Throughout the weeklong stay in New Orleans, students had
the chance to live the complexities of the city first-hand, with
experiences ranging from mainstream (visiting the French Quarter
and taking a tour of local swamplands) to more intense, visiting the
Whitney Plantation to learn about the city’s history with slavery
and volunteering with the Jericho Road housing project. They had
the chance to visit Laguna alums at Tulane University, where they
also met co-author Snedeker, who wrote one of the books they
studied throughout the year.
“The challenge was to help them appreciate the culture without
judgment and to see where our cultures might be more alike than we
realize,” Ashley says. “Through their personal interviews, meeting
and talking to real people, and performing research, they dedicated
themselves to thinking through the city’s problems as if they were
their own.”
According to Ashley, the kids seized the nuances of the city and
used their critical thinking skills to understand how communities
can come together to solve problems—including the man-made
problems that we as humans often bring upon ourselves.
“The truth is that most of our students won’t go on to become
English majors,” Ashley says. “But we're showing them that English
can mean more than literary analysis. It means understanding our
world.”
Learn more: Visit http://lbsnola.weebly.com to view student
essays, as well as a video about the trip created by Laguna student
Camila Lemere ’18.
For the past three years, Laguna’s ninth and tenth grade students
have gone on urban adventures as part of a schoolwide effort to
augment the traditional curriculum with hands-on learning. Using
both classic and modern texts as a springboard for discovery, the
students conduct research that takes them to exciting, historically
important locations where they meet and learn from experts and
local residents. After inspiring trips to New York City and London,
English Teacher Ashley Tidey, Ph.D., says that students on the
2016 trip to New Orleans achieved a higher level of involvement
with the communities they visited than ever before.
“This year has really marked a shift in the class,” Ashley says. “I
started thinking less about literary analysis and more about urban
analysis—allowing the kids to understand the truly complex culture
and people of the places we are studying.”
The spring trip to New Orleans was inspired by the tenth
anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and fifth anniversary of the BP
oil spill. As part of the curriculum, students read The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by
Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker. Both were used as the
launching point for a year-long urban immersion into the cultural
and social issues impacting the city of New Orleans.
While literary analysis remained a focus in the early part of
the academic year, Ashley says students quickly moved beyond the
literary realm, tackling tough topics like the New Orleans prison
system, racism, and failures of the Hurricane Katrina evacuation as
part of the year’s studies. They undertook in-depth essays on these
self-chosen issues, and were required to perform interviews with
someone who had first-hand experience in their topic field in order
to gain a more personal understanding of it. According to Ashley, it
was an empowering experience on many levels.
For instance, student Margaux Murphy ’19 had chosen to
study the Katrina evacuation as part of her essay. In doing so, she
interviewed the director of an organization called Evacuteers,
which has partnered with the city of New Orleans to prevent future
evacuation disasters. Since Katrina, the organization has created
16 official “evacu-posts” throughout the city, largely in low-income
areas, to ensure faster, safer emergency response for the city’s
underserved populations. Margaux’s connection proved so fruitful
that Evacuteers offered to arrange for Laguna students to visit City
Hall and learn more about the city’s new efforts toward emergency
preparedness.
“My students literally guided me to that component of the
experience,” Ashley says. “It’s a whole new, empowering model
of trip planning—taking input from the students on what is
meaningful for them to learn about.”
Laguna Stage band members join Charmaine Neville
on stage at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro.
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