Beth Balliro is an artist and educator that has worked with urban youth for over 15 years. In addition to being a founding faculty member at the Boston Arts Academy, she serves on the RYMAEC advisory board, the youth media educator network in Boston, MA. She looks forward to joining the Art Education faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Fall of 2010.
YMR: Tell us about your background, and your current position at the arts high school.
Beth Balliro: I entered the field of arts education because of my interest in art therapy. I began my formal training as an art therapist in the early 1990s in the South Bronx. At the time, I was an undergraduate student. I found the therapeutic setting fascinating, but I also began to feel that all art education was, in some form, art therapy. I decided to transition to work in school settings.
I returned to Boston after college, and in 1998 became a founding faculty member at the Boston Arts Academy, the city’s only public arts high school. In addition to teaching studio arts for the last twelve years, I have developed Boston Arts Academy’s CapstoneProject. To complete the Capstone Project, all seniors prepare a grant proposal to fund a community-based arts project of their design.
My interest in media education has expanded as a result of my involvement with the Capstone Project. So many of my students, in developing their Capstone Projects, have incorporated innovative new media into both their proposed projects and their final presentations. Essentially, my students have driven a demand for more new media in the classroom. Having observed this trend, I became involved in RYMAEC, the youth media network in Boston, to help other educators build their capacity to support media integration into school curricula.
YMR: Describe your role in RYMAEC.
Balliro: I have served as an Advisory Board member with RYMAEC since its inception. As a teacher of traditional media with an eye to trends in high school curricula and youth media, I feel I have helped to bridge the teachings of media educators with more traditional public school teachers who may be intimidated by technology but understand its potential for helping students succeed.
YMR: Describe the RYMAEC activities that are most exciting to you. How do you see these activities making an impact in your school district?
Balliro: I have been particularly excited about RYMAEC’s web2.open mic events. At these events, educators from a wide range of expertise share the ways that technology enhances their teaching as a means to achieve deeper student understanding. From our few innovator-gurus to the novice intern drawing from a great dedication to providing access to content to her students, educators have a forum to share their growth, struggles and innovations in a democratic and celebratory forum. It has been fantastic to be a part of this collaborative effort.
YMR: In your years of teaching, what have you noticed is most important for young people to learn and achieve as they are transitioning out of high school?
Balliro: A few years ago I presented on a panel regarding helping students gain “21st Century Skills.” This forced me to consider what specific attributes students must acquire for success in today’s world. In essence, students need to be able to navigate through information and cultural diversity with curiosity, follow-through, versatility, and confidence.
Breadth of knowledge is not important—it is the ability to ask questions and search for answers that will propel students toward healthy and fulfilling development. I have seen the sad reality of extraordinarily gifted artists enter the “scene” heralded with great promise—only to stop short because they lacked follow-through. Conversely, I have known young artists that weren’t the most innately skillful propel into amazing careers due to their ability to work hard and learn what they don’t know.
YMR: From your experience, where does media education fit in arts—and more traditional—education?
Balliro: My colleagues and I have identified a recurring type of student that traditional education has failed to serve—the student that lives most fully in a digital world. We began to see a pattern of young women and men, just two or three each year, that were technologically savvy and had “checked out” of school on its more three-dimensional terms. We struggled with ways to captivate these types of students, helping help them build the credentials to lead their peers and teachers into a new technological milieu. It has been frustrating and inspiring to see these young people forge ahead like a new techie avant-garde and it is our hope to lead them toward leadership and not eccentric isolation.
The experiences of these few tech savvy students, in particular, have shown me that an arts and media education, particularly one that emphasizes cross-disciplinary exploration, problem-solving, cultural contact and rigor, can reach the students that traditional education cannot. Moreover, as I’ve observed the impact of this kind of education on the outcomes of students’ Capstone Projects, I have become more and more convinced that media education, in addition to arts education, helps students develop the skills that will really help them as they transition out of high school into work or higher education.
Wrestling with problems and seeking innovative solutions has long been the work of artists, and it is what students need to practice in order to prepare for the complex world they will inherit. In addition, the critical skills of wondering and building joy among others are often overlooked, but may just be the most meaningful of all. Both media and arts education foster these skills in young people, and I am proud to work with both the Boston Arts Academy and RYMAEC to continue to move this work forward.
Category: Uncategorized
Art Therapy: A Critical Youth Media Approach
Not all personal stories are made for the screen. From a therapeutic stance, some stories that youth producers craft are not always ready for an audience. After all, once you put it on a screen, you can’t take it back.
For example, over two years I worked with a student who I will call Melanie. Melanie wanted to make a documentary about her experiences with cutting and self-mutilation. She believed that cutting was a healthy activity that turned her away from the path of drugs and alcohol to better cope with her difficulties. For Melanie, each of the many scars covering her well-hidden arms and legs were signs of her survival.
