Who Am I Becoming?

This is  a group portrait from Art and Consciousness, one of the College & Career Intensives that students have the opportunity to select at Brooklyn Generation School.  This month-long, seminar-style, credit-bearing class was held for 10th grade students from October 31 to November 23, 2011.  Students identified their personal strengths, charted their life stories, and created maps of their futures. Every student responded to a professional photographic portrait by Cara Howe by writing a letter about what they saw when they viewed their own portrait. This letter answered three questions: Where I’m from, Who I really am? and Who am I becoming?  Students incorporated elements of their letters in vibrant collages, which will be featured in a gallery exhibit in 2012.

Our Intensives were featured in Time Well Spent: Eight Powerful Practices of Successful, Expanded-Time, a report issuedin September 2011 by the National Center on Time & Learning, Furman Brown and Generation Schools joined the National Center and the Harvard Graduate School of Education for an extraordinary gathering on the power of expanded learning time to prepare students for college and career success in Boston on October 25-26.

Generation Schools was also one of ten community-based organizations across New York State that received a $50,000 College Access Challenge Grant (CACG) to help low income students at Brooklyn Generation obtain a college degree. CACG grants were awarded by the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation (HESC). HESC is New York State’s student financial aid agency, helping people pay for college and is a national leader in providing need-based grant and scholarship award money to college-going students.