826 Valencia Workshop Podcasts

Our plan

The podcast series is an opportunity for students to share their hard work with the community at large and to become familiar with important 2.0 technologies. After the culmination of a workshop or writing project, we have students come in and record their pieces and then we publish the recordings through our website and on iTunes. The project was highlighted by iTunes as a “new and notable podcast” in the summer of 2007 and gained national recognition. Our goal is to make student writing content available to a wider audience and to expose students to technological tools that allow them to grow their skills and knowledge. They use audio editing programs to record, edit, and craft their pieces and then with the instruction of our technology director, upload the final pieces to our website.

What we did

We have students come in individually and record in our media lab, or workshop teachers often integrate the podcast series into their workshop plan. In episode four, two students from Mission High School, Hile Lula and Danny Benitez, read their stories which were recently published by 826 Valencia in the The Mission High Magazine. Under the wing of 826 and Pirette McKamey, a language arts teacher at Mission High School, seniors were encouraged to write objectively on current, controversial topics. The result is a collection of powerful essays ranging from the politics of hair to global warming, Hurricane Katrina, body image, and dealing with romantic break ups. In the past year, all 122 of Ms. McKamey’s seniors were involved in the project. The issue is dedicated to Jamar "Bear" Lake, a student who wrote an article in the issue on gang violence and was shot during the project’s final stages. Episode three takes you inside a recent workshop titled The Jazz Poets, a special collaboration between 826 Valencia and the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Teachers Rob Kohler and singer/songwriter Maya Dorn, along with guest musicians Fred Harris and Ambrose Akinmusire, led students in a free-form, improvisational writing class. To start the class, students were treated to a series of recordings by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg before being let loose with their own creations. What followed was a jam session of sorts between 10-13 year-old poets and professional jazz musicians. According to teacher Rob Kohler, the class was about "music inspiring poetry and poetry inspiring music."