While I understood her point of view, it was clear that she was not far away enough from her subject to tackle it objectively. In my opinion, she was not ready to make that film, it was too soon. “That’s okay,” I told her, “because there are plenty of other stories in your life that need telling. You’ll tell this one some other time, it’s just not the right time yet.”
As her instructor and mentor, I have the responsibility to make sure that the story that she wants to tell is both appropriate for telling, and that her exploration of the topic can be done in a safe, healthy manner that isn’t exploitative or puts her in harms way. My worry is that by putting a camera in the middle of her trauma, it could shift Melanie’s emphasis away from growth and healing, into something that seems to almost celebrate her situation. The answer to Melanie isn’t ‘no you can’t’ but rather, ‘you can, just not yet.’
A few years later, Melanie decided to re-approach the subject. Her life was in a better place, her choices healthier, and her perspective on the topic had changed. She wanted to create a strong piece that could help other teens trapped in similar circumstances.
As youth media educators encourage personal story telling and sharing through audience-bound media projects, we need to think critically about what is appropriate for sharing, the emotional needs of the youth we work with, and our responsibility in monitoring youth produced content. Art therapy and clinical resources are great tools to bettwe support educators when dealing with the personal stories young people prepare to display on the big screen.
About RAW and R2R
Raw Art Works (RAW), located in Lynn, Massachusetts, is a nationally recognized, community-based youth arts organization with a mission “to ignite the desire to create and the confidence to succeed in underserved youth.” The Reel to Real Filmschool (R2R), founded in 2000, is recognized as a leading youth filmmaking program, both nationally and throughout New England.
We believe the most important stories to tell are one’s own, and the difference between art and craft is a personal connection and ownership of the artistic process. It is understood at RAW that communicating through art is inherently therapeutic.
Currently, RAW serves more than 400 young people each year in its studio-based programs, which have included printmaking, painting, and filmmaking since its inception in 1994. These programs are supplemented by more than 2,500 additional contacts with young people through outreach activities.
Whether it’s on-site work in the public school system, court mandated work with teens right out of lock-up, individual therapy, or simply hitting the streets with our “Van Go!” summer program, we meet youth where they are in the community. The biggest issues facing RAW and the youth it serves tend to be community-based issues such as poverty, violence, substance abuse, and gangs. These issues are a major driving force in the development of RAW’s teens.
As an organization with deep roots in the field of art therapy, RAW and R2R believe strongly in the transformative power of the artistic process. We ask our artists, regardless of medium, to peel back the layers of their experiences and transform their stories into art, in this case, specifically, into films.
While R2R is rooted in art therapy and receives support from a team of professional therapists, it is the only program at RAW not actively run by a clinically trained therapist, but instead, led by filmmakers. While the field of expressive therapies has been around for some time, the use of filmmaking in conjunction with art therapy is a relatively new development.
Youth Media and Art Therapy
Youth media typically fares well in supporting young people to reflect on their lives, developing strong relationships with adult allies in the process. Typically, youth media programs provide a safe culture and environment for collaboration, openness, and trust to investigate one’s story.
Many educators have experienced that the process of personal story sharing can expose a lot of trauma and conflict beneath the surface of youth creators. Oftentimes, these educators are not equipped with art therapy resources and tools, which would build the strength and confidence of the young people served.
Some youth media organizations, like the Latin American Youth Center Art + Media House in Washington, D.C. has a social worker on staff, which they find highly effective in their programs (see: YMR, March 2009). In addition, parents recognize youth media as a process that has been refered to as “safe passage” for healing traumatic experiences in the lives of their children (see: YMR, June 2009).
Youth media has the right factors that encourage young people to tell and share their personal lives, but we don’t always have the means to analyze, support, and identify the level of trauma or disclosure of young people. For example, see (YMR, July 2007 and April 2008).
If we go back to Melanie’s case, let’s think about how her story about cutting, which was not entirely common information, is treated as a public media piece. Imagine the hypothetical scenario where the aesthetics of the film are discussed alongside the content: “When you show your scars, or when you show how you would take apart a disposable razor blade to cut yourself with, is it better to show that in a wide shot, or a close up? What’s the sound design that we’re hearing while this part of your story unfolds?” Such questions might have overwhelmed Melanie who was in the midst of processing trauma.
The healing process is an important part of young people’s experiences and youth media must identify ways to support this process alongside media production. Underneath all personal issues that come up in youth media, as educators, we need to help young people explore what is really going on so that they can live full, expressive lives.
Thankfully, a qualified clinical team to deal with issues like Melanie’s, as well as sexual abuse, neglect, and substance abuse supports the R2R staff. But not all youth media organizations are set up to afford clinical staff. However, the practice of art therapy has many important tools that the youth media field can add to its knapsack.
