Visit Humanitas Online

Academy Broadens Teachers' Knowledge of Humanities HUMANITAS HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS LAST WEEK viewed the murals of Diego Rivera, visited the Latino History, Art and Culture and the Japanese American National Museums and followed Danté from the Inferno to Paradise during LAEP's Humanitas Academy. The Academy is an annual professional development workshop designed to broaden teachers' knowledge of the humanities, provide them an opportunity to work together on teaching methods, and acquaint them with scheduled cultural and educational events of interest to their students. Humanitas is a network of more than 500 teachers working in interdisciplinary teams at approximately 40 Los Angeles Unified School District schools. The teacher teams design and implement thematic curricula around significant ideas that engage students and promote critical thinking. One of the subjects high school Humanitas teachers explored during the week-long Humanitas Academy was Danté's "The Divine Comedy." Dr. Efrain Kristal, a professor in UCLA's Departments of Comparative Literature and Latin American Literature, discussed the history, philosophy, religion, social science, political science and art associated with Danté's literary journey through the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. Kristal described how Danté placed classical themes in a religious context and traced Danté's influence on writers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "This workshop has given me a lot of ideas on how to link Danté with modern literature," said Jeanne Lamb, a 10th-grade English teacher from Manual Arts High School, who was attending the weeklong Academy at USC. "I really think students need a background in mythology to understand literature." Herb Williams, an art teacher at Los Angeles High School, was impressed by slides Kirstal showed of illustrations by William Blake and Gustav Dore. "The art is valuable in studying the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance," Williams said. Martha Dunn, a teacher of world literature at Manual Arts High School, said she thought that the themes from Danté would be valuable in studying themes of good and evil or crime and punishment. "I think my students would really relate to what kind of punishment should be meted out for various sins." Her colleague from Manual Arts, Linda Baughn, an 11th-grade social studies teacher, said she found the intellectual engagement in studying Danté was valuable in itself. Eric Schonebaum, a world history teacher from Fairfax High school, said Kirstal's seminar gives him more information for a unit his department currently teaches in which students are asked to compare and write about Danté's Inferno, Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness," and the film, Apocalypse Now. The following day, Ray Linn, a 10th-grade history teacher from Cleveland high school gave a talk on the influence of Christianity on literature. "The onset of Christianity brought on what can be seen as a whole new world view," Linn said. "This is reflected in literature as a more realistic view of the world. The onset of Christianity undermined the traditional classic literature of the West." Also during the academy, teachers got a chance to do some team planning for the upcoming school year, shared literacy techniques and learned how to use the interdisciplinary essay in the classroom.