Hot off the press! Dr. Yukako Ishimaru and her student mentor Erika Paris, a Secondary Education major at SRU, taught our Humanities Ladder students the art of calligraphy this week.

Learn more about the Humanities Ladder program here: www.humanitiesladder.org

It’s not just another Thursday at Aliquippa High School. That’s because the CPH’s Humanities Ladder program offered another new experience for program participants—Afro Colombian dancing.

SRU's Afro -Colombian Dance Company (headed by Dr. Melissa Teodoro) gave a presentation and dance demonstration to the students at Aliquippa so that they could observe some of the cultural concepts they studied during their Music and Dance Module. 

During the Music and Dance module, students discussed how music and dance are cultural products that tell or communicate information about the historical background of the peoples that created such cultural products. 

In the case of the Hispanic cultures, the presence of the historical links to European, Indigenous, and African cultures can be found in the music and the dances of different regions. For instance, students spent time discussing how the predominance of certain instruments in music and movements in the dances tell us a story of what cultures have had more impact in the region. Particularly, students discussed drums and call-and-response as elements that communicate strong African influence and how we find these elements as predominant in the cultures of the countries with Caribbean coasts. 

When the dancers from SRU spoke to the Aliquippa students, they mentioned the predominance of the drums and the call and response in the dances that they perform, which illustrated and reinforced the concepts they had explored in the classroom.

Check out the Aliquippa High School students dancing alongside the SRU students!