Suggestions to the Field
Make it personal. Tackling issues alone is not enough. Make films that only your teens can make. As we say to our students “if someone else can make your film, let them do it. Make the film that only you can make.” In a time of limitless access to media for our teens, it is more important than ever to put a face and an identity on the issues that our teens choose to tackle. The end result? Teens see that their own stories and voices are legitimate, and their films will result in greater artistry and honesty.
Build a culture of openness. To get students to reflect on their lives, they need to have strong relationships with staff and their peers, a safe culture for collaboration and openness, and a trustful environment that allows students the comfort to investigate who they are and the role they play in the world. For the students and the RAW staff, it is all about the quality of their relationships with each other. As a result, RAW staff members spend a lot of time talking, writing, and exploring their lives and art together. They work hard to lay a strong foundation that allows trust to grow, both from teacher to student as well as student to student.
Be prepared. Asking for personal stories will put educators right in the face of the realities of our teens. Like an onion, once you start peeling back the layers, there’s no way to put them back. Be prepared to face the often-harsh realities of our youth. Be honest and transparent in your reactions to their stories. They will know if you’re being real or not with them. If you don’t always know what to do, say the truth. Know when to say that you don’t have an answer. They’ll respect you for being honest.
Build relationships. Connecting and building relationships takes time and isn’t always easy, but is well worth it. Building relationships with school counselors, social workers, therapists and parents will make it easier for you to seek out advice and assistance as you learn more about the realities of your teens. Relationships with parents will help give you a more complete picture of the students’ home-life—just don’t be too willing to put a parents point of view above students.
Protect yourself and know the law. When talking to youth about their lives, as an educator you must explain what you are required to do if abuse is suspect so that you do not violate students’ trust. However, as a caretaker in the state of Massachusetts, if I suspect any occurrence of abuse or neglect, by law, I am to report it. Whenever possible, if you are talking with a teen about heavy issues, have someone else whom you trust in the room with you to sever as a witness and support. Make sure that the student is aware that you receive support from your staff, and that ultimately; you’ll make smarter decisions if you have team support.
Next Steps
The youth media field is prone to showcasing youth produced media with deep social impact. Incorporating a more personal direction, one that actively puts teens personal viewpoints and experiences on the screen will give youth media work a deeper emotional impact overall. Our youth have incredible stories to share, but, as a field, we need to understand how best to incorporate therapeutic approaches that keep youth safe and emotionally secure throughout the process.
While therapy belongs in the realm of therapists, using art as a tool of self-expression is a timeless concept. The field of art therapy has demonstrated that it is important for us to understand how to responsibly aid teens through their path of exploration as they create their art. Social workers, therapists, and counselors are all important and necessary components in this process, both for the aide of the student and for the protection of the instructor. When issues of neglect or abuse are at play, no single person should be asked to hold the entire weight of that person’s experience.
Christopher Gaines is a father, husband and filmmaker. He is also the director of the Real to Reel Filmschool at Raw Art Works, in Lynn, Massacusetts, just north of Boston. He was first introduced to filmmaking as a teen, and is just as much in love with the medium now as he was then. Prior to RAW, Chris worked professionally as an editor and cinematographer.
Paulina Villarroel began her career as a filmmaker at the age of 15 at Cambridge Community Television in Cambridge, MA. Shortly after graduating from The Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at NYU, she worked as the video production manager for Facing History and Ourselves, an international educational non-profit committed to teaching civic responsibility, tolerance, and social action to young people, as a way of fostering moral adulthood. In June of 2009, Paulina received her Ed. M from the Arts in Education Masters Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Recently, she joined the staff of Raw Arts as the instructor for Real to Reel Filmschool.
Youth Media Facilitation: An Approach for Organizational Learning
Youth media can spark media storytelling and improve the internal practices of an organization so that it is technology savvy and accessible to the younger generation. This level of reflection and adaptability can prepare youth media advocates to justify the field’s importance and reframe the discussion for a wider audience when project-based funding sources dry up and budget cuts loom.
After ten years facilitating youth media projects rooted in the rich soil of Boston, I see an immense potential in collaboration among the variety of community media/arts and youth-serving organizations in our city and its suburbs. Together, we can develop and articulate a common framework for integrating youth media as a valuable tool to reflect and improve upon our practices; and, in the process, encourage our youth participants to contribute to organizational growth and sustainability.
Youth media educators are in a unique position to support organizations by:
• fostering individual voice and participation;
• creating critical moments to articulate and decipher an organization’s culture; and,
• challenging, and therefore transforming, how an organization learns and adapts by matching youth media facilitation to what an organization does, says, and believes.
