Visual & Performing Arts High School in Buffalo, NY

Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts (BAVPA):
The Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts, also known as BAVPA, is a magnet performing arts high school in New York State & is part of Buffalo's public school system. The school offers classes for Grades 5 to 12 and requires students to apply (as if for a job) in the field of their desired "major concentration". Majors taught in the school are Visual Art, Television and Film Production, Dance, Theater, and Music (vocal or instrumental). The Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts was founded as a part of the desegregation program in 1977. The goal was simple: provide an exciting college preparatory program for students in the arts and academics that will attract students from all parts of the city of Buffalo, NY.

Subjects offered at The Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts include:

Biology; Earth Science; Chemistry; Environmental; Physics; AP Environmental; AP Biology; Spanish 1-4; AP Spanish; Algebra; Geometry; Advanced Algebra & Trig; Calculus; AP Calculus; AP World History; Global 9 & 10; AP Literature; AP Language; Acting; Theatre Arts; Theatre History; Voice and Diction; Dance; Chorus; Vocal Jazz Ensamble; Sculpture; Printmaking; Photography; TV & Film and more....

AP World History:
The purpose of the AP World History course is to develop greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts, in interaction with different types of human societies. This understanding is advanced through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate analytical skills. The course highlights the nature of changes in international frameworks and their causes and consequences, as well as comparisons among major societies. The course emphasizes relevant factual knowledge deployed in conjunction with leading interpretive issues and types of historical evidence. The course builds on an understanding of cultural, institutional, and technological precedents that, along with geography, set the human stage. Periodization, explicitly discussed, forms an organizing principle for dealing with change and continuity throughout the course. Specific themes provide further organization to the course, along with the consistent attention to contacts among societies that form the core of world history as a field of study.

College world history courses vary considerably in the approach used, the chronological framework chosen, the content covered, the themes selected, and the analytical skills emphasized. The material that follows describes the choices the AP World History Development Committee has made to create the course and exam. These choices themselves are compatible with a variety of college-level curricular approaches.

AP Art History:
AP Art History is designed to provide the same benefits to secondary school students as those provided by an introductory college course in art history. In the course, students examine major forms of artistic expression from the ancient world to the present and from a variety of cultures. They learn to look and analyze works of art within their historical context, and to articulate what they see or experience in a meaningful way. A meaningful way to experience works of art is learning to frame an understanding that relates how and why works of art communicate visual meaning.

An introductory college art history course content generally covers the various art forms in the following proportions: 40-50% painting and drawing, 25% architecture, 25% sculpture, and 5-10% other media (printmaking, photography, ceramics, fiber arts, etc.). The AP Art History course content and AP Examination reflect these distributions.

College art history survey courses vary in approaches to interpreting art, including selection of chronological frameworks, themes, and the emphasis on analytical skills. The AP Development Committee regularly monitors the ways in which art history is taught at the college level and the choices they make in devising the course and the examination are compatible with college level curricular objectives.

AP Biology:
This course is designed to be the equivalent of a college introductory biology course usually taken by biology majors during their first year. Some AP students, as college freshmen, are permitted to undertake upper-level courses in biology or to register for courses for which biology is a prerequisite. Other students may have fulfilled a basic requirement for a laboratory science course and will be able to undertake other courses to pursue their majors.

AP Biology should include the topics regularly covered in a college biology course for majors. The textbooks used for AP Biology should be those used by college biology majors and the labs done by AP students must be the equivalent of those done by college students.

The AP Biology course is designed to be taken by students after the successful completion of a first course in high school biology and one in high school chemistry. It aims to provide students with the conceptual framework, factual knowledge, and analytical skills necessary to deal critically with the rapidly changing science of biology.

The two main goals of AP Biology are to help students develop a conceptual framework for modern biology and to help students gain an appreciation of science as a process. The ongoing information explosion in biology makes these goals even more challenging. Primary emphasis in an AP Biology course should be on developing an understanding of concepts rather than on memorizing terms and technical details. Essential to this conceptual understanding are the following: a grasp of science as a process rather than as an accumulation of facts; personal experience in scientific inquiry; recognition of unifying themes that integrate the major topics of biology; and application of biological knowledge and critical thinking to environmental and social concerns.

