For Your School
Start a MAPS program at your school! MAPS is all about bringing poets and musicians together from different backgrounds and life experiences to write and perform complete songs. The poetry students spend a semester studying college-level poetry while writing their own poems. These poems are inspired by their “life stories,” derived from real...
In the Press
Performing Arts Charter students find song inspiration in personal poems The Daily Hampshire Gazette Created 04/19/2012 By StevePfarrer First came a quartet – three female singers and a guy strumming an acoustic guitar – singing lyrics about “heading up into the clouds.” Next was a short instrumental workout among...
What We Do
The MAPS program is structured to teach students a combination of skills. MAPS classes help students: write in-depth, expressive poetry and music with well conceived structure. access their emotional selves in order to find “the truth” in their works of art. cooperate with one another, crossing over racial, geographic, and socio-economic...
About
Music and Poetry Synchronized (MAPS) teaches 7th through 12th grade students from different geographic, socioeconomic and cultural background to write poetry and music, in preparation for a public concert at the end of the program term. Each MAPS class runs throughout a semester with one group of students creating poetry from their life stories, and the other group uses these poems as lyrics for the songs they write.
MAPS is in its thirteenth year of operation and expanding its program outreach to rural and urban schools in more cities and states. MAPS continues to be directed by the original vision and mission of bringing diverse students together from different cities and states to create poetry and music together. The four MAPS teachers are Felix Rivera and Davinna Thrower (poetry teachers, at the Urban Assembly School for Green Careers/Innovation Diploma Plus – UAGC in Manhattan) and Matthew King and Rahul Roy (songwriting teachers, Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School – PVPA in South Hadley, Massachusetts).
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