In this article, I’ll offer my recent MIT@Lawrence research experience at YouthBuild Lawrence as a reflective case study of how I attempted to integrate youth media as a tool and methodology, combining urban planning and business theories with tested community organizing and project-based learning techniques.
YouthBuild Lawrence “Keep Lawrence Clean” Project
YouthBuild is a national network of local programs that help “low-income young people ages 16–24 work toward their GED or high school diploma while learning job skills through building affordable housing (YouthBuild USA).” My project with YouthBuild in Lawrence had two goals:
(1) to teach community organizing though a multi- prong awareness and hands-on engagement approach; and,
(2) to experiment using new media tools to raise youth voices, calling for change in their community.
Over the course of one spring semester, I worked with a small leadership team of young people to launch bi-weekly sessions embedded inside a day of normal YouthBuild programming, developing an awareness campaign around litter; such as, gathering signatures on a petition to get the city to change trash pickup regulations. To support these actions, the youth produced their own commercial and a photo-map documenting littered alleyways. Whiles these media projects were empowering for the participants, the organization struggled to find a way to incorporate media projects as a sustained aspect of the overall program.
As was the case at YouthBuild, I am often invited to a youth development organization to train youth in new media skills. The first goal of these media trainings is to nurture individual youth participation through leadership and peer mentoring. But upon reflection, I found that outside academics and media facilitators need to find a more collaborative approach with local staff and youth participants to develop a sustainable youth media adoption strategy. The moment when an organization tries to adopt any new tool is an opportunity to discuss how and why it learns and grows. As active “process consultants,” collaborative youth media facilitators can use the point of entry of sharing new technical expertise to also build organizational capacity.
Based on the lessons learned in Lawrence and subsequent projects in Bangalore, Springfield and Boston, I’m developing a description of my technique for collaborative facilitation and new media tools that can be adopted by both youth media and other youth development practitioners and youth participants (see diagram below). This facilitation strategy evolved through both real-time action-research and post-work reflection to use participatory media training as a point of entry into community organizations.
In this work, I tried to describe, for both youth media facilitators and any other community practitioners, how I approached integrating youth media projects into the larger youth development aims of organization like YouthBuild. Each of the eight facilitation strategies is grouped by how deeply I dove into the organization’s culture.
The eight facilitation techniques tempers my own experiences in the Boston area with organizational learning theory. Based on the work of MIT’s Edgar Schein and other researchers, this collaborative facilitation strategy believes the best way to help an organization change or adapt is to tease out aspects of the organizational culture: shared assumptions, stated values in mission statements, and values expressed as actions in everyday behaviors and programs.
Since the YouthBuild project, I have developed the following techniques to collaboratively teach media skills in a way that aligns to an organization’s culture. The approach re-articulates what an organization truly believes, says, and does, while empowering staff and youth producers to adopt the most appropriate media tool to reach individual and collective goals.
I now often start my interventions and new youth media projects with more in-depth inquiries about why the organization exists, what it values and how it designs and prioritizes its actions. Then, and only then, do we start talking media tools that could help achieve their aims. When I share these experiences with my peers and youth leaders, it often sparks discussion of how and why community practitioners should add this new dimension to their facilitation, to not only spark media storytelling and member activism but also to improve an organization’s internal practices.
Here’s a quick description of the 8 techniques, with some references to certain participatory media tools that pair well each facilitative action:
Next Steps
By sharing new technical expertise, youth media educators can play a unique role in nurturing both youth participation and organizational capacity through collaborative facilitation. The next step for the youth media field, in Boston in particular, is for more practitioners to document, evaluate, and share our techniques for collaborative facilitation, peer networking, and youth leadership in the context of organizations. Our local communities are full of youth media facilitators and other educators who would greatly benefit from learning from each other’s collective insights and approaches specific to raising young people’s abilities, expression, and voice while bolstering the organizations that support them.
Danielle Martin graduated as a Master in City Planning from MIT in Sept. ‘09, spending two years leading the MIT@Lawrence university-community partnership and completing a thesis where this case study first appeared. Before MIT, she served as an AmeriCorps*VISTA at the Community Technology Centers VISTA Project at UMass Boston [now The Transmission Project]. She also spent four years directing the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club (MA) Computer Clubhouse. She is currently consulting with several academic and community-based partners around adopting new media strategies, piloting an afterschool program around conflict-transformation and photo-journalism with Peace In Focus, and creating a community within MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, the Department of Play, focused on the design of new mapping and mobile technology and methodologies to support youth as active participants in their local communities.
Engaging Educators in Diversity and Meaning-Making
Few opportunities exist within the social structures where teens operate to cross borders and share diverse perspectives and stories. Youth media is a natural environment to engage teens to appreciate diverse viewpoints and effectively communicate with multiple audiences; however, adult instructors need to have the proper training.
