POMONA - Mallory Fehrensen, 20, has fond memories of a woman who taught her elementary-school class to “just say no.”
Fehrensen, who studies theater in education and community at Cal Poly Pomona, was so inspired by the person she calls “the tobacco lady” that she decided to base her senior project on the woman’s teachings.
“I decided to create a program that uses theater to educate children,” Fehrensen said.
She is the founder and director of Theatre Educating Children About Realistic Experiences, also called The CARE.
“The CARE is a preventative program that gives children a community to take part in that doesn’t involve violence or drug abuse,” she said.
The program works with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at the Success Through Awareness and Resistance day camp in La Puente. The group meets with fourth- through sixth-grade students Thursday mornings, using theater to teach them how to deal with everyday experiences.
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There are few places where you can get your hands dirty, draw or paint for most of the day, or act like a fairy, karate kid or frightened Indiana Jones.
But that’s exactly what goes on at the Summer Arts Academy at the Cal Poly Pomona Downtown Center, where nearly 60 youths are learning to express themselves through art, creative writing, music and theater.
The four-week academy, which started July 7, is all about igniting those creative fires in kids ages 7 to 16 - anything that’s free thinking, aesthetically pleasing, out of the box, artistic and spontaneous. Arts education can also improve students’ communication skills, interpersonal relationships and creative thinking.
For instance, students in the improvisational acting class are given a scene, and in a matter of minutes, six actors come together to recreate the Battle of the Bulge. Instead of Germans fighting the Allied forces, though, the young thespians’ battle include a fairy, karate kid, devil, boxer and cowardly Indiana Jones.
On Aug. 1, the summer program culminates with the fifth annual Showcase of Student Learning and Talent, where students will discuss their visual works and give performances from the movement, theatre and choral music classes. The show and reception begins at 5 p.m. Student art work will be on display at the Downtown Center gallery throughout the month of August.
No matter their background, all students can find commonality through art, says Jonnie Owens, director of community outreach in the College of Letters, Arts, & Social Sciences. It’s that kind of thinking, along with the “Respect each other” rule, that guides the academy and brings the best out of everyone.
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Dust off those reading glasses! Cal Poly Pomona has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to host The Big Read in Pomona this fall.
The Big Read gives communities the opportunity to come together to read, discuss and celebrate one of 23 selections from American and world literature. The Big Read in Pomona will focus on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird through a series of events in October and November. Last year, The Big Read in Pomona encouraged thousands to pick up Bless Me, Ultima.
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Rod Leveque, 2000 - Loves Riding and Writing
By Laurie McLaughlin, Poly Trends
His most recent race was the hardest he had ever done. “It was 55 miles through fire roads and trails in the Cleveland National Forest with approximately 11,000 feet of vertical elevation gain,” says Rod Leveque of the excruciating seven-hour trek. “To give that some context, it’s more than twice the distance of a marathon, through the wilderness, with an elevation gain equivalent to climbing the stairs of the Empire State Building 10 times over.”
Leveque competes in as many as 30 mountain-bike races a year, and last season, he won the state championship for an intermediate rider in his age group. He’s 5-foot-7 and currently weighs 145 pounds, but fewer than four years ago, he was pushing the scale at 200 pounds and hadn’t ridden his bike much since high school.
“I just decided I didn’t want to keep gaining weight, so I dusted off my 10-year-old bicycle and started riding again,” he says. “I took to it really well, and I lost more than 50 pounds.”
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Does anyone recall the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty during the 1990’s with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen when the Bulls had a strong all-around defense and six NBA championship titles to show for it? One of the reasons the imprint of the Bulls’ legacy is embossed in my mind is that it reminds me of a big part of my childhood and how I grew up watching every single game with dedication and passion. Michael Jordan became one of my top role models and a hero who represented motivation and perseverance — an example of how I wanted to live my life. I am currently president of the Men Against Violence group at Cal Poly Pomona. As a student club working within the Stop Violence Office, our group is concerned with peer education and assistance in dealing with issues of stalking, sexual assault, and dating and domestic violence. One of the areas where our group differs from the T.E.A.A.R. (The Education Against Abusive Relationships) theatre group on campus is that we focus on the men’s side of the partner violence problem. The Men Against Violence group at Cal Poly Pomona concentrates on the research that explains why males commit 98 percent of all reported sexual assaults in this country (according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics) and the fact that most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows. With these problems in our society continuing to occur all around us, sometimes I find myself getting overwhelmed from all of it and, at times, am hard-pressed to strive for change. So how did I get into this field, and why do I continue to invest my time? I actually get that question more times than I can count and whether the specific answer I give makes perfect sense, it is by looking at a few levels of my background that the response becomes clear.
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