In Education there is always a plan and outcome goal for every lesson. The Youth Voices Project begins with this framework, but it is meant to adapt and change. With each project, we work with students from different areas of the city with different backgrounds. We work in different facilities with varying resources. Education Notes helps to mediate between plan and reality by looking at the weekly workshops from the educator's perspective, and how the process of developing the project relates to larger social and educational issues.

We invite you to take a look at what's been going on inside and outside the walls of Venice High School.

For the Neighborhood and Me project, students produced digital interactive panoramas (aka murals). Through the development of this project, students learned to use design principals and graphic elements, such as repetition, hierarchy, texture, color, and transition.

Students learned about the history of collage and discuss the various formats of collages from the art of Russian Constructivists and Dadaists to contemporary artists and designers. Students also took a field trip to The Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), an arts center that produces, preserves and conducts educational programs about community based public art works. SPARC was founded in 1976 by artist, activist, and muralist Judy Baca.

The student murals curated an experience of walking the paths of the places on the map, and the textures of the experience at a street level.

Students were challenged to see what kind of juxtapositions or narratives they can create through these “linearesque” audio/visual presentations. They were taught to use Vuvox, an online application that allows you to cut and collage images, embed video and audio, and create stand-alone multimedia panoramic experiences. They were encouraged to apply the graphic principles learned and perhaps integrate some of the styles of collage artists and designers.

Check out the murals by clicking on the entries below.

The Venice Youth Voices Student Producers consisted of 11th Graders from Venice High School's New Media Academy. We worked with two of Ms. Kraft's classes (group 1 & 2) totaling 58 students. They first worked individually, each student had the opportunity to brainstorm and develop their personal map and hotspots. Through several activities, they created and posted their work on their individual blog sites. They then worked in groups to acquire the various multimedia production tools like photography, cinematography, sound recording and design, video editing, and interactive design.

At mid-semester we divided them into groups, each with a team leader who was selected based on his/her performance in the first half of class. They worked on two projects, the first was to explore an element of the Venice Boardwalk and to generate media assets; the second project focused on the team leader's personal map and students went out to generate media assets to represent four of their hotspots.

During the Youth Voices student workshops, students worked on various multimedia activities that lead up to the production of their personal hotspots and final digital murals. They drew personal maps, produced sound design projects, and created digital murals of the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Take a look at some of these amazing projects.