As educators we often rush to the production process for fear that our students won’t complete their work, or that the quality of their work will suffer because they didn’t have enough time to learn about and complete the technical elements. It is perhaps, more important to engage youth to practice the skills of analyzing a story and the audience as it is to teach them the technical aspects of media making.
Over the years, I have developed workshops through Home, Inc. to help educators engage student diversity through the important process of meaning making in media, improving their skills as media facilitators. These professional development courses and programs use communication skills to create a collaborative and inclusive environment. The lessons and transformative stories from these workshops, which I will share in this article, provide important insight to the youth media field as we continually work with a wonderfully complex and diverse group of students.
About Home, Inc.
HOME, Inc. (“Here-in Our Motives Evolve”) is a 35-year-old non-profit organization that was founded to develop the talents of inner city teenagers, youth organizations and schools in media and communications. We partner with inner city public schools and provide an on sight media teacher/lab coordinator to develop classes and run after school workshops in 11 schools in Boston and Somerville, and at a public internet center. HOME, Inc. manages media labs that typically include 25 media capable computers, software, cameras and recording equipment.
Home, Inc. has developed a series of activities for our Youth for Social Change professional development workshops that help media instructors: better seek out diverse interpretations; help teachers and students identify with interpretations that diverge from their own; and, create media that targets change while accounting for diverse interpretations.
Training Media Educators
In the first part of Youth for Social Change workshops, we talk with media educators about the importance of creating an environment where all participants feel comfortable expressing themselves and contributing to the collaborative process. Sometimes, the best way to illustrate to media educators the importance of this kind of environment is by showing them how different their own viewpoints can be, and encouraging them to talk about how it feels to be heard and appreciated by the group.
To illustrate this point, the Youth for Social Change workshop begins with the analysis of a bit of text from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabrial Garcia Marquez. I use the following quote:
“The children insisted that their father take them to see the overwhelming novelty of the sages of Memphis…They insisted so much that he paid the thirty reales and led them into the center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was an enormous transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars…It’s the largest diamond in the world. No the gypsy countered. It’s ice.”
By examining this text with educators, we can begin to explore several questions that are relevant to the task of creating an environment for young people where they feel comfortable working together to create media. These questions include:
• What does this quote mean, or what point is Marquez trying to make?
• How do you interject your own point of view when it often feels like the “facts” stated in the text are established?
• How can you engage other people to think more personally or critically about this text—rather than deferring to their first impression?
• What does the exercise of examining this quote tell us about the process by which people interpret meaning?
• How might understanding the process of interpretation help us become better media makers?
In facilitating this conversation, I work with media instructors to analyze the process by which individual perspectives can be articulated, or transformed, repurposed and distorted in the process of group discussion. With the professional development workshop participants, we brainstorm ideas for ensuring that all points of view are heard, understood, and incorporated into the group conversation. We then brainstorm ideas for creating a classroom in which diverging viewpoints are acknowledged, and collaborative work that can move forward. This is an essential skill for a media educator to have, particularly when the media educator is tasked with the responsibility for facilitating the production process among a highly diverse group of young people.
Understanding the Medium as the Message
Another important issue for media instructors to explore is the way that the choice of media type impacts the total message communicated by a single piece of written or visual information. At Home Inc., we have found that it is key that both media educators and youth media producers have insight into the ways in which their messaging is linked to and transformed by the kind of medium they choose.
To this end, I use an activity in which instructors compare the same message written in conventional typed English with that written in text messaging syntax. The instructors in the workshop discuss how the choice of medium (conventional English vs. text messaging) can impact the overall accessibility and meaning of the message. With this workshop activity, instructors explore the question of choosing the appropriate media type for effectively communicating a message to the target audience.
The VERB Model
The final workshop activity I employ in the Youth for Social Change workshop looks at how organizations seeking to create behavioral change through messaging employ a multitude of media strategies to create a kind of redundancy in their messaging. We look specifically at the Center for Disease Control’s VERB Campaign Logic Model. This model has been used to design social media for social change, including a social media campaign to combat obesity that tracks change over time.
The VERB model allows us to reexamine the questions that we hope to raise for our audience based on the knowledge and beliefs they currently have, and to reexamine their knowledge and beliefs in light of the new information the piece of media provides. In the workshop activity, we discuss that one way of provoking an audience to reexamine its beliefs is by adapting or re-appropriating stories or representations that are already part of the common knowledge of our target audiences.
Some examples of such thought-provoking re-appropriation include the adaptation of the music video genre to reach teens with a health message, or the creation of the pop song, such as “ We are the World,” which raised funds and attention (today, remade to help Haiti) beyond the commercial intent of popular music. A local Boston example is the Public Health Commission anti violence campaign—aired in the fall of 2009—that was created through peer led media projects.
