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Arts for Learning Shares Stories of the African American Heritage Trail

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Screenshot from African American Heritage Trail video

Laced with compelling stories of the real-life triumphs and struggles of African-Americans, a new video produced by Arts for Learning (A4L) is set to debut in Norfolk Public Schools. The African American Heritage Trail highlights times of historical interest in the Lower Norfolk area, now part of modern-day Chesapeake, from the 1500s through the early 1900s.

Master storyteller Sheila Arnold, a longtime member of the Arts for Learning roster of professional artists, developed the program by researching the history of the area, writing the script, and working with an A4L production team to record the video. The project was underwritten by Bank of America.

Why did some African Americans fight for the British in the Revolutionary War? Why did slaves flee to the Great Dismal Swamp? And how did a unique ship design—and stripping down to her underwear—help one unforgettable slave escape to freedom? The answers are fascinating and can be found by watching the video, which includes stories related to the American Revolution, Underground Railroad, Civil War, and Reconstruction. The culturally responsive content is aligned with Virginia Standards of Learning for grade five.

Arnold, who goes by “Ms. Sheila” as a storyteller, believes the program is important even beyond telling stories of the African Americans who helped shape the history of the Tidewater area.

Bigger than that, it looks at a continuum, which is often not looked at in history, looking at what happens in a particular place over time.”

“Kids really don’t get a continuum, and that’s why they get confused and ask if Harriet Tubman knows Martin Luther King,” Arnold says. “I hope it will lead to teachers and students wanting to know what happened over time in their own areas and with other ethnic groups as well.”

For the 2021-2022 school year, NPS fifth grade teachers have exclusive access to the video, which is divided into five segments for easy classroom implementation. Teacher guides to facilitate discussion are included for each segment. A4L is providing the video at no charge to the thirty-one NPS elementary or combined elementary/middle schools, which have more than 2,100 fifth graders enrolled.

Arnold and the A4L staff designed the program in collaboration with Norfolk Public Schools’ history/social studies specialist Christopher Mathews, a former teacher of the year at Bay View Elementary School who is also on the A4L artist roster. The African American Heritage Trail features curricular connections to American history, character education, language arts, and reading.

Arts for Learning’s CEO, Christine Everly, calls Arnold’s program one of the best that the organization has ever offered. “We’re thrilled to offer stories few have ever heard before about the important contributions of African Americans with ties to our area. And we’re very grateful to our sponsor, Bank of America, for providing us the financial support to develop this important project.”

The Chesapeake Convention and Visitor’s Center has developed a driving tour and podcast along the African American Heritage Trail, as well as a brochure that describes the points of interest along the route. The Center is providing free brochures to all NPS students who view the video in their classes.

Watch the trailer of the video here:

 

 

New Stories from a Favorite A4L Storyteller

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She’s back, and we couldn’t be happier. After a three-year tour in England, Arts for Learning storyteller Sarah Osburn Brady returned to Virginia in August, her art and her connections to the storytelling community deepened by the experience.

Sarah and her family—daughters who are now eleven and eight and a pediatrician-husband whose transfer to Royal Air Force Lakenheath prompted the move to England—are now living in McLean, Virginia, forever changed by their time in the U.K. Sarah calls her three years there “a gift,” with highlights including being part of the Cambridge Storytellers group and “being able to travel and walk the landscape of so many stories, both historical and traditional, as well as literary stories.”

She believes her storytelling has changed, thanks to new insight she discovered while living abroad.

I think sometimes whenever we grow and change as people, it allows us to bring new things to our art form, and there’s something definitely that will make growth and change happen whenever you move to another country.”

Sarah first explored joining Young Audiences/Arts for Learning more than a decade ago while working as a professor of theater and communications at Hampton University. After the birth of her first child, she joined the roster, partnering with another acclaimed A4L storyteller, Sheila Arnold, with programs on the civil rights movement and two “women of freedom,” Harriet Tubman and Ellen Craft. Sarah also developed solo programs including Poetry and Jabberwockies, which celebrates the rhythm and rhyme of language through classic poems and nonsense words.

As both a performing artist and teaching artist, Sarah’s storytelling isn’t easy to characterize.

