Pathways to Arts & Humanities Summer Scholars Program

Join us for an introduction to rhythm tap dance, a percussive vernacular art form pioneered by Black Americans. Students will learn about tap’s rich history (including how tap intertwines with the historical development of jazz and the American stage and screen, and how tap’s current thriving pop, hip-hop, and jazz scenes emerged) and will use their feet to express themselves musically through beats and melodies. Tap shoes will be given to students and no dance experience is required.

Learn how to make soft sculptures combining sewing and assemblage while learning foundational painting techniques around the theme of rasquachismo. Embrace rasquache aesthetics, a term adapted during the Chicano/Mexican Art Movement which is “making the most from the least”, using materials and fragments from your own visual culture to create a new aesthetic.  No prior experience is necessary. Come play, construct, and paint!

What is a collage? Now more than ever, we live in a world where we interact with two dimensional images as much as we do with the physical world. Social media, billboards, that cool t-shirt your friend is wearing, all have images that are meant to advertise or signify something to the people who interact with them. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are emerging technologies that will only blur the boundaries between the image world and the real world even further. The best way to navigate this blended terrain is to create art that speaks to the digital world we find ourselves in and enhance our ability to navigate it. In this class we will learn the fundamentals of digital photography through hands-on training with digital cameras and planned photo walks. We will then learn a basic workflow in photoshop to both edit our pictures and begin building collages that allow individualized approaches to blending our physical realm with the image world. We will use images from the library of congress as a basis for creating a blend between these two spaces.

This workshop brings together the basics of 2 arts and humanities disciplines- literature and theater- to offer a fun and stimulating introduction to both. Students will examine literary texts, do creative writing and collaborative reading activities, and learn basic acting techniques to present the works.

This workshop focuses on examining how oral histories are collected and what they can and cannot tell us about the past. How can we use oral histories and personal testimonies to study two different historical racial regimes? What can we learn from comparing them? Through oral histories, students will explore how ideas about race in the Jim Crow United States and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were used to limit and deny the citizenship rights of Black Americans and German Jews. The key materials for this workshop come from Yale’s Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Testimonies.

This dynamic workshop draws from ongoing research that recovers the essential role of Black people throughtout Yale and New Haven history. It puts back at the center of local storytelling people who have always been central to local history and celebrates Black community building, resistance, and resilience on campus and in New Haven.

Explore how storytelling extends beyond the page, blending words with performance, multimedia, and digital tools. Write poetry and short stories using experimental techniques, mixing languages, sounds, and visual elements. Finally, collaborate with other students to create a digital anthology hosted on GitHub and learn about basic HTML and digital publishing.

This workshop introduces themes and styles of contemporary American poetry with a focus on summer as a motif. Students will engage in reflective and creative writing exercises that draw inspiration from summer’s imagery and emotions.