The pillows are more than blue fabric decorated and stuffed with foam.

They say something about the young person who made them.

One says “Jesus Loves You.” Another reads “#RIP.” A third has the number “187” on it, a three-digit synonymous with murder, crime and police. Another read “Gang, Gang.”

The pillows are part of an art project for children who live in Northview Heights, a North Side neighborhood and housing complex. Ulric Joseph, who teaches art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Md., but lives on the North Side, led the project, which is funded by the Buhl Foundation.

Joseph recently won Best in Show at the Dollar Bank Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival’s Juried Visual Art Exhibition in June. He has led the Northview Heights art project for the past two years. Last year, the children created masks. Last week, the children decorated their pillows.

“Some followed directions and others didn’t,” Joseph said of the kids. “Some never came back. Doing this is not about the money. I see my kids in these kids, and I just want the kids to have a good experience.”

The children, most 14 or younger, show up for the art class at a church in Reserve Township on the boarder of Northview Heights. They come in from homes that may be tense or broken and from streets that can be prone to violence and crime, Joseph said.

Inside the church, they find a welcoming room, other children like them and Joseph, who is eager to spend time with them.

Each of the 50 kids was given a pillow and asked to create designs on both sides. Last Wednesday, Joseph talked about the work as he helped them stuff the pillows so they could take with them.

Making pillows is about more than creating a soft space for the children to rest their heads, Joseph said. It also gives them a chance to be creative and express themselves.

After the craft, the kids get dinner.

“This is about feeding the kids good, nutritious food,” said Cheri Pogue, chief operating officer for United Methodist Church Union, a non-profit that brings the free food for the kids. “And we also want to feed their soul. Without the grant we would not be able to do this art.”

Joseph asked each child to put his or her name on the pillow so he would know which one belonged to which boy or girl. He had the children make designs on cyanotype, a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. The original is green but changes to blue when it’s exposed to the light.

It was fun for Tayonnah White, 8, who said she loves that the pillow is fluffy.

“It’s cute,” she said.

Passion Cox, 8, wrote “Jesus Loves You,” on her pillow because she said she loves Jesus.

“I really liked making the pillow,” Passion said. “I am going to take it home and sleep on it.”

Honestty Robinson, 12, put her nickname, Onney, on the pillow. She also had some social media hashtags, including “#RIP,” for her late uncle and other people special to her.

“Our pastor has this for something for us to do and this is helping our neighborhood do stuff,” Honestty said of the craft. “It creates positive things.”

Rev. Diana E. Marshall, pastor at New Dawn Beginnings Outreach where the kids worked on their crafts, said the project brings smiles to their faces.

“The kids get a kick of out this project,” Marshall said. “This project gives these children a sense of responsibility and discipline; and that it takes steps to come to fruition; and they learn patience. Once they understand the process, they want to help others.”

Originally published on July 14, 2019

SOURCE: Tribue-Review

Last fall, before the snow arrived in Pittsburgh, seventh-grade students on the North Side visited the North Pole.

They spoke with scientists there who were studying polar bears and got a glimpse of the gear they were using. The students, warm in their classroom at Pittsburgh Schiller 6-8 in Troy Hill, tweeted their questions to the researchers, who answered them immediately on a live video stream.

“It was very interactive, so the kids loved it,” said Kaitlyn Whitfield, a science teacher at the middle school who arranged the virtual field trip for her classes.

The exercise was set up through Discovery Education, a resource for schools created by the same media company that owns the Discovery Channel. Ms. Whitfield this year has been using the digital program in her seventh- and eighth-grade classes, where her students are now researching the Apollo space missions as part of their unit on lunar phases. She also has used the program’s readings and short video clips for her lessons on the water cycle and electrical circuits.

Pittsburgh Public Schools recently entered a formal partnership with Discovery Education that will enable the district access to its digital curriculum and professional development and training for its educators as the district strives to transform all schools into STEAM-centered learning environments.

STEAM — or science, technology, engineering, arts and math — education has been touted by education experts, business leaders and elected officials across the country as the future of education.

Schools everywhere have been creating maker spaces and mobile science labs, applying for technology grants and developing new computer science and engineering lesson plans, all in an effort to teach students to be creative problem-solvers and to work collaboratively. It’s a quest, experts say, to prepare young people for jobs and careers that haven’t even been created yet.

