Humanitas is a network of more than 500 teachers working in interdisciplinary teams at 32 LAUSD high schools. It is also an integrated classroom curriculum that engages students and teachers in an in-depth exploration of the arts and humanities and in the process expands student learning and teacher knowledge and skills.

Using a unique team-teaching and team-learning approach that emphasizes a theme taught across multiple subjects, Humanitas has improved students performance and increased teachers' motivation and skills.

Humanitas partners with leading organizations such as the LA County Art Museum, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and On-Ramp to offer special seminars for interested teachers and students around specific topics such as literature and literacy, incorporation of visual art into the classroom, media literacy and online content and curricula.

Humanitas Activities and Accomplishments

• Humanitas sponsors an annual Summer Academy, a three-day event each August that seeks not only to engage teachers as learners but also to tie that learning to the cultural opportunities the city presents.

• Humanitas is in its eighth year of a partnership with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Twice a year, teachers meet with AMPAS staff and design a three-day media literacy project for their eleventh-grade students. Up to 400 students then attend a three-ay workshop that addresses the issue f the media and stereotypes of race, gender, ethnicity, age and sexual or political orientation.

• Teacher work in literacy has resulted in significant student outcomes as measured on the Degrees of Reading Power Test, in the case of network leaders' students and in the High School Exit Exam, in the case of the Roosevelt Humanitas Academy.

• Humanitas' association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities has opened doors at the museum and teachers have been accorded special privileges in the galleries and with curators.

• Since 2002, Humanitas has partnered with the International Studies Project, a California Subject Matter project at Loyola Marymount University. Teacher leaders have worked with university scholars and provided exemplar lessons for selected teacher teams. The expertise developed by Humanitas teachers has been acknowledged by LAUSD administrators.

• Merle Price, LAUSD deputy superintendent Instructional Services, recently praised LAEP's Humanitas teacher network and student academy for a high passing rate among Humanitas students on the English- Language Arts section of the California High School Exit Exam. According to LAUSD data, 76 percent of eleventh-grade students enrolled in LAEP's Humanitas academy at Roosevelt high school passed the English-Language Arts section of the California High School Exit Exam compared to 52 percent of the total number of students who took the exam.

For more information about Humanitas, contact Barbara Golding at (213) 622-5237 or via email at exchange@laep.org.