Nyasha Warren

Ed.M. AIE '05

Doing Four or Five Things at Once

Before coming to HGSE to study in the Arts in Education Program, Panamanian alumna Nyasha Warren had already spent plenty of time in North America, and she had already been in the habit of putting her complementary interests in the arts and sciences to good educational use too.

The daughter of Caribbean-born parents who both studied on scholarships in the United States, Nyasha majored in biology at Oberlin College in Ohio. After graduation, she worked in cancer research in New York for a few subsequent years, and concurrently became involved with the New Song Community afterschool program in Harlem. “New Song is an arts-based program,” she explains, “that welcomes people from the community to share their skills and knowledge with kids in the context of creative arts.”

That’s where she first took the opportunity to teach kids about science through a variety of art projects.
 
During her year in the HGSE Arts in Education Program, Nyasha took the opportunity to study in more depth the multidisciplinary applications of the arts, yoking her seemingly disparate interests for the eventual benefit of young students. In her spare time, she worked on projects for the Museum of Science and New England Aquarium, where she included visual and language arts in a curriculum project about fish. And in her spare time, she enjoyed the lively and creative fellowship of such AIE student artist-educators as Tony Day and Dana Caffee-Glenn and the arts-related courses of Shari Tishman, Roger Dell, and Steve Seidel.

As hoped, Nyasha has offered the benefit of her experiences to young students since her return to Panama City. “I have been trying to incorporate the arts as much as I can in my work as a middle school science teacher at a private school,” she notes, describing one lesson that includes choreographed movement between classrooms in a lesson about osmosis and another that includes a sort of costumed square dance to illustrate the theory of genetic recombination.

When the school day ends, Nyasha doesn’t stop. First she goes off to tutor children in English. “It’s a good way to work more closely with children than I can in a big classroom,” she explains. In the evening she dances — in performance at parks and other public venues — with Umoja (Swahili for “unity”), a troupe that does traditional West African dances (Ghanian, Guinean, and Liberian) like those the newly arrived Africans were doing in Panama 500 years ago. And on weekends, well—she turns to her volunteer work for the West Indian Museum, where she organizes activities for young visitors and produces the museum’s newsletter.

“I’m doing like three things at once,” she says cheerfully enough, with no audible trace of exhaustion in her voice. In truth, she seems to be doing more like four or five things at once. “I forgot to add that I am also the on-site coordinator for a documentary project called Voices from Our America©2006, directed by Prof. Ifeoma Nwankwo of Vanderbilt University. This project is really exciting since we are recording the evolution of the West Indian Panamanian experience over many generations.”

Those many generations include quite a few of Nyasha’s own ancestors — their manual labor on or near the Panama Canal as it was being dug and their professional   work in the sciences for the society that has grown from the project. (Stories for another day.)