AT ISSUE: DAREarts reaches students in north Etobicoke.
DAREarts Kids presented a evening of visual arts, music, drama and photography at North Albion Collegiate showcasing the works of students from 12 northwest Etobicoke schools. Here, Zakaria Hassen, 14, and Jamille Lambert, 13 hold their award winning art projects.
Photo/GRAHAME PAINE
Isaiah Reid learned discipline and respect. Jamille Lambert developed into a stronger and more outgoing leader. Zakaria Hassen explored his family roots. All three now foster a newfound enthusiasm for the arts.
Above and beyond their 12 weekly DAREarts Days - studying art forms ranging from architecture, to dance, to music, to literature, to visual arts, and photography - Isaiah, Jamille, Zakaria and the 46 other select members from north Etobicoke's first graduating class of the DAREarts program also learned that most important life lesson needed to carry them through to adulthood, said founder Marilyn Field.
"The goal of DAREarts is for our student delegates to walk away with a sense of self," she explained at the winter session's year-end showcase at North Albion Collegiate Institute on Thursday, March 10.
"I want our graduates to feel strong inside themselves; that no matter what is happening in their world - and we know a lot of them have really tough life situations to be in - that nothing can touch who they are inside."
Nearly 40 Grade 4 students watched Thursday, March 10 as their Grade 8 classmates from a dozen participating north Etobicoke schools - Albion Heights, Beaumonde Heights, Braeburn, Claireville, Dixon Grove, Elmlea, Elmbank, Greenholme, North Kipling, The Elms, Rivercrest, Smithfield and West Humber - received their DAREarts diplomas at the two-hour event, which featured on-stage performances of student-composed songs, Shakespearean sonnets, break dancing, and an art display showcasing their photography, prints, self portraits and other creative projects.
Founded 15 years ago on the merits of Discipline, Action, Responsibility, and Excellence through the arts, DAREarts' unique five-year program works with "at risk" students aged nine to 14 from high priority neighbourhoods like north Etobicoke, empowering the kids to become leaders in their communities through arts education.
For 13-year-old Jamille, an Elmbank JMA student who won DAREarts' Margaret Field Award for creativity, the program was one that gave her the confidence to emerge as a role model among her peers.
"It helped me because when I went back to school, I taught my friends what I'd learned and encouraged them to do the same," she said. "Art brings out another side of you, because when you're doing art sometimes you're more relaxed and you're more focused on what you're doing."
For Beaumonde Heights' Zakaria, 14, winner of the Judith Teller Award for his passion for learning and commitment to excellence, beginning to write his memoirs under the tutelage of Emmy Award-winning writer/producer Monika Jensen Stevenson on DAREarts' Literature Day was the highlight of the program.
"It was pretty fun, because it helped me delve into my roots and look back at what makes me who I am today," he said. "I'm from a Somali background and my family really likes soccer, so I have that kind of imprinted on me now."
What makes the DAREarts program so successful is due, in large part, to the teaching staff that is handpicked for both their backgrounds in the art, and their ability to relate to their sometimes troubled young charges, said DAREarts head teacher and director of urban programming, Genevieve Anthony.
Herself an Ontario Institute for Studies in Education-trained teacher with a professional background in dance and drama, Anthony said many of DAREarts' teachers have such similar personal histories as their students that it's easy for the kids to open up to them in their times of struggle.
"My DAREarts cell phone rings and gets text messages around the clock. I have been called when children are thinking about suicide, when there's funerals, when they're being taken to a hospital, and even sometimes when the cops are involved," she said.
"My own background is not so pretty: I've had two cousins murdered. Name a story and I've been there. Our teaching staff can reach the kids on that level, because we have those same experiences - and that absolutely, 100 per cent helps."
One of the greatest things about the DAREarts program for Anthony, as a teacher, is being able to open up to her students whole new worlds they might not have otherwise experienced, she said.
On DAREarts Days, groups of student participants are bussed downtown from their home communities to the Walmer Centre, the program's home base near Bloor and Spadina. From there, depending on what art form the kids will be studying that day, they go on field trips to culturally relevant museums and centres that reflect their studies - to the AGO, the ROM and the Bata Shoe Museum, to St. Paul's Basilica and St. James Cathedral, to the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet, to the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir, to name just a few.
"The thing about DAREarts that is pretty powerful is, because we do choose so many children from so many different schools and places, we're building communities for them outside of their own community," Anthony explained.
"It's all about bridge building into other communities. Here in particular, a few years ago I had children in my class who had never left this area, had never seen the CN Tower, had never even been on the TTC. So by creating bridges to other communities, we're creating a potential exit and a potential entrance for these children."
By showing their participants another way, and by catching them before they're old enough to fall, it was Field's hope from the very start that DAREarts could steer kids away from the drugs, violence and hopelessness that are realities for so many of today's youth.
"All kinds of statistics - including the police reports - show that the best time to reach kids is in these most impressionable years (ages 9-14), the formative years. We want to catch the kids before they become street statistics," she said. "And with DAREarts, every day has magic happening; every day there is change in one or more of the kids in the program. It's amazing to see."