Next Steps
In order to lead a successful youth media program, all participants must share a mutual respect and understanding for each other’s perspectives. This understanding serves as the foundation to creating media that can speak to and engage a diverse audience. When a young person realizes that he or she can make a difference with their ability to communicate a vision for change, they become empowered and confident that they can make a difference.
Alan Michel is the director, co-founder, and board president of HOME, Inc. a media arts and education non –profit in Boston and is the District PR Chair for Rotary District 7930. He has directed and produced many educational media projects including “The Life Of The Library” with Jay Leno, and campaigns for AIDS awareness, media literacy and other health and social causes. In addition, Alan developed the curriculum for media literacy professional development and project based learning at 5 Boston Public Schools, spearheaded partner relations with community groups, government, arts, education and scientific institutions and organizations and developed access to local and national media and telecommunications opportunities regionally.
Interview: Beverly Mire
Beverly Mire is the assistant director of education for MIT/Terrascope Youth Radio. For 13 years she was the deputy director of Youth Radio/Youth Media International and for the past five years, she has run media programs at Boston-area schools and nonprofit organizations. Ms. Mire has won numerous awards for her work, and sits on the advisory board for the Regional Media Arts Educators Consortium, the Boston youth media network.
YMR: Describe Terrascope Youth Radio and your role in the program.
Beverly Mire: Terrascope Youth Radio is an outgrowth of Terrascope, which is a program for MIT freshmen. It was and is the brainchild of our director, Ari Epstein. We are funded by the National Science Foundation, and work in partnership with Cambridge Youth Programs (CYP), the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), and the Blunt Youth Radio Project in Portland, Maine.
We primarily serve high school-aged youth from the Cambridge school system, although young people from nearby communities have also participated in our program. Our high school-aged participants come on board as interns to the radio program. Typically, they find out about us through CYP, the city of Cambridge Mayor’s Summer Youth Employment Program, outreach activities, and, now, word-of-mouth.
Terrascope Youth Radio interns create audio features about the environment—our world, our city, our neighborhoods, our schools. Our stories are about the big issues—such as global warming—and also about everyday stories, such as how to be environmentally conscious when you shop. Because our home base is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in close proximity to the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country, Terrascope Youth Radio interns are able to create their stories with the assistance of university research scientists who are experts in their fields.
I like to say that in my role as Assistant Director of Education, my most important duty is to make sure Terrascope Youth Radio interns are happy, have fun, learn a lot, and have the best experience possible. This goes beyond creating great radio/audio. It is just as important to me that by coming to MIT they are exposed to college life, learning that going to college is imperative and accessible.
YMR: Terrascope definitely has specific issue focus. How does this make it different from other youth radio programs?
Mire: As far as I know, Terrascope Youth Radio is the only radio project that has an environmental focus. That’s what makes us different, and I’m very proud of that. Our interns care passionately about the future of the planet, and by being exposed to top-notch scientists from MIT, Harvard, Tufts, and organizations around the country, they are learning how they can affect change on a local level.
YMR: What are some of the distribution strategies used by Terrascope?
Mire: We have a very fruitful relationship with PRX. Through PRX, we worked with New Hampshire Public Radio to create and distribute “Fresh Greens.” In Fall, 2008 we worked with Clearwater.org to create Clearwater Moments, which aired on WAMC-Albany, whose signal covers 7 states. We also periodically collaborate with the Blunt Youth Radio Project which culminates with a field trip to Portland, Maine to participate in their weekly show which is aired on WMPG-FM.As for our ongoing project, Terrascope Youth Radio features are played on the weekly show “Terravoice,” which is run by MIT students and airs on WMBR-FM. Terravoice is hosted by MIT Terrascope undergraduate students.
YMR: What are some of the benefits to the high school interns working with college kids on a college campus?
Mire: Just by being themselves, the Terrascope college and graduate staff members inspire Terrascope Youth Radio interns to look beyond high school. One college student is going for her Masters in Education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, another is an undergrad there. The rest of the staff is made up of MIT juniors and seniors.
Some of our high school interns don’t see college as a possibility. Money is a huge barrier. In some cases they don’t like their school and can’t see staying beyond 12th grade. Some have financial pressures at home. Our college and graduate staff are more than willing to talk to the interns about these frustrations, about making the right choices around education beyond high school, and not letting money stand in the way.
We have seen our high school interns pursue more opportunities due to their exposure to Terrascope’s college and graduate mentors. Just recently, one of our interns was accepted to four universities, including Suffolk University in Boston.
YMR: Give an example of one of the summer activities that allows the high school interns to take an active, hands-on role in both community issues and radio production.
Mire: Last summer we created an audio tour for the Boston Children’s Museum that highlighted the building’s green features. At the same time, the interns assisted in the production of “Fresh Greens,” an hour-long special that was distributed through New Hampshire Public Radio and Public Radio Exchange (PRX). You can access these projects at these links: www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/about/audio_tour.html and www.nhpr.org/special/freshgreens/about
YMR: What drives your passion for the work you do?
