One “The Big Read” event was a fashion show in collaboration with the University of Georgia School of Fashion. Gallery by Ana Aldridge
In collaboration with the University of Georgia, Clarke Central High School was funded through a Nation Endowment of the Arts Grant called the “The Big Read” to produce curriculum, promote artwork and participate in other events surrounding the book “The Year of the Dog” by Grace Lin and the Chinese New Year. The culmination of these events took place on Feb. 27.
Senior Visuals Coordinator Suncana Pavlic: What is “The Big Read” grant?
Media Specialist Lindy Weaver: One of the professors at UGA (Melisa Cahnmann Taylor) wrote a grant several years ago. It’s a National Endowment of the Arts Grant and it is called “The Big Read.” The whole idea is you have a community read the same books and then you have events surrounding the books. Part of the events she wanted to do was community-related and came to us here at Clarke Central. We have done this before in the past. We had a poet here last year brought to us by the same grant. This year they were Chinese authors and one of them was a book called “To Live” … (and) the other book that they chose was “The Year of the Dog” written by Grace lin and it just so happened that they are trying to coincide a lot of the events around the Chinese New Year. (The) ELL classes — Ms. Bolgla’s students — are all reading that book and having a big unit around it.
SP: How have Clarke Central High School students been participating in the events of the grant so far?
LW: We collaborated with the graphic arts classes and they designed all of the logos that they have been using for the events on the website. We collaborated with the arts classes and they created the dragons that are painted all over the school and the different Chinese landscapes. They also created the Great Wall out there on the breezeway and then all of the world history classes created projects. The idea was to use the Great Wall as a timeline that we could highlight different events in Chinese culture.
SP: Has the entire school had the opportunity to participate?
LW: We trying to have the whole school do these lessons around the Chinese New Year that were supposed to happen during advisement. It just kind of fell flat this year. Lesson learned we can’t do anything around registration time because it is too hard to manage even though we did try to make the lessons self-directed for students. Not very may got done. For the ninth and tenth graders, we did a fortune teller that we sent to advising classes and the students were supposed to write good wishes inside the fortune teller and that will be their wishes for the year. Then for the upperclassmen, we did the little red envelope that everybody gets. Traditionally you give people money, but we can’t give any money, so we gave all of the kids the envelope and we gave them all a little piece of paper to write a good wish. And if they followed the lessons they had, you could also write them in Chinese characters.
SP: How were these activities and events vetted and planned?
LW: I also really enjoyed that I did a Google Hangout with the UGA students and UGA professor and so talking about how to design that curriculum that we pushed out during advisement was huge. We were really being very specific. We wanted to be sure that the ideas that we brainstormed with the teachers we had — which were the art teachers and the world history teachers — to make sure that they were culturally appropriate. It was important for us to get it right and to be sure that what we shared with the students was culturally relevant and important.
SP: How did the CCHS fashion show become one of the events for “The Big Read”?
LW: Part of the big events they did with UGA was they had the School of Fashion design costumes around Chinese culture and the Chinese New Year, so they are doing a huge fashion show, but they already had the costumes so they wanted to come do a fashion show here as well, but they did not have enough models so I recruited models.
SP: Why is this important to incorporate into our school community?
LW: I like that UGA wanted to collaborate with us and offer some opportunities to our students that they might not get otherwise. I mean who often gets to be a model /in a fashion show. Also, the idea of “The Big Read” and the fact that we have a community all read the same book and come together to celebrate whatever that book is.
More from Sunčana Pavlić
More from Ana Aldridge
