Bringing history to life: In partnership with UMSL, the new Living Arts Pathway enlivens classes at historic Sumner High School

Bringing history to life: In partnership with UMSL, the new Living Arts Pathway enlivens classes at historic Sumner High School

Mack Williams, a graduate research assistant in the History Department, helps a student with his National History Day project at Sumner High School. Williams teaches a new museum studies elective in which Sumner students explore personal and local history, create public exhibitions and learn career skills in museums and cultural heritage. (Photos by Derik Holtmann)

Mak Williams answers questions from all corners of Sumner High School’s lively classroom as he moves from table to table, project to project.

His students are engaged and working together in half a dozen rooms, while Williams lends a hand with their history projects, helping establish a timeline and searching through Sumner yearbooks from days gone by.

The space, a former art room, has been specially designed with an open layout to enable working in groups. It has also been transformed into a veritable multimedia production house, with two 3D printers on one wall, a computer bench on the other, a CNC router machine for making vector-based etchings in the corner and a back room converted into a studio for video and podcast recording.

“It’s unlike any other classroom in school,” Williams said. “It’s a different energy.”

It’s all part of the Living Arts Pathway, a new elective museum studies course in which Sumner students explore personal and local history, create public exhibitions and learn career skills in museums and cultural heritage. The course was born from a unique community partnership between 4theVille, a community-based cultural organization committed to safeguarding the legacy of The Ville neighborhood, and the Museums, Heritage and Public History graduate program at the University of Missouri- St. Louis.

The course, part of a broader Arts Pathways program at the high school, helps breathe new life into the nearly 150-year-old institution and center of black life in St. Louis — an institution that was founded just a few years ago. was on the edge of the abyss. closure.

A new beginning

Sumner High School holds a notable place in local and national history as the first high school west of the Mississippi River to educate black students. During the 20th century, the institution produced numerous cultural celebrities such as Arthur Ashe, Chuck Berry and Tina Turner.

Despite its importance, the school was in danger of closing its doors in 2020 due to low enrollment. Two 4theVille co-founders, Julia Allen and Thomasina Clarke, were frustrated by that possibility and decided to take action. As Sumner alumni and lifelong residents of The Ville – the historically Black neighborhood surrounding the school’s Cottage Avenue campus – they recognized its cultural and symbolic importance.

“I have yet to tell a Black history story that doesn’t somehow run through The Ville,” said Aaron Williams, co-founder and chairman of 4theVille.

4theVille rallied local arts and cultural organizations, most notably the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, to petition the City of St. Louis Board of Education to spare the school. The group wrote the Sumner High School Recovery Proposal, which proposed injecting arts enrichment programs into the school as a means to increase enrollment and student engagement. The school board ultimately approved the plan for the 2021-2022 academic year, and the Sumner Advisory Board was formed to oversee the school transformation.

“We had to establish that program at the beginning of the second school year,” Williams explains.

He enlisted Lara Kelland, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor in Museum Studies and Community History at UMSL, to help guide the development of the Living Arts Pathway. The pair brought in Mack Williams, a graduate research assistant in the History Department, to finalize the curriculum and teach the course to Sumner.

A promising start

Mack Williams was convinced that he could attract students to museum studies by connecting with them on a personal level, and he was right. The course’s popularity grew through word of mouth during its first year, and the class list was soon filled. The inaugural cohort also saw early success.

“For our first year, we entered seven projects for National History Day, and five of those seven placed in the top five in their respective categories,” he says. “Our students have the confidence to enter this space this year where they know they belong. They know they can do it well. They have a good track record and we have the experience to build on.”

Artifacts and photos of tennis star and Sumner High School alum Arthur Ashe Museum are on display in a locker exhibit at the high school. Five lockers are dedicated to prominent alumni and are equipped with plexiglass and lighting. The displays include photographs, documents from the school archives, digital videos and digital story cards accessible via QR codes.

Due to student demand, Williams is teaching two sections this year: a beginner class with 15 students and an intermediate class with 20 students. He adds that he hasn’t had a single disciplinary issue in his class in a year and a half.

Those results are no coincidence. They arise from the high expectations that Williams sets for his students early on, which are further reflected in the lesson motto: ‘Excellence as expected.’ Director Ronda Wallace has witnessed the transformative effect of that approach.

“It definitely had an impact on bringing out their natural talents,” Wallace said. “It also played a role in our increased enrollment and our decrease in discipline because they are really focused on the research. They are focused and get excited. Once you offer a program that gets students excited, magic happens.”

An inside-out approach

The Living Arts Pathway curriculum is carefully designed to develop student buy-in. Williams says he has identified an “inside-out approach” that starts with a family history project and gradually expands student outreach into the community.

“Each project then increases its exposure,” says Williams. “One of the areas we wanted to focus on to help facilitate that was genealogy, so we explored the connections between the students and their family journey to get here and made the correlation between that and the Great Migration as part of the larger African American experience. We also started working on projects that linked them to the history of the school.”

The students have been given the opportunity to find new and innovative ways to preserve Sumner’s legacy. One of their first successful efforts was to redesign Sumner’s “Hall of Fame” – a hallway with portraits of famous alumni.

“I took our students out into the hallway to look at those portraits, and I challenged them to reexamine what they would do to better understand who these people are and to better express that by honoring them in the hallways,” Williams said. . “We brainstormed that idea and came up with the idea of ​​preserving the legacy of our Hall of Fame alumni by converting unused lockers into museum exhibit spaces.”

Five lockers are dedicated to prominent alumni and are equipped with plexiglass and lighting. The displays include photographs, documents from the school archives, digital videos and digital story cards accessible via QR codes. Sophomore Romell Calhoun enjoyed using artifacts related to Ashe, Turner and Grace Bumbry to tell their stories and says the project opened his eyes to how many great people came from Sumner.

Students have also begun compiling an oral history archive, recording interviews with Sumner alumni from all walks of life. Senior Zea’Neya Rhone loves conducting interviews and has embraced her role as a documentary filmmaker.

“This course helps me see the perspective of Sumner alumni,” she says. “You can write your own history while learning about history.”

Mack Williams helps a student with a project about Sumner High School alum Warren Bass, the first Black Baton Twirler at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The interviews also provided Jordan Stewart with the opportunity to develop his skills as a photographer and videographer.

“I didn’t expect to learn how to use a camera like I know now,” he says. “I’m a jack of all trades here. I do everything. I have recorded interviews; I took some nice pictures.”

Students are also free to explore individual passions through their National History Day projects. They have the opportunity to create a documentary video, visual exhibition, research paper, performance or website for the annual competition. The topics range widely, from the legacy of influential rapper 2Pac to Calhoun’s project about the untold story of a black scientist who began developing rocket schematics in the 1920s.

Through telling these stories, students develop valuable, transferable skills and begin to see a place for themselves in the field of museum studies and beyond. For many, studying has become not only a reality, but also an expectation.

Calhoun says understanding the history of Sumner High School inspires him to pursue his goal of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study aerospace engineering.

“It made me feel like I can really do something with my life,” Calhoun says. “It was people that came from Sumner, and then I’ll be someone that ends up being from Sumner. So that means I have a chance to make it and make a big impact on the world, just like the people before me did.”