Lafayette International High School
About Lafayette International High School
Located on the West Side of Buffalo, Lafayette International High School serves a student body comprised entirely of immigrants and refugees who have arrived in the United States within four years of enrollment.
As part of the Buffalo Public Schools (BPS) system and a member of the non-profit International Network for Public Schools, Lafayette is an innovative school that’s designed to serve the needs of English Language Learners and offer them the high quality instruction that will prepare them for post-secondary education.
The Challenge
Lafayette offers a wide variety of academic programs for its students. But officials in the BPS art department felt there was room to expand the school’s offering to include a minor in filmmaking.
All students at Lafayette are immigrants or refugees, each with a unique perspective and a story to tell. Giving them the tools to tell those stories could facilitate connections with others and ease their social integration. Importantly, it could also give students both the academic and emotional tools to empathize with others and find the value in each person and their individual story.
The Problem
As with anything new, we felt it important to explore the idea and its roots to arrive at the core truth it was trying to convey. We don’t believe in seeking answers; we find it more valuable to seek questions.
To that end, we collaborated with officials in the BPS art department to understand what a minor in filmmaking would mean in the context of the Lafayette experience. What should students get out of it? Would each student be required to take courses in the minor, even if they didn’t see it through to completion? How could the curriculum align with the reality that students live, especially when viewed through the lens of social media and its pressures?
Finally, we sought to understand the idea from a functional standpoint. What filmmaking subjects should the curriculum touch upon? How could those concepts be taught in an engaging way? And how would the curriculum be constructed?
The Approach
Our approach is, at its core, collaborative. We worked with officials in the BPS art department on a qualitative deep dive that revealed the true intent of the program: To give students the knowledge to not only decode video messages but to create audiovisual works as expressions of their ideas or visions of life. Students would be given a conceptual understanding of how to create documentaries, short films, YouTube series, stop motion pieces, and videos for Instagram Story.
We knew that Lafayette already offered its students access to a rich store of classes in subjects like painting, composition, writing, photography, and 2D design—all means through which the students could express themselves.
To craft the new filmmaking curriculum, we drew heavily on those class experiences to build a cohesive experience that enabled students to systematically and creatively put to use the tools they had already learned. With that as a foundation, we expanded the curriculum to introduce a different medium—video—and showed the students how to leverage knowledge gleaned from prior coursework and pair it with cameras, sound, editing, acting, producing, and directing to tell impactful stories.
Throughout the curriculum, we included detailed exercises tailored specifically to meet the needs of this student population and help them develop the hard and soft skills they would need to be successful in higher education and their future careers.
The Result
We gave Lafayette officials a custom curriculum designed to develop technical skills in a student population with specific but diverse needs. Our custom curriculum, which launched in 2020, provided an outlet for each student’s innate creativity as a means to maximize their self-confidence and empower them to express themselves. We’re proud to have created a curriculum that enables students to bring their ideas and insight to life—even if they’re shy or a non-native English speaker—and become a powerful source of inspiration for others.