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.
Great News Comes in Threes for KALW’s Training Programs
By Ben Trefny, Interim Executive Director, KALW Public Media
I’ve got three pieces of great news to share with you.
Shereen Adel winning the award for “Captain Superfoods” last week at KALW.
One – KALW’s Editorial Operations Manager, Shereen Adel — Audio Academy class of 2016 and KALW’s current training director — was recently named as part of the Online News Association’s 2022 Women’s Leadership Accelerator! The inspiring group represents six countries and showcases a range of expertise: from local news; to production innovation; to audio. (Or, in Shereen’s case, all three!) You can meet the #ONAWLA cohort by clicking here.
Two – The station’s listeners really came through in our March membership drive, helping KALW surpass it’s $250,000 fundraising goal. In fact, we set a “stretch goal” of $275,000 that would ensure funding for our high school podcasting institute. And our supporters helped us meet that, too! I met with our program’s teachers, Holly J. McDede (Audio Academy class of 2013) and Sarah Lai Stirland (Audio Academy class of 2020), last week, and we’re setting plans in place for recruitment of teenagers around the Bay Area and the timing of our program. As I’ve shared before, the podcast we help teenagers create — tbh — won the most recent “Student Special Project” award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter. Can’t wait to get started on the new season!
Three – Johanna Miyaki, one of KALW’s current fellows in its Audio Academy training program, is part of a class that’s just two months away from graduation. Here are some of Johanna’s thoughts about working on her first full-length feature story (which you can hear by clicking here):
Johanna Miyaki
My experience producing my first feature was such a great opportunity to identify how to play to my strengths and lean into emerging skills. Having the talent and support of the team of mentors, editors, and engineers at KALW available to me was such a great confidence boost and motivator. I am proud of the work I did and so grateful to my subject for trusting me with his story. His response to me meant so much, he was so pleased with the story and said one of the actualities I used (from someone else in the story about him) “brought a tear to his eye.” A high compliment! This meant I moved someone with the story, my subject no less, and it meant the world. I am digging into my next feature now. It’s sort of set a bar for me personally in the best way!
Four – I know I said three pieces of great news, but here’s a fourth: KALW is currently accepting applications for its next Audio Academy class! Learn all about audio journalism and storytelling from a well-seasoned team of supportive professionals serving the Bay Area. It’s a mission-driven, community-building, fun, fulfilling, and potentially life-changing experience, and we welcome you to apply to be part of it! Learn all about it by clicking here
Poetry Can Help Build Wings to Fly Because Change is Beautiful
By Bessie, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot, Oakland International High School, assisted by Martha because Bessie has a hard time punching computer keys to make words
Bessie here, poetry mascot for OIHS.
Hello from Oakland. I’m Bessie and I’ve been busy enjoying long flights up in the sky and looking down on the world below. Oakland International High School (OIHS) is my special world that I love to float around. I meet students in the main courtyard and stop on the edge of a bench to listen to them. Or I float to the soccer field, making sure I stay out of the way of both the ball sailing through the air and the students running to catch the ball to send it flying the other way.
I’m so proud to be this year’s poetry mascot for OIHS. I have long been a part of the school. There’s even a hoodie with my image drawn on it that says, “Migration is beautiful.” It speaks to the fact that students have traveled from many parts of the world to be a part of this great school.
But I like to think that the inspiration of butterflies like me isn’t just about migration but represents the great change that all OIHS students can experience. I’m a perfect example of change. I started out as a caterpillar, kinda slow and moving funny. Then something amazing happened. I started building a safe place around me, a cocoon that hugs and supports me as I learn about being a butterfly and how I want to fly. I stayed there until my wings formed and I felt comfortable to break free and spread those wings. Then I moved to my current beautiful stage where I fly up in the sky and do amazing things and people love looking at me.
