Student Publications

A collection of oral histories of Muslim Youth residing in New York City, crafted by Muslim student authors.

11th grade students from Millennium Art Academy, a small Bronx high school, and nine local senior citizens worked together as part of a yearlong, school-based intergenerational project. Students and seniors participated in weekly icebreaker and storytelling exercises which culminating in the students interviewing and writing the seniors’ oral histories. The final publication, Back in the Day III: Food for Life, is a celebration of the students’ hard work as well as of the deep relationships they formed with the seniors.

This book continues in the tradition of the project preceding it—Killing the Sky: Oral Histories from Horizon Academy, and its sequel—and marks the third year collaboration between the Student Press Initiative of Columbia, Teachers College and Horizon Academy’s interred student population. The previous works have held as an arch concern the belief that the pathways to expression afforded by these publications remain uninterrupted and uninflected, particularly in regards to the language utilized in that expression. The interviews providing the basis for this collection of narratives were conducted in Spanish, and their subsequent English translations were drawn from textual transcripts. While translation introduces a conspicuous obstacle into the enterprise of linguistically precise oral history, another concern central to the mission of these books is broadening a legitimate audience base for stories that usually are left unaccessed by nature of their authors, their locations, their content, and, in this case, their language. The accommodations made for non-Spanish speakers moves to accomplish this.

Killing the Sky grows out of a unique collaboration between The Student Press Initiative and Horizon Academy, the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island in New York. At the time of writing, the authors represented here were inmates awaiting either trial, transfer to a long-term prison, or release from jail. Each had previously dropped out of school and was attending the jail’s high school to complete credits towards either diplomas or equivalency exams. This remarkable classroom project began by first recording and transcribing the students’ oral histories. Student, teacher, and SPI teaching artists then worked intensively and collaboratively to revise, edit, and transform transcript into draft. The resulting personal narratives offer an arresting glimpse at the kind of anger and violence that arise out of the conditions these young men have survived in school and on the streets. There is wisdom and insight in these stories, and most notably a fervent desire to be heard.

Student authors profile one another as a community-building model

Advisories around the city—and most likely the country—are full of students and teachers who don’t necessarily have the resources to help them identify issues that are of true importance to young people today. There is a need for this and the students, themselves, are in the perfect position to provide this resource. They know what they, and their peers, need and want to talk about. Their voices ought to be heard. This is the idea behind For Every Voice, A Different Truth, an advisory handbook written by the 10th grade students at The Institute for Media and Writing at the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in New York City. The book comes with an accompanying CD for classroom use.

What does student voice mean and where should it come from? Twenty seniors, members of the first graduating class of Pablo Neruda Academy, a new small school in the Stevenson High School Campus in the Bronx, New York, answered this question by investigating the small schools movement from their own unique perspective in a year-long partnership with Teachers College, Columbia University’s Student Press Initiative. In addition to doing a great deal of research and field work, the students explored this topic by communicating with leading figures in the field of urban education and school reform including academics, researchers, policymakers and practitioners. The content of that communication appears inside the pages of this book, along with other artifacts of our year-long journey, each student’s culminating reflection about their experience in a new small high school, and student recommendations for the small school community at large.

The Shakes is the product of 9th grade students' exploration of social issues in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Students first entered into an in-depth analysis of the content and form of both Shakespeare’s language and rap music. They went on to explore how both the Bard and rappers use devices like imagery, hyperbole, allusion, and metaphor to both entertain and critique society. Students then crafted thoughtful argumentative essays and used them to co-author verses for rap songs—a new genre of music students called Academic Rap. The result is an album that contains four songs, uniting the theaters of Elizabethan England with a classroom in Manhattan.

Writers Unblocked is a collection of profiles written by 9th grade students from the Academy for Young Writers in New York City. In this book, the students explore what it means to “be a writer” by interviewing and profiling diverse writers from all over the city and the country. Some of those writers profiled include contributors to the New Yorker, travel writers for Lonely Planet, young adult authors, editors, poets, college students, architects and comedians. In addition, the students also reflect upon their own identities as writers through photography by creating still-life photos that represent who they are as writers.

Students in an 11th grade Earth Science class examine how weather variables relate to each other, and come to a surprising conclusion about the way they influence their school culture.