“I’m not a storyteller who tells just one type of stories. I tell historical, literary, and traditional stories, along with a smattering of personal stories and tall tales. I find that I do a lot of those different things. My style varies according to the story I’m telling, according to the needs of the program, according to the audience, all of those pieces.”

When she’s developing new programs, Sarah says there are some stories “that won’t let you go, that sit bubbling with you and then punch you in the shoulder until you let them out. Then there are other stories that, because we’re working artists, we get handed.” One of the stories she got “handed” in England was on Thomas Paine, the writer of Common Sense, after she was asked to create a special program about him for a festival. She wasn’t excited about it until she dug into months of research and discovered she found him “fascinating.”

Sarah tells stories related to Thomas Paine as part of a festival in Thetford, England.

“I often tell my husband that almost any subject, if you find the right way in, you can find that it’s fascinating,” Sarah says. “The first time I performed that program, there was a woman who came up to me and said, ‘I thought this was going to be boring, but you made it interesting.’ And that is part of my goal as a storyteller—to take whatever subject I’m telling stories about, whatever program I’m doing, and invite people in, even if they don’t think they’re going to be interested. It’s amazing to me how storytelling can help people be interested in ideas and clarify subjects that people thought they weren’t interested in or thought were confusing or thought were extra complex.”

Sarah previews a new choose-your-own adventure storytelling program on Zoom.

Being back at Arts for Learning in the middle of a pandemic means Sarah is developing programs that can work virtually. A new program, “More Than True: Folk and Fairy Tales with Character,” features a choose-your-own adventure approach that allows students to interact with her live and help decide character and plot details.

Sarah is also developing a new program focused on the stories of women who resisted tyranny during the world wars. We’ll share details soon!

Moving back to the United States during a pandemic hasn’t necessarily been easy for Sarah and her family, but she says there are good parts along with the difficult parts.

“One of the beautiful things is that Zoom and other platforms are allowing for there to be a comfort with and an ease of communication at a distance. So in some ways, it’s almost like we haven’t really moved because there’s regular contact with people in the UK and with the storytelling community there, so there are lots of good things.”

We’d call it 100 percent good for Arts for Learning to have Sarah back with us. Contact us at programs@Arts4LearningVA.org if you’re interested in booking one of Sarah’s programs, which you can explore by clicking here.  All are available in a virtual format.

Covid-19: Hard Times and Hope for Arts for Learning

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Virginia’s stay-at-home order has changed all of our lives, in many different ways. For Arts for Learning, the impact has been profound.

For students who love our programs, there’s great disappointment. Sixth-grader Myla Stith can’t play the violin this spring because the Strings Impact program was canceled. “I was hoping I could get really good. After all these years, I wanted to show what I could do, so I’m pretty sad about it.”

The Rhythm and Me adaptive dance program was cut short for kids like Naomi Morgan, a fourth-grader with autism spectrum disorder. “She was getting the dance steps down, she was having a ball, she was having fun,” says her mother, Monica Morgan. “It was sad it ended so abruptly because she was really getting into it.”

It’s hard times for many artists on our roster too. “As a fulltime storyteller, with my backup job being substitute teaching, I’m completely out of work at this point,” says Via Goode, A4L teaching artist. Via is one of 38 teaching artists on our roster who are losing more than $42,000 in income because of program cancellations that have affected more than 16,000 students and 2,800 educators.

As a nonprofit organization, Arts for Learning is hurting. We don’t receive money from programs when schools are shut down. And that means we’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars that we need to keep our nonprofit afloat—money that we use to pay our artists and staff, our rent and electric bill, and everything else that keeps our business running.

Our artists and our staff have stepped up to create Take 10, new digital programming for home-schooling students that’s both fun and educational. It’s also a way for us to offer small amounts of pay to our participating artists. But here’s the problem—we don’t receive any money for producing Take 10. Since it brings in zero revenue to Arts for Learning, we can’t keep on doing it without new funding.

That’s why we need YOUR help. We want to keep providing arts education to Virginia’s kids, but we can’t do it alone. Any amount helps—will you give $10 to Take Ten? Use this link—all donations are tax deductible.