ACE Spectrum

It’s About Deadlines – KALW Audio Academy Takes Students to Higher Places

Posted by Martha Sessums on Oct 31, 2018 in ACE Learning Center, ACE School Report, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW, and Alyia Yates, Audio Academy ’19

I’d like to continue introducing the members of the Audio Academy class of 2019 with a few paragraphs from Alyia Yates. She’s got a lot to say in a really great way, so let’s get to it!

There is nothing more exciting and terrifying than your first day of school. You’re sleep deprived because your mind wouldn’t stop reeling. You practiced how you would introduce yourself in the mirror, though practicing it for the 40th time won’t make you look any less crazy. And finally you’re at the gates, all spruced up with the last packed lunch you will make because damnit, sleep is important. You’re bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to take on the first day of the rest of your life, backpack and dreams in hand. Except, you’re 24 years old, you graduated high school almost seven years ago, and you’re not in a John Hughes movie. You’re starting your first day of Audio Academy.

In all fairness, the damn radio station is in a high school and bruh… if that didn’t bring back memories of crippling anxiety and bad school dances… but I digress. The first day at KALW had me on the steepest of edges, I mean, how do you act? You’re in a room with people you don’t know, in a place that you hope will jump start your budding journalism career, with a pit in your stomach and a PB&J making its way up your throat. Damn, should I have worn a tie? Do chicks even wear ties? What is the female equivalent of a tie?! Yeesh… but you pull it together and you walk through that little door, only to find a bunch of shoeless people, eating chocolate and having dance parties on the hour. “Oh yeah, I’m in San Francisco.”

But jokes aside, the first day was a delightful and pleasant surprise. I was met with smiling faces and a syllabus full of lessons and projects that I was just ready to get my little acrylic nails on. The people who are in the office are so engaged and enthusiastic about their work that you can’t help but feel the hum of electricity in air. One of those individuals was my mentor and now avid brunch date, Lisa Morehouse. She took me through the high school to a wonderful spot overlooking the city (and a bunch a teenagers skipping gym class) and asked me what I wanted from this and how can we achieve that. I ‘bout damn near bursted out into tears. I was about to resume my radio training.

Since I was but a wee child, I have always had a love for radio; my dad is a musician and my mom was a public speaking coach. Match made in radio heaven, eh? The thought of my silky vocal cords “sending one out to the ladies” on a late night radio station only listened to by truckers made me want it even more. But then ya go and put news and stories for the masses on it and, boom, you got to go to college for journalism. So I did my stint at Mills College and got my minor in Journalism and major in Intermedia Arts… so no radio right? WRONG! I was met by past KALW news director Holly Kernan, who would guide me in the ways of public radio like some audio angel.

Alas, she had to go. But she foretold a prophecy that would lead me to the Audio Academy, and by that she told me I should apply to it when I was ready. Okay, maybe the prophecy part was a bit much, but I’m dealing with a lot of analogies here, so be patient. A diploma, some debt, and a serving job later, I am sitting in a room full of my peers waiting to be accepted into this radio clan and ready for my first tasks.

And just like high school (see how I circled back there?), before you know it, its midterm season, and you’re not as well-studied on the subjects as you thought you were. The first tasks were easy enough: the morning conference call, check. Fact checking other stories that not only make you a master Google-er, but you get a basis on what your story should be like? Check. Night classes that help you build your skill and allows you get to know your soon to be Karaoke buddies? Double check! But then the math test of radio tasks comes, and you’re stuck there hoping that if you get enough right, you can walk out of there with a C-minus. What I’m referring to is the task of newscast assistant (buh buh bummm).

It sounds easy enough in theory: you pick two to three news stories; you write them out in a conversational tone; the newscaster comes to read it; boom, bing, bang, you’re done. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t know that, so I created what I can only describe as a bad screenplay written in a Peet’s Coffee. I mean from the names written on the side to the fake responses for the other characters. It was bad, and it was due before four o’clock. Of course my caster that day was news director Ben Trefny, who low key reminds me of those anime character that are like super chill and goofy but have this almost scary super ability that makes people question their personality (in a good way).

He shows up 15 minutes before its due, deletes it all and churns out a whole two pages in five minutes with ten minutes to practice and even has enough time to teach me not only how to do it, but how to perform it live. Ben super-saiyan-ed me. I couldn’t even walk out of that situation defeated, because it was handled so beautifully that my brain had to catch up. I then knew that this was not a final, but merely a practice test, and it was okay not to pass the first time around.

And so I leave you with my experiences so far. I have been a nervous wreck for a bit of my life; a perfectionist to an unrealistic degree, and a person not as confident in their radio abilities as one with experience should feel. But I’m here. I know that what I’ve learned and experienced so far will only take me to higher places. I am among amazing people not only with KALW staffers, but with my fellow Academy members who are actors, and comic book enthusiasts, and Google workers. (Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds fades up from the background.) We’re here to learn, and we are learning, so I guess you can equate it to a John Hughes movie. So if you’ll excuse me, I have deadlines to make and a fist to throw in the air.

Don’t you, forget about me.
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!
Don’t you, forget about me…

“I Am Home” Highlights OIHS Immigrant Teens but Their Story is Universal: Education is to See Life Through New Eyes

Posted by Martha Sessums on Oct 30, 2018 in ACE Learning Center, ACE Partners, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Martha Sessums, President, ACE

I found a book treasure when I returned to the ACE office after a long business trip. It was given to the ACE team from two of the leaders* of Oakland International High School (OIHS) which hosts an ACE Learning Center. OIHS is dedicated to serving Oakland’s newcomer youth.