“This type of learning and what kids are going to have to be able to know and be able to do to have those jobs, we’re not really preparing them based on our current model,” said PPS Chief Academic Officer Minika Jenkins. “We need to make a bigger shift and our classroom environments have not really changed since the Industrial Revolution.”

Initially pitched to the school board as a multi-million dollar purchase and plan to immediately embed the Discovery Education curriculum in all Pittsburgh Public schools, district officials instead decided to phase it in as a pilot program in the district’s six schools that have a STEAM focus. Besides Schiller, a partial STEAM magnet, Langley K-8, Woolslair Pre-K-5, Lincoln Pre-K-5, Brashear High School and Perry High School, will begin using the programs next year.

The district will pay about $657,000 over the next three years for access to the Discovery Education online catalog of resources for students and teachers, as well as the training and support Discovery Education provides to teachers and administrators. In four years, Ms. Jenkins said, the district hopes to roll out the training to all 54 schools and customize a STEAM plan for each building. Even the classroom furniture could look different by then, she said.

“What we’re really doing is changing the culture of [each] school,” she said.

Cassie Quigley, an associate professor of science education at the University of Pittsburgh and a 2019 Pennsylvania STEM ambassador, said many school districts are starting to embrace STEAM education, and supporting teachers with professional development and training is vital to that mission. State standardized tests are also starting to assess “21st-century learning” skills, prompting students to analyze data, construct models, design experiments and communicate the results.

“I think that there are the right sorts of initiatives moving forward,” Ms. Quigley said. “I think schools have a real challenge in their requirements in terms of what they need to do within a certain time frame. I think there are exciting opportunities on the horizon for this sort of work.”

Ms. Quigley, who this month published a book for educators on STEAM practices in the classroom, said Discovery Education allows teachers to be flexible to meet different students’ needs and show students how their subjects are relevant to their daily lives.

According to Discovery Education, schools that have been using its various products across the country have reported positive effects on student performance: improved state test scores in Oak Ridge schools in Tennessee and Miami-Dade schools in Florida; better science scores for students who speak English as a second language in Collier County, Fla.; and better end-of-course exam scores for students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina.

Initially under threat of closure, Schiller launched its STEAM program in 2014, said Principal Paula Heinzman. Now, the school has more than 200 students and a waiting list of more than 50 for its sixth-grade classes. For the last two years, it has been a STAR school, ranking among the top schools in Pennsylvania. Seven Schiller eighth-grade students were accepted into Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy magnet high school for next year, compared to last year’s two, Ms. Heinzman said.

According to the Future Ready PA Index, 47.6 percent of Schiller students scored proficient or advanced on state standardized English language arts tests, 20.1 percent in math and 25 percent in science. All students either met or exceeded state expectations for growth in performance last year.

STEAM teacher Nicole Findon said every student in the school visits her classroom every six days. Each quarter, they study a different subject: computer coding, engineering, robotics and video game design. Ms. Findon, who has been at Schiller for four years, said she writes her own curriculum.

In addition to learning important science and technology skills, she said the goal is for students to take the skills they learn in the STEAM lab and use them to help solve word problems in math class or to analyze passages and documents in language arts.

“(STEAM) is a way of thinking,” Ms. Findon said.

On a recent school day, Schiller students were working in the school’s STEAM lab on the second floor. A sixth-grade student worked on a video game design project, and a group of eighth graders huddled at a desk, connecting computer code that they wrote to a circuit they designed to power small LED lights, motors and motion sensors.

One of the students, Tanzania Livsey, 14, has plans to incorporate the technology into a diorama project, complete with spinning dance floor and light-up disco ball. Xzavier Rodgers, 14, is designing a security system with motion sensors that would send a digital alert to Ms. Findon’s cell phone, activate blinking lights and automatically slide a deadbolt lock into place.

Ms. Heinzman said she was initially skeptical of the virtual field trip to the North Pole in November, because she worried the students wouldn’t participate. But the engagement was “amazing.” She wants Ms. Whitfield to show the school’s other teachers how to use the Discovery Education online resources even sooner than next year.

“We just really need to step our game up because the children want it,” Ms. Heinzman said. “We have to prepare our kids for the jobs we don’t even know about yet. …I feel like this is a resource that helps us achieve that.”

Originally published on March 30, 2019

SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette