Please congratulate Foshay students and NAI Scholars, Karen Molina and Kenia Coyoy, who are the first LAUSD students to have won the nationwide 9th Annual Dickens Project essay competition. As winning students, they will be travelling this week to the 2014 Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz with all expenses paid.
View this mini-documentary that was made about their classroom study of Dickens’ last novel,
Our Mutual Friend: http://youtu.be/9Qoilrlmw4U
Their essays have been published at the Dickens Project website and will be circulated for discussion by the participants, which include faculty and graduate students from the Dickens Project institutions which include almost 40 major American and international universities.
Center of the Dickens Universe: South LA teens win nationwide Dickens essay competition
Los Angeles, California – August 1, 2014 – Karen Molina and Kenia Coyoy are South LA teens who are not swiping through the pages Facebook, but flipping through an 885-page Victorian novel. Karen, 17, and Kenia, 18, have won this year’s nationwide Dickens Project essay competition. The students will be attending the Dickens Universe this week at UC Santa Cruz where they will join faculty and graduate students from major American and international universities for a week long conference centered around one of Dickens’ work, this year’s selection being his last published novel, Our Mutual Friend.
The students, both students at Foshay (and USC NAI scholars), read the novel in a unit of study in their AP English classroom, marking a rare, if not unprecedented, occasion that
Our Mutual Friend has been read by high school students at their school site and South LA. First published as a 20-part monthly serial between 1864 and 1865, the novel presents an extensive cast of characters in twisting plotlines set in the waterways and dust heaps of a grim, money-obsessed London. Students, many first-time readers of Dickens (or any Victorian novel), developed their own essay focus and their teacher, Jacqueline Barrios, chose Karen and Kenia’s essays to represent their classmates in the contest, now in its ninth year. This is the first time LAUSD students have won the competition. As winning students, they will attend the 2014 Dickens Universe (August 3-9) with all expenses paid along with their teacher. Their classroom study of the novel is the subject of a mini-documentary that tracks their learning in the context of their own lives.
http://youtu.be/9Qoilrlmw4U
Jon Varese, director of the Dickens Project Digital Initiatives, said “We have been receiving essays from high school students for many years now, and this year's submissions from the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative truly rang out as outstanding. In fact, Molina's essay on the troubled place of women in Victorian society, and Coyoy's essay on the many forms of narrative deception, were amongst the finest essays we have ever seen in nearly a decade of essay submissions."
The winning essays are now published on The Dickens Project website, and will be circulated at the 2014 Dickens Universe for discussion by the conference's many enthusiastic participants. Karen’s essay is titled
British Independence, Rather Perverted: Betty Higden’s Problematic Independence in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Kenia’s essay is titled Duality of Deception in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.
http://dickens.ucsc.edu/scholarships/hs-students.html
The Dickens Project is a research consortium
of faculty and graduate students from major American and international universities. Founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, member institutions include the University of Southern California, all the UC campuses, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, NYU, among others. http://dickens.ucsc.edu
The USC NAI program is a college pathway program designed to prepare students in neighboring South Los Angeles communities around USC who would be first in their families to attend college. After successfully completing the program and graduating from Foshay this past June, Kenia will be starting her freshman year at UCLA while Karen will be attending the University of Southern California. https://communities.usc.edu/college-access/nai/
Contact:
Jacqueline Jean Barrios
University of Southern California
Neighborhood Academic Initiative
661 W. Jefferson Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
Phone: 213-743-1591
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