Image courtesy of Elbenrey Capule

Dr. Sabba Quidwai calls up students to share their group’s rose, buds, and thorns representations with the others.

The Arts Student Union is an SAUSD program with the mission of fueling creativity and the arts in students. The program brings different students from different schools together to talk about the importance of arts in their community and how they can make a positive impact through the arts for future generations.

On January 18, high school students from different high schools including Segerstrom, Godinez, and Valley High School were gathered at the district office for ASU’s first meeting of the year. The students were introduced to the program, its mission statement, and the main question:  How can you make a positive impact on your community through the arts?

With this question in mind, students were put in groups and individually had to describe in one word how they felt about the future of the arts. They were provided with Play-Doh to create a sculpture representing their one word. After individually making their sculpture, each student had to put a part of it in the middle to create a ‘big picture’ along with their group mates and share with the other groups how the big picture describes the future of arts.

Students were also introduced to the Focus Your Ideas app, which is going to be used for the next few meetings. FYI, which was founded by rapper will.i.am and actor Sunil Reddy, focuses on training AI to fuel creativity to its users and help them manage their projects more effectively. This, however, has not managed to convince some students as the use of AI in arts is something they find worrying.

“I felt like it was more AI taking over instead of doing it yourself. It’s more of if you have questions for something you want to do, you just have to ask the AI and it will give you results instead of discussing and doing it together with your team to try to come up with the ending result,” Jasmine Martinez (12) says. “I think the only way I would feel more comfortable with AI is to use it more often, but even then I would feel like I’m just trying to put up with it.”

Using AI for the wrong purposes is a form of plagiarism and many people are concerned that this technology can potentially replace human artists. This challenges people in the arts community to work with AI and use it as a tool. The ASU hopes to inspire students to use AI to their advantage while still recognizing that artificial intelligence cannot take the place of authentic creativity.

Two art advocacy speakers were present during the meeting, including Tiana Day, founder of Youth Advocates for Change, a non-profit organization that allows youth voices to have their own creative space and make social change through the arts, and Dr. Sabba Quidwai, who introduced students to the design sprint.

The design sprint allowed students to think about ideas of a rose, a thorn, and a bud. A rose represents something that is working in the arts, a thorn depicts something that isn’t working, and a bud, an area of opportunity to improve arts as a whole.

Mrs. Owens, Segerstrom’s drama teacher, chaperoned this event for the first time. She shared her favorite part about this event and what she hopes the students will get to do in the future.

“My favorite part was the students getting to talk with and in front of each other, I think that was really good,” she says. “I remember a lot of students said they wanted more of a voice in what was going on at their school and in the community, so hopefully, this will provide them with an opportunity to make their voices heard and change things for the better.”

Owens also discusses what she hopes she can do to help her art students. “As a teacher, I could help the students by listening to them because if I don’t know what they want, it’s going to be hard for me to support them and help,” she explains. “It is the Arts Student Union after all so I want them to be able to have their voices heard. We have a lot of really creative, smart kids so if they have better ideas on an inclusive arts community, that starts with being inclusive to them and hearing what they want.”