Mire: I’m going to be very honest. People often say things like, “you must feel so good about what you’re doing.” That makes me a little nuts because I don’t think of it that way and I can’t convince them otherwise. Here’s the truth: I do it because I like it. I do it because I’m good at it. It’s no different from when I was in commercial radio (my background). I stayed at a job as long as I liked it. It has nothing to do with “feeling good” or doing “good deeds.” It has everything to do with liking where I work, and liking the people I work with. That’s what drives me.
YMR: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Mire: I’d like to ask my colleagues how we can work together effectively to get more public schools, especially “underserved” schools to adopt the best practices of successful youth media programs. It’s no secret that media as a form of expression helps even the most disinterested and dispirited student learn, and learn better. It isn’t brain surgery. It doesn’t take research. With today’s technology it isn’t even expensive. It just takes implementation. For the life of me I don’t see what’s holding them back.
Media and Expression: An Approach for Helping Girls Process Trauma
When one of Teen Voices’ 16-year-old teen editors found out that she had lost her aunt and cousins in the Haiti earthquake, she stood in our offices, shaking and crying. She was one of many to get devastating news that day. The earthquake reached deep into Boston’s Haitian community—the third largest in the United States—where countless families lost relatives.
At Teen Voices, we recognize that providing a space to write, process, and speak—both in person and on the radio—can help girls process trauma while alerting media outlets that girls’ voices are critical to the global dialogue.
About Teen Voices
At Teen Voices, we serve approximately 200 low-income girls of color each year. Most girls are dealing with critical issues in their lives that require maturity far beyond their years.
We work with many girls who are dealing with poverty, parental abandonment, and terminally ill parents; some are teen mothers, some are experiencing emotional or physical abuse, and some are impacted by gang life and prostitution. A host of deeply personal issues call for the attention of an intergenerational support network, which is what Teen Voices provides.
Typically at Teen Voices, we encourage girls to think about the sexualized, marginalized images of women in the media. We support girls to examine the media’s fixation on beauty and challenge constructed norms of female identity. Girls recognize that they are not represented accurately in the media and that real stories and statistics take investment, research, and a viable outlet. Mentors and staff help girls to analyze the media, suggesting other, healthier options, and training on creating these options.
In the process, Teen Voices becomes an outlet for girls experiencing traumatic events in their personal lives. For every half hour spent working on a feature article, a separate half hour is spent discussing, say, the bullying that many girls experience at school. A 16-year-old mother focuses on her journalism skills for an hour, and then spends a second hour talking with her mentoring group about the challenges of mothering. Girls routinely enter our program shy, wary, and intimidated; two months later, they are affectionate, engaged, and driven.
Girls Respond to Haiti
The earthquake in Haiti directly impacted many of the girls we serve. Their voices were not represented in the news and it was clear that as a youth organization, we needed to respond to the trauma the girls were going through. We also felt the real lack of media representation for this community, and saw the girls’ frustration that their voices weren’t being heard.
In response, we put together a special feature that became a testimony of what the girls and their country lost, connecting the girls to each other through shared experiences and the written word. Their essays speak to a deeply wounded country, a sense of frustration with the way newscasters portray this country, and of course,an overwhelming sense of loss.
For example, in Sabrina Isaac’s essay, she writes, “This disaster will forever haunt me ‘till I take my last breath on this planet. I lie at night with pictures under my pillow that we took in July 2009, and I say, ‘They’re not really dead, they’ll come back to me. This is all a just a nightmare.’ Then reality sets back in, and I have to deal with knowing that they are gone forever.”
Isaac shared her essay on Boston radio station WBUR. An intense experience for anyone let alone a teen in trauma, the 16-year-old participated because she wanted to tell others her story. Getting girls’ voices on the air offered a much-needed diversification of sources on the Haiti disaster, giving a rare in-depth look at a global story from the perspective of girls.
Upon reflection, Isaac says she felt relieved that she was able to share her story through writing and on the radio, because she “felt like other people would know how [the earthquake] affected people firsthand instead of just hearing it on the news. Just by looking at it on the news, you wouldn’t really understand unless someone actually told you what he or she went through when it happened,” she says.
She says the experience made her feel more comfortable opening up, and helped her process her thoughts so she was able to focus more clearly on the day to day.
“It’s no longer something that’s always on my mind,” Isaac says. “When it happened, I didn’t do too well in school, it was just something I would always think about in school, [where] I would just blank out. Then after writing it down and talking about it, it was like, ‘OK Sabrina, you can do this, you can think about other things.’”
