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EDUCATION
Bobbie Green, International High School of New Orleans
Yolanda Andrade, International High School of New Orleans
Iwan Leggins, L. B. Landry-O. P. Walker College and Career Preparatory High School
The other weekly session was spent at The Collection, learning from a total of eight different THNOC staffers. John H. Lawrence, director of museum programs, led the students through the Louisiana History Galleries as a way of discussing permanent, broad-overview exhibitions. Deputy Director Daniel Hammer introduced the students to the Reading Room and how to use it.
Then the students were given free rein to search the catalog and select a research topic of their own, to be developed into a final presentation and paper at the end of the semester.
“High-school students very rarely have any opportunity to engage in any clearly facilitated primary research, so this is great,” said Alexios Moore, BECNO’s academic director. “Certainly all of our students are headed to college, but developing a research interest this early is, I think, the difference between a student going to graduate school or not.”
Many of the students’ research topics seem destined for graduate theses. Savanna Brewer, a senior at International High School of New Orleans, focused on a lesser-known aspect of the work of photographer Clarence John Laughlin: his writing. Brewer had been going through Laughlin’s archived papers, searching for unpublished works to highlight in her research paper.
“I like that he tried poetry earlier in his career." BreweT said as she looked through Laughlin’s iconic Ghosts Along the Mississippi. "In the book, he’ll have one of his photographs and then he’ll have a paragraph next to it. A lor of his blurbs read like prose poems. They’re just beautiful.”
Senior Patrick Do, in searching THNOC’s catalog for a topic relating to pirates, found the papers of Dominique You (sometimes spelled as Youx). a privateer and lesser-known contemporary of Jean Lafitte. Do spent several Ktaoni at the WRC reading, in French, microfilm copies of the papers.
“His real name wasn’t ever actually released.* said Do. who is graduating from International High School of New Orleans. They gav* Lim a nickname. Captain Dominique. There’s really no general mninwut as so when he came from.
“I’ve never had a class where you lesvse canpw 10 p> do rararch somewhere else. You don’t stumble across this type of infonmbrui as	ar Google. I did Google it,
but everything that came up was from The Hi===»; Orleans Collection.”
Like any good researcher, student; lookn^a* net *e!i-known topics narrowed their focus to a specific angle: Darrell	a nuc: ^LB. Landry—O. P. Walker College
and Career Preparatory High SchooL	.he	hiranrr	of New Orleans Jazz and
Heritage Festival posters to study	ihrr — a jwmr local icons rather than more
abstract designs. (Fats Domino wa* th- £, j	featured on a Jazz Fest poster, in
1989, Howard said.) Bobbie Green, a fnimni ■inn and IfKcntational senior, studied Mardi Gras costume designer LMa	)«u	another Landry-Walker
student, researched a career-boosting pntaimng b* Vihalia Jackson, while Tyrone Clay, a senior at Sci Academy, deh^d i£S> ris= Lirpc liiir trfStorvville madam Lulu White.
Two students used their resrr—S pao^., io 6r_i mforasion about their own histories. Yolanda Andrade, an International Hi£$t Schoc*	f?und glimpses of her heritage
through the centuries in New Ork^> f:j«n a fis	Hi«^»«iic Confederate-army soldiers
to the early-1900s Spanish-ian^icr magume .Urmn*. "My project is basically to kind of break the myth that there wn r~ 1 ■ia.* hoc bfest Katrina,” she said. “They’re not all just carpenters and laborers.'
For Anton Brown, the meaich p nu tor- nm n-r. dofer to home: the senior dt New Orleans College Prep mLid jss-Kjt** «ebu,u;ng plan—the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP) report—for CaaBt. the neighborhood his family called home until Hurricane Katrina and the Inr:. breaches ttm them to Houston for five years. Brown, after living in Central Cuv his mnrn n> New Orleans, had just moved back to Gentilly and wansrd tk. learn how ius neighborhood had rebuilt itself.
“It’s like I’m discovering ■	Bnoo	aid.	—MOLLY	REID
12 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly


New Orleans Quarterly 2014 Summer (14)
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