The mission of Humanities Amped is to model and share transformative educational practices that result in people’s power to shape their world. Since 2014, Humanities Amped has worked with teachers and students in East Baton Rouge Parish Public School classrooms to implement approaches that nurture belonging, kindle social responsibility, and root academic standards in creativity and problem solving. Through our current residency at Tara High School, Humanities Amped is impacting a high-needs campus that serves over 900 students.
Across the nation, 30% of high school students don’t even make it to graduation. This tragedy is the direct result of many teenaged youth feeling disconnected from school, both interpersonally and academically. When students’ voices, concerns, and interests are not considered an important part of what happens in classes, they are taught to feel that they don’t matter and that school doesn’t matter. School disconnection for marginalized youth is an egregious missed opportunity: a recent CDC study on youth well-being and the crisis of youth mental health reports that school connectedness is a very powerful protective factor with a long-lasting impact on development into adulthood.
Humanities Amped directly addresses these systemic shortcomings in education by creating in-school conditions that call students into challenging, meaningful learning that is sustained through supportive relationships. On the campus of Tara High School (69% Black, 23% Hispanic; 22% English Language Learners; 100% Title I population), Humanities Amped offers a dynamic ecosystem of supports and interventions, including youth leadership development, connection to resources for students and families, and restorative responses to conflict. In Amped classrooms, Amped and Tara educators partner to facilitate civically engaged project-based learning that synthesizes creative and academic practices to strengthen community and student accountability.
When Ben [pseudonym] began his Humanities Amped Dual Enrollment Communications class, he was disengaged. He spent class scrolling on his phone instead of connecting with the course material, his peers, or his teachers. In his words, “when I have my off days I just feel like I don’t want to communicate with nobody, I just want to be in my own bubble.” As the HA educators in his class worked to reach Ben, he came to realize two things: the course content offered authentic meaning to his life, and his teachers genuinely cared for him. In an interview, Ben explained, “I saw that they cared. [...] I really saw that they helped.” He also “started to notice we were going over things that we use everyday. I didn’t really think of the class as a grade, I thought of it as a way to better myself. And as I was [...] getting all my assignments in, making A’s, I started to notice that I was really actually communicating better.”
Because Humanities Amped approaches center the combination of belonging and meaningful learning, Amped students are more likely to stay in, finish, and thrive in school. Four years of data have shown that Humanities Amped students graduate at a 30% higher rate than their peers, effectively closing the graduation gap. For Ben, this dynamic approach meant that he “started to actually get interested, and my phone was always up. [What interested me was] the fact that it helped me better. As a human and all.” Ben’s story demonstrates that connectedness at school is possible for young people, and that the targeted interventions applied by Humanities Amped can powerfully transform students’ learning experiences.