While Sierra "Sid" Porter and her classmates in a language arts class at Traverse City High School wrapped up their studio podcast, Interlochen Arts Academy students in an English as a Second Language class put the finishing touches on their radio drama.
Both projects were possible thanks to a recent grant from the Michigan Humanities Council.
Interlochen Arts Academy was awarded a $4,020 "Michigan People, Michigan Places...Our Stories, Our Lives" grant for the project, "Dr. William Beaumont, the Michigan Years."
"Michigan People, Michigan Places ... Our Stories, Our Lives" programs emphasize collaboration among cultural, educational and community-based organizations and institutions to develop Michigan public humanities programming.
The project was a collaboration between Marvine Stamatakis' ESL students and those in Mary Preston's language arts class at TCHS.
"It was a really good opportunity and I learned a lot," said Porter. "It gave us a lot of hands-on experience and it was way more diverse than just writing a research paper."
Porter, 18, was also so inspired by the project that she is now considering a career in radio broadcasting.
The students focused on the career of Beaumont from 1819 to 1833. Beaumont is best remembered for his experiments on the human digestive system. What makes his work controversial even today is that he performed his experiments on a live human subject named Alexis St. Martin.
Beaumont was an army surgeon at Fort Mackinac when he treated St. Martin for a gunshot wound to the stomach. St. Martin was left with a permanent hole and Beaumont began studying gastric juices by running a series of experiments on the man. One involved tying food to a silk string and dangling it through the hole into St. Martin's stomach.
The students at TCHS produced their podcast based on an evaluation of Beaumont's famous medical experimentation. The IAA students created and will perform an original radio drama based on the same story.
Stamatakis is the project director who applied for the grant. She has staged school radio dramas in the past, thanks to help from National Public Radio's Frank Stasio, who came to Interlochen for several years to work with students after she heard him discussing the dramas and asked him to come to Interlochen.
"I knew that kind of project would work with my students, so I emailed him and he said he would love to come. We did three projects with him."
Stamatakis said the radio dramas have been a great learning opportunity for her students.
"They're reading, writing, listening and speaking," she explained. "They learn a lot of content and apply it to a story."
Her students, like Preston's, learned about Beaumont's work through a variety of sources. Stamatakis invited a librarian from the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University, as well as a local doctor and a biology teacher who discussed the digestion process. They also read background material, she said.
Preston said she approached Stamatakis last year about collaborating in the future after watching a stage production by Stamatakis' students.
"I really liked it and I'm always looking for a different ways to teach a project," said Preston. "I also like the idea of collaboration a lot and knew our students are really creative and independent workers."
The TCHS students began their project by learning interview techniques as well as learning about Beaumont. Preston's students wrote up their questions, practiced interviewing and finally invited a historian, two ethicists and a nurse to the school to be interviewed.
The students looked at the contemporary ethical issues from both Beaumont's time and now, explained Preston.
"We asked them a big variety of questions and they were mostly ethical," said Porter, who is the podcast's narrator. "One of the things we wanted to know was if they felt it was right for Beaumont to experiment on him even for the sake of science."
Once all of the interviews were finished George Zarr, a producer and composer from New York, came to Traverse City and condensed their work into a half-hour show. He also worked with the ESL students on their drama.
"Our show sounds like a roundtable discussion," said Porter. "I'm really excited about it."
The Michigan Humanities Council awarded a total of $206,000 for 17 public humanities programs in 14 Michigan communities. It is the MHC's largest single grant disbursement period in at least 23 years in records dating to 1984.
For more information on the grants visit www.michiganhumanities.org. The Michigan Humanities Council, founded in 1974, is a private, non-profit organization funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
IAA students will perform their radio drama on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Dendros Chapel on the Interlochen campus. The public is encouraged to attend.
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