Dickens Day: A new Victorian Tradition for South Los Angeles high school students
Dickens Day at South LA!
Foshay Learning Center 12.18.2014
Photos by dickensdayfoshay@blogspot.com Blog Team
View more photos at: DickensDay Foshay Photo Album
Lucia Godoy (17) served butter cookies while Belen Espinosa (17) discussed the semicolon as part of their senior projects for Dickens Day, a campus-wide celebration of their study into Dickens’ works and the 19th century. These South LA students attending Foshay Learning, along with their peers, brought their school to aVictorian world. 150 Dickensian ambassadors in costume roamed the school with “Ask Me” buttons on anything from Dicken’s use of the semicolon to the Poor Laws to the status of women in 19th century England. Students sipped Earl Grey tea and received a lesson on Tea Etiquette (pinkies down!) at the Grand Victorian Tea Party while designing “animechanicals”, making chalk skeletons, “tagging” themselves with Dickensian graffiti and getting 200 students to read Dickens out loud at the lunchtime quote-a-thon. A London Bridge mosaic mural (a collaborative project about the symbolic meaning of bridges) was not falling down while PopArt Galleries went up around campus with student work based on readings of Martin Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities. A Dickens Victorian basket was raffled and staff, administrators and parents mingled in general Dickensian good cheer.
USC NAI Theater Workshop, a student literature-based performing arts company joined in the festivities—reprising their costumes from their 2013 production of A Christmas Carol as they recited famous lines from the beloved work: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
Dickens Day marks a first for these AP English literature students as they get ready to take on a study of one of Dickens’ lesser known novels, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), this year’s Dickens Universe selection. They are a part of a new partnership with the Dickens Project, a scholarly consortium that mounts the Dickens Universe, the annual conference at UC Santa Cruz. Foshay students tacking hefty Victorian novels and writing about them gained the attention of the Dickens Project through the winning of the 2013 nationwide essay competition by two of their peers, Karen Molina and Kenia Coyoy. As a result, a new scholarship grant will guarantee four South LA teens attendance at the conference this year, along with books for the students who have committed each year to read and study the Dickens Universe annual book selections, this year also including Dickens’ controversial “quarrel with America” in his memoir American Notes (1842).
For many students at Foshay, also scholars at the USC Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), this will be the closest they have ever come to London, the Victorians or even to a novel of this length and time period. NAI students are from USC’s neighboring South Los Angeles communities and will be first in their families to attend college. The new partnership will cultivate the next generation of readers of Charles Dickens, and of readership in general, in keeping with the spirit of Dickens himself, whose innovations in serial publication helped popularize reading in unprecedented ways.
It was the best of times indeed here in the heart of LA-Thank you to all who are spearheading this growing appreciation of Dickens’ work and times in our school.
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