Grappling with ethical issues ranging from the doctor-patient relationship to exploitation of the poor or minorities, students in Mary Preston's Integrated Language Arts class are gathering source material for a radio show.
Working with radio and media veteran George Zarr of Manhattan, they are providing the raw interviews for writing students at Interlochen Arts Academy. These English as a Second Language students will craft a play using the tapes as source material.
The interviews taped by the Traverse City High School students were initially going to be heavily edited into a short companion piece to the play. Zarr, impressed by the students' work both on the tape and behind the scenes, plans to incorporate them into the final radio show. The finished play will be taped and broadcast later this spring on Interlochen Public Radio.
"It was originally supposed to be a podcast but not when I'm around,” he said about upgrading the scope of the Traverse City High School students' contribution.
Guiding the Traverse City High School students through the intricacies of radio production, Zarr brought over professional equipment from Interlochen Public Radio for them to use. The students will visit Interlochen next month to tour the radio station, have lunch with the ESL students and then watch a practice session of the radio play.
They will be part of the project from beginning to end.
"These kids, when I come in the morning, they set up the equipment, that's professional stuff,” he noted of the equipment on loan from the radio station. "Anything I've thrown at them they've thrown right back at me.”
The play is taking shape and still untitled but the topic is compelling: Dr. William Beaumont's work in the 1820s and 1830s on Alexis St. Martin, a fur trader who had been shot in the stomach. The resulting hole provided a window into the body's workings for years and Beaumont used it to track, experiment on and document the digestive process.
Tackling such a complex subject is part of Interlochen instructor Marvine Stamatakis' vision; last year her ESL students wrote and produced a radio play about the 1937 sit down strike in Flint. On his third collaboration with Stamatakis, Zarr's writing and production guidance and expertise helps boost the ESL students' language and media skills.
The implications of Beaumont's work were not lost on Preston's students last week as they interviewed area professionals about the issue. On Thursday morning, Pamela Grath an instructor of Humanities at Northwestern Michigan College sat at the microphone as students peppered her with questions: would St. Martin have been a subject if he were rich? Why did St. Martin keep coming back?
"There's supposed to be some possible benefit to you,” said Grath in response to a passionate protest from senior Braden Brown that the experiments were exploitation. "Was the patient aware of this? It's interesting to look at the way we do things now and the way they did things in earlier times.”
Grath cautioned students that medical ethics were complex and the choices of both men stemmed from values, motivations and decisions lost to history.
"When we're making ethical judgements we really need as much information as we can get,” she added.
As for Preston, the project is win-win for her students, who get to experience a full spectrum of learning about both the topic as well as media production.
"I look for opportunities like this because I think students are really creative here,” she said.