There are many inspirations for changing into a butterfly. One is my namesake. Her name was Bessie Coleman and she was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold an airplane pilot’s license. She learned the skills and earned the license in France and returned to the US to become a spectacular flyer in airshows that were popular in the 1920s. There’s a road at Oakland International Airport named after her and she will be honored on the US quarter in 2023. She came from sharecropper background but she always wanted to fly – literally.
Flying and changing into a butterfly is amazing inspiration for poetry too. Poetry can be flowery (my favorite type) but it often directly gets to the truth and spirit of how we feel, which can inspire feelings and hope to encourage all of us to fly. Earning wings is hard for humans but poetry can be an inspiration.
One of my favorite poets is a Maya Angelou and a favorite poem is “Still I Rise.” She strongly and a bit sassily tells the world that even if she is trodden on that “like dust, I’ll rise.”
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
And then she proclaims her flight path upward full of dreams and hope and we all know she makes it high into the air and inspires those of us still growing in our caterpillar cocoons to know that wings will help us rise.
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
I’m sure that the OIHS students will write poetry that will inspire everyone to work to fly upward toward each personal success. Even if the poem you write doesn’t win the contest, it’s a path to understanding our truths and that helps build our wings so we can rise.
Happy National Poetry Month. Time for me to fly off as I hear those dogs coming. Love ya Dexter and Luna, but you do like to chase after me.
Make Your Courage Sing in Poetry
By Max, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot for San Francisco International High School, assisted by Martha Sessums who likes words
Max here. Looking forward to seeing your poems.
Hi. Max here. I’m the mascot for San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) thus the mascot for everything, including the ACE Poetry Contest. We’re the Huskies and I was the inspiration for the mascot of the school. That makes me very proud of the students who reflect our strong and courageous spirit.
Poetry is doing some wonderful and courageous changes to stay modern and keep the attention of current students of poetry. Rhyming patterns have changed and become more fluid. Some poems are read backwards or sprawl in circles around a page. Some look like paragraphs in a story that don’t worry about rhyme, just about each poets’ thoughts.
One of the best changes is the National Youth Poet Laureate position that is getting more prominence. The current Youth Poet Laureate is Alexandra Huynh who is from Sacramento and just started her first year at Stanford. The recent past National Youth Poet Laureate was Amanda Gorman who recited her poem at the 2021 Presidential Inaugural for President Biden. Both are pretty special.
Another inspiration about current poetry is that it is experienced via video, not just written down in words. That way we get to see poets personally express themselves with their poem and the visual experience makes the poem more real. It’s an experience for many senses, not just the words we read.
My favorite poem of Alexandra Huynh’s is called Inheritance and it’s about her experience in the last couple of years with the corona virus and the lockdowns and the way we all learned at school. She flips the experience to a positive, strong and courageous way to look at the past two years. I remember our student poems from last year’s ACE Poetry Contest and they reflected the tough times, but Huynh finds an amazing amount of courage in her reaction to the virus time. Here’s a video of her reciting the poem and here’s the last section because, after all, this is a written blog and Martha insists on words.
And years from now when I become ancestor, I will tell them all about the courage of distance. How we learned to hold space instead of hands. I will tell them about the color of courage. How loss echoed through an entire generation and the children became teachers. Learned love is not defined by age. I will tell them of this land we ripped from a people we can never repay but will try and try. I will tell them about the way a footstep can be felt on the other side of the planet. So, mind your soul. Move only in truth. You have inherited the sun. Now make it sing.
As mascot of SFIHS, I totally believe our students have the courage and strength to make their lives sing. We are Huskies. We make it happen. We work together with our teachers and staff to find our right paths, whether it’s a path to a Stanford or junior college, or a path to a trade school that provides us a more immediate career, or a path to finish high school and start working to support family. It’s about minding our souls and moving in our truths. Poetry can help us find our inspiration.
That’s why I love being the SFIHS mascot for the ACE Poetry Contest. Our poetry is strong, courageous and reflects our truths. Go Huskies.