Photo Journal: My Class in Elmhurst, Queens.

b’h

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On behalf of Café Avra, Happy 2011 to all.

I must apologize for the short  Café Avra break I have taken. I see my last post was quite a long time ago, on December 23^rd!

I have been lucky enough to have been traveling off and on the last 3 weeks, once to Philadelphia and twice to Washington DC, both for business and pleasure. Photo Journals on these journeys to come in a future post.

I also am starting to prepare for my Israel trip, in which I leave in less than a month. Time does fly I must say. I leave on  Feb 13th, preceding a short vacation with my family in which we leave on February 4^th.  So I really only have three more weeks left at home.

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Today, and coincidentally on Martin Luther King Day, I want to share with you quite a new experience I have had over the last six weeks since I arrived back in New York. One that I did not need to travel barely beyond my backdoor.

You probably have seen that throughout my trip in Africa I began to help a few artists, non profits, and organizations build and manage their own website. I currently call this service “Café Avra Productions”.  My goal was to assist those who could never afford to have their own website, or even take a class to learn how to make one, with creating and managing their own blog/website to use for whatever purposes necessary.  To view a few from my Africa trip please see: https://cafeavra.org/cafe-avra-productions/

When I first arrived back to New York, I was speaking to a good friend and talented colleague of mine, John Moreno. Originally from Colombia, currently based in Queens, John, who amongst many endeavors, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Latino Youth for Higher Education Program which, through workshops, tutoring, mentorship programs (etc) helps to promote college awareness and success to minority students in New York, especially those of Latino origin and new to the United States.

Please do check their website : http://www.lyheprogram.org/

I was telling John how I started to teach blogs/websites in Kenya/Uganda and how amazing it is when I see my students begin to update their websites themselves, get really creative with the appearances, and really take initiative in the process. Also, it seemed that the experience of creating the website was almost therapeutic for the student, especially when working with refugees. Keep in mind though I was working on a one-on-one basis, not in a classroom setting.

He asked me if I was interested in possibly doing an after school program at one of the schools he provides services to, The Pan American High School in Elmhurst, Queens. The student population is Latino high school students who mostly arrived in the country within the last year and do have a problem getting accustomed to the US education system, the English Language, and can have trouble with their social skills. Most are from Colombia, Dominican Republic and Ecuador.

I thought it would be quite the challenge and almost an experiment;  first to actually teach a class in a High School which I have never done before. And also, just arriving backing from Kenya, to see the differences between working with Latino Youth from quite poor countries versus those in Africa. How similar would their engagement be in this technical, creative process?

I ended up doing 7 after school sessions and had about 15-20 students throughout the course. Some dropped out, or couldn’t make it to every class due to other commitments, loss of interest, or even part-time jobs.

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I now invite you to meet some of my students

Despite the language barrier, and a few technical difficulties in the beginning, the class went quite well.

I taught my students how to create an appearance for the blog, how to upload photos and videos, create pages, and most importantly create your own style.

I was very very impressed with their computer skills and creativity. Obviously some of the students were a bit faster than others, but all had email addresses’ already, quickly understood the concepts of posting, creating pages, and uploading photographs. Compared to a few of my students in Africa, and maybe due to the time already spent in the United States, all my students I could consider tech-saavy.

Some of their English skills are a bit weak, so it was a challenge to write longer posts in English, but I am glad to have pushed them and I was impressed how quick they got the wordpress.com system in English.

Last Thursday (January  13th, 2011) was our last class and we had four students compete in a competition on who had the best website based on the following criteria:

Creativity

Enthusiasm

Effort

They were required to have a post on how their Christmas was this year, a page on their country, and a page titled “About Me”.

Additional posts and pages were encouraged!