The book “I Am Home, Portraits of Immigrant Teenagers” is a collection of personal stories defining what is home by teens attending OIHS. Their memories are of what their former homes were like from refugee camps to villages to cities, and what home means to them now that they reside in the Bay Area. These students are learning how to live in a new country, along with a new language and culture. They experience the positive and negative as they look for safety, friendship, love and a way forward.

Safety and family are huge themes for these students.

“Oakland feels more like home to me than Afghanistan. It’s most important to me to feel safe. To me, this is home.”
Salahuddin Sarwari, age 17, Kabul, Afghanistan

“My home is here now with my family.”
David Angel Chavez, age 18, San Salvador, El Salvador

“Home is a place of enjoyment with your friends, a place where you can go out of your house at 6 a.m. and come back at 6 p.m. and be safe.”
Susana Tesfu, age 15, Adi Keyh, Eritrea
Merhawi Tesfu, age 19, Adi Keyh, Eritrea

So is moving forward.

“When I leave school, I want to have a good job and a big house so I can live my life however I want to.”
Sliem Fikadu, age 18, Keren, Eritrea

“I think of my future in nursing to help people who are sick. I want to have a house in Senegal and a house here.”
Oumou Thiane, age 17, Dakar, Senegal

“When I came here, my dad said to me: if you want to build yourself, you can build yourself; if you want to bring yourself down, you can bring yourself down.”
Nassar Korin, age 15, Ibb, Yemen

In reading these portraits I am reminded of a quote by John Dewey at the beginning of the book “Educated” by Tara Westover. I had to google Dewey and learned he was a mid-20th century education reformer and philosopher, and his idea of education as a continuing process is something to which these students might relate.

“I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”

Their stories are about change, something we all experience, but these students’ change is continent-sized as they moved from one country or continent to the U.S. The portraits are full of describing the time spent studying, working and trying out new opportunities. Of missing parts of their family, parts of their culture. The sounds, smells, flowers, yards, pets, food, fresh air, hugs, fun time, cows, lost friends, living a different life style. Some want to return to their homelands. Some can’t.

But all are going to school. All are getting an education at OIHS. All are reconstructing their experiences of education in the classroom and in life.

OIHS is a key part of guiding these continuing reconstructions of experience. We at ACE are honored that we can help.

And in the end, Anna Akpawu, age 16 from Lomé, Togo, says it well:

“For me home is a happy family. Home is where there are people that care about you and where you are safe. Where people need you in their lives. It could be anywhere. Preferably with pizza.”

*Thank you Sailaja Suresh, Director, OIHS Learning Lab, and Carmelita Welsh Reyes, Co-Principal, OIHS, and all the OIHS students that signed their names and thanks in the book. Wow. What a treasure.

Purchase “I Am Home” on Amazon . All proceeds will go OIHS.

What Do Audio Storytelling and Chocolate O’Clock have In Common? KALW Audio Academy has the Answers

Posted by Martha Sessums on Oct 22, 2018 in ACE Learning Center, ACE School Report, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio and Pria Mahadevan, Audio Academy Fellow ’19

It’s been a little while, and things have been busy. It’s the journalism business, after all! But as we approach the extraordinary news cycle of the upcoming midterm elections, I wanted to share a nice personal perspective of a different kind of transformative experience.

Here are a few paragraphs from Pria Mahadevan, who started up in our Audio Academy training program about a month-and-a-half ago:

When Ben asked me to write about my past couple months in the Audio Academy, I couldn’t stop thinking about how a just few months ago, I was scrolling through this website reading posts by former KALW Audio Academy fellows. Specifically, I remember reading what Bo Walsh (‘18) wrote about

KALW Audio Academy is “Nothing Short of Jedi Training,” Says One Fellow

even after months into program, he still couldn’t believe how he got here. If I somehow get into this, that’s gonna be me, I thought.

Flash forward to today and yes, I’m definitely just as stunned as Bo that I get to grow, learn, and produce here at KALW. That, at least, I expected. What I didn’t expect was just how much KALW’s mission to provide “joyful, informative radio” to the Bay Area community permeates the atmosphere of the station. I’m not just talking about the impromptu dance parties, daily “chocolate o’clock,” or the fact that we have Slack channels dedicated to finding each other’s keys. It comes through in the way people treat each other. People at KALW enjoy and respect the work they do, and in turn they enjoy and respect each other. I love working here, and I cannot imagine a better place to start my journalism career.

Like the majority of our Audio Academy fellows this year, I’m an outsider to the world of radio journalism. Public radio – and journalism in general – can be a difficult field to break into without previous experience. But KALW is dedicated to training, mentoring, and supporting new voices in radio. Every Audio Academy fellow has a mentor for the year, and I lucked out with Marissa Ortega-Welch as mine. I came into the Audio Academy with more questions than I knew what to do with, and Marissa has been great about slowing me down and helping me understand that many of my questions will be answered with more experience. She has already helped me build confidence in my voice, and it’s great to float ideas to someone more experienced than me and know I’ll receive constructive feedback.

I’d also like to highlight the ways in which this cohort of fellows has enhanced my Audio Academy experience. Without something like KALW, there’s a good chance that none of us would have ever met. But every Wednesday evening, this group of scientists, actors, techies, nannies, established journalists, and one twenty-something nomad that still can’t believe she lucked her way into this get together to explore the very thing that united us in the first place: audio storytelling. I learn so much just by being around these people, and I can’t wait to hear the stories they’ll bring onto the airwaves.

Let me end with this: if there is another “me” out there currently combing through this blog, know that there is a place for you in the big wide radio world. I’m so grateful to KALW for seeing the potential in me that I was beginning to doubt I’d ever seen in myself. If you’re an early-career journalist or radio aficionado eager to explore a future in this dynamic (and fun!) field, this is definitely a place you can thrive.