AP Music Theory:
A major component of any college curriculum in music is a course introducing the first-year student to music theory, a subject that comprises the musical materials and procedures of the Common Practice period. Such a course may bear a variety of titles (Basic Musicianship, Elementary Theory, Harmony and Dictation, Structure of Music, etc). It may emphasize one aspect of music, such as harmony; more often, however, it integrates aspects of melody, harmony, texture, rhythm, form, musical analysis, elementary composition, and to some extent, history and style. Musicianship skills such as dictation and other listening skills, sight-singing, and keyboard harmony are considered an important part of the theory course, although they may be taught as separate classes.

The student's ability to read and write musical notation is fundamental to such a course. It is also assumed that the student has acquired (or is acquiring) at least basic performance skills in voice or on an instrument.

The ultimate goal of an AP Music Theory course is to develop a student's ability to recognize, understand, and describe the basic materials and processes of music that are heard or presented in a score. The achievement of these goals may best be approached by initially addressing fundamental aural, analytical, and compositional skills using both listening and written exercises. Building on this foundation, the course should progress to include more creative tasks, such as the harmonization of a melody by selecting appropriate chords, composing a musical bass line to provide two-voice counterpoint, or the realization of figured-bass notation.

AP Studio Art:
This AP Program offers three portfolios: Drawing, 2-D Design, and 3-D Design. The portfolios share a basic, three-section structure, which requires the student to show a fundamental competence and range of understanding in visual concerns (and methods).

AP US History:
The AP program in United States History is designed to provide students with the analytical skills and enduring understandings necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in United States history. The program prepares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by making demands upon them equivalent to those made by full-year introductory college courses. Students should learn to assess historical materials—their relevance to a given interpretive problem, their reliability, and their importance—and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. An AP United States History course should thus develop the skills necessary to arrive at conclusions on the basis of an informed judgment and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively in an essay format.

AP Language:
The AP English Language and Composition course is designed to help students become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of rhetorical contexts and to become skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. Both their writing and their reading should make students aware of the interactions among a writer's purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing.

The goals of an AP English Language and Composition course are diverse because the college composition course is one of the most varied in the curriculum. The college course provides students with opportunities to write about a variety of subjects and to demonstrate an awareness of audience and purpose. But the overarching objective in most first-year writing courses is to enable students to write effectively and confidently in their college courses across the curriculum and in their professional and personal lives. Therefore, most composition courses emphasize the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and professional communication, as well as the personal and reflective writing that fosters the ability to write in any context. In addition, most composition courses teach students that the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing they must do in college is based on reading texts from various disciplines and periods as well as personal experience and observation.

Composition courses, therefore, teach students to read primary and secondary sources carefully, to synthesize materials from these texts in their own compositions, and to cite sources using conventions recommended by professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), the University of Chicago Press (The Chicago Manual of Style), and the American Psychological Association (APA).

AP Literature:
The AP English Literature and Composition course is designed to engage students in the careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students can deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. As they read, students should consider a work's structure, style, and themes, as well as such smaller-scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.

Studio in Photography:
This class meets every day for two semesters. Students are expected to bring a sketchbook, notebook, three-ring binder, and sharpened pencil to class daily.

Students will learn how to utilize the camera as a tool for art making. They will explore both the aesthetic and technical aspects of photography. Students will be expected to successfully shoot, process, develop, enlarge, and display 35mm black and white film. The history of American photography will be studied and applied to studio assignments. In addition, students will be expected to complete one weekly sketchbook assignment that complements the photography curriculum. Student work must be saved and used in their Senior Portfolio Review.

Vocal Jazz Ensemble:
The Vocal Jazz Ensemble is a small group of singers who sing various styles of a-cappella music such as :

Jazz
Rock
Broadway
Folk
Hip-Hop
Cultural music styles from around the globe
Pop music

The group was started in 2006 and has performed at the Kleinhans Music Hall, Sheas Buffalo Theater, Nazareth College, 2006 New York State Democratic Convention, Ralph Wilson Stadium, and other local venues.

This rigorous course of vocal training includes personal lessons, and requires a knowledge of Music Theory.