and inspired by the work that has come out KALW’s Crosscurrents team, and I am so excited to be a part of it. I can’t wait to share my own contributions across the airwaves!
New KALW Collaborations Reveal Hidden Stories of Art and Music of Bay Area
By Guest Blogger Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
Hello! A lot of our latest initiatives are really taking shape right now. I’d love to tell you about two of them.
On Monday, Audio Academy mentor Ninna Gaensler-Debs and I went to Oakland to meet with our partners on our new Sights & Sounds project. It’s an arts initiative that involves two parts: a weekly program showcasing Bay Area arts from the perspectives of the artists themselves; and a collection of reported stories about the arts in one community, East Oakland, where we will be throwing a live event of multimedia storytelling and performance in the spring of 2016.
Community journalists from Oakland Voices, KALW’s newest partners, come together in the offices of the Oakland Tribune.
First off, Ninna and I got a tour of the fantastic 81st Avenue library from the associate director of the Oakland Public Library system and went into or stopped by the other five libraries in East Oakland. We’ll be working with the managers of those libraries to spread the word about our amplification of the arts and setting up listening sessions to bring people from the community together around stories. We then met with Oakland Voices – the team of community journalists organized by the Oakland Tribune and Bay Area News Group. It was a true pleasure to talk with them about what we’re doing at KALW and how we’re planning on working with them on stories about the arts of East Oakland in coming months. They were extremely enthusiastic and gave us a lot of suggestions for venues and performers for the live event. If the collaboration goes as well as our initial visit, this is going to be a brilliant partnership.
Meanwhile, our managing editor Jen Chien and Audio Academy alums Ted Muldoon and Chris Hambrick have been working hard on the weekly Sights & Sounds program. They’ve put together four pilots so far, and Monday, they’ll be recording material for the first one to be broadcast! It’ll air Thursday at 7:44 during Morning Edition and again at 4:44 on All Things Considered. We’re planning on it to be podcast, too.
On Wednesday, I initiated a new training project at Sunset Youth Services – an after school program for teenagers in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset. I used to volunteer there before KALW work took over my hours. One of their staffers, Wendy Baker, who used to volunteer with KALW, is coordinating a bunch of students on their end to do some engineering with us. It’s a good fit because we all do quite a bit of work in ProTools. I gave them several My Mixtapes to work on, and they really got to it! When I arrived, I worked with a boy named Cartier who had two pieces to show me, a girl named Sierra who had made five (!), and a boy named Christian who had made a beautiful Mixtape from an original song that a friend of his named Ari had written and performed. I helped Christian finalize the piece, and you can check out the result right here:
Pretty cool, right?!
It’s extremely gratifying to be working on these collaborations. I think they’re great for the community and great for the station, and I’m so excited to cultivate them and help them grow. Stay tuned for much more to come from our newest partnerships!
ACE Learning Centers for School Session 2015-16 “Off to a Great Start”
By Martha Sessums
Alpha Public Schools started the new school year this week with a tweet from John Glover, Founder and CEO: “It’s the first day of Fall session at Alpha, and it’s off to a great start!”
The Alpha Parent Center started its second round of “Learning English” classes this week, and added a morning class to the schedule along with its successful evening session.
The students at San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) expect to have a new iMac lab by mid-October thanks to a successful Tilt Campaign that raised $50,000. For a delightful statement of the need for new computers, check out the campaign video. “I’m sorry to say, but the computers are from the 2000s, man,” said Bahromjon, Grade 11.
The SFIHS ACE Learning Center will continue to focus on programs called Prevention, Spark and Span. Prevention supports students who have experienced interrupted formal education to develop academic literacy skills in English.
Spark focuses on academic language development, high school graduation requirement preparation, and community college dual-enrollment for students who have completed their high school coursework but have not yet passed the state graduation requirements. Span supports high-risk graduates through their first year of four-year college by promoting college retention, academic success and leadership development.
Of course, sometimes it’s about the fun and food. As Kyle Halle-Erby, Span Program Coordinator, said, “We had our first day with students for a senior BBQ – we’re really starting the year off right.”
At Oakland International High School’s ACE Learning Center, all 12th grade students have access to a college literacy class, including plans for coordinating this with the Peralta colleges. This focus will help ensure that OIHS students are ready to enter high-level ESL classes or English 1A, once they matriculate.
In addition, seniors will participate in an internship program. This is focused on exploring career interests and readiness, preparation for higher education and authentic English language practice in the workplace. A new class is offered in partnership with TV station KDOL in Oakland where students can learn the art of video production.
“We feel good about our program this year,” said Sailaja Suresh, Principal. “The district is also being proactive about making more connections from high school to community college, so I’m hoping our students will benefit from that work!”
More good news is that California removed passing the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) as a graduation requirement for the class of 2015. If you’re not up on what happened, the test was cancelled by the state Department of Education for both budget issues and the fact that it didn’t test for today’s Common Core curriculum. This meant that many students were caught in limbo as they hadn’t passed the test yet, and needed it to be admitted to college. The removal of the requirement opens up the future for lots of students.
“It’s such an exciting time as we start thinking about how to support these students in transitioning into college now that that door is being opened to them!” said Julie Kessler, SFIHS Principal.
KALW’s Audio Academy, another ACE Learning Center, is gearing up for the new school session to start in September. The eight new student’s backgrounds range from podcast experts (the future of radio?) to print journalists and columnists, to a physicist and philosopher interested in “radio drama” to a theatre major to the cohost of KALW’s Africa Mix.
There were 82 applicants and Ben Trefny, KALW News Director, claimed it was very hard to pick the top eight. This will be the third Audio Academy class, and it has given KALW a leading image in the radio industry.
“We’re now considered a visionary station in the public radio realm,” said Trefny.
Thus, the ACE Learning Centers are truly off to a great start this school year. We’ll be keeping the conversation going on the ACE Spectrum as students focus on their continuing education programs and tell their success stories – whether on-air, in video or podcast, in written word or in person.