Lynn Celestin, another of Teen Voices’ teen editors, responds similarly. She says that writing and speaking about the Haiti disaster made her realize the benefits of talking to others about her problems.
“Now, when something happens to me, I share it,” Celestin says. “It’s easier to share it out because people can help you, instead of keeping it inside where nothing’s being done about it.” She continues, “Writing it down felt permanent. People got to see how I was feeling, and it was exactly how I felt. It wasn’t just me yelling, it was in writing.”
Celestin shared her essay about Haiti, and her thoughts on the media coverage of the earthquake, on Commonwealth Journal, a public affairs radio program produced by WUMB Radio on the University of Massachusetts Boston campus. She describes the experience as nerve-racking but meaningful. Celestin taps into a key aspect of combining writing and speaking as a means to process trauma and amplify girls’ voices:
“Writing was one step,” she says, “and then talking about it meant everybody else could hear. When I knew they were finally listening, it was that much easier to say.”
For both girls, it was in part a public expression of pain that garnered them the air time to share their stories—not an easy or desirable experience, but a necessary one in the interest of adding their voices to the conversation. By giving girls a supportive environment, some training in writing and speaking, and a microphone, we will learn a great deal more about the young people in our communities. And through this combination of introspection and outward expression, we can establish a process for girls to share and make sense of their experiences.
Suggestions to the Field
Consider working with teens in your program on an exercise that allows them to process difficult emotions privately and publicly, in that order. Draw on community resources to support the girls in this process: seek input from youth workers, therapists, and writers who have experience working with teens.
Approach media outlets that are open to diverse viewpoints and will take young participants seriously.
Give your teen participants the media training they need to accomplish a successful interview. Run mock interviews with them ahead of the “real thing.”
Remind teens that they can stop writing or speaking if they feel uncomfortable. This ceases to be a useful exercise if they feel overwhelmed.
Next Steps
When we wonder why more women aren’t in positions of power in media, politics, engineering, mathematics, and countless other fields, we have to look at the options available to them on the newsstand, and the limited exposure their authentic voices receive on television and radio.
Amplifying real girls’ voices in television and print early will help us grow a new generation of women who can speak effectively to public affairs and communicate about their emotional wellbeing. Asking girls what they think, and listening to what they have to say, is the first step toward evening the playing field. It’s also the only way to capture the real experiences of young people, who have much to contribute to dialogue around world events like the Haiti earthquake.
Jessica Moore is the editor and publisher at Teen Voices, a print and online magazine created entirely by teen girls through a journalism mentoring program. Moore was previously managing editor of digital media for New York-based nonprofit Sesame Workshop, and senior education producer for U.S. News and World Report. She was also online producer for PBS NewsHour, working largely on arts and politics coverage as well as news content for teens. Moore is a contributing writer to the arts journal Big Red & Shiny, and is a member of the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Online News Association.
Interview: Maya Stiles-Royall
Maya Stiles-Royall is a Media Lab Coordinator for HOME, Inc. in Jamaica Plain, MA, and currently teaches media literacy and production classes at two middle schools in Somerville. Maya’s adventures in media began at Yale University when she took up the Film Studies major and began making films in the New Haven elementary and high schools where she worked. They have since taken her to a Johannesburg, South Africa with an NYU study abroad program, and across the United States on a vegetable oil-powered bus with a sustainability education non-profit called BioTour. Maya is looking forward to beginning her Ed.M this fall with the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
YMR: What background experiences inspired your passion for youth media and how did you come to work in the field?
Stiles-Royall: Like many youth media educators, I was drawn into the field by my own experiences as a young artist and filmmaker. As a high school student, I lived in the darkroom, scribbled poetry incessantly, and dreamed of becoming a photojournalist. I hadn’t considered filmmaking until an internship with documentary filmmaker, Katrina Browne, the summer after my freshman year at Yale. Shadowing Katrina during the post-production of her PBS/POV documentary, Traces of the Trade, I began to understand the transformative power of film media—the way it can activate change within the viewer, the producer, and even society. The internship sparked something within me, and I threw myself into the Film Studies major as soon as I returned to school in New Haven.
I also began working as a classroom assistant for a kindergarten class at Dwight Elementary School. So, when a production class gave me the opportunity to shoot my first film, I took the camera with me into Ms. Lubanda’s classroom. I had admittedly fallen in love with the gregarious students, and I wanted to show the Yale community that the youth of New Haven were capable of much more than riding in the “bicycle gangs” that we heard about so often in the Yale Daily News. Then, filming at Family Literacy Night, I had one of those transformative experiences: a fourth grade student stole my camera. When he took the camera, I realized that maybe it should have been in his hands all along. How could I be the one to deconstruct their representation? Wasn’t that something that the students should be able to do for themselves? This moment pushed me to confront the complex inequities that exist in media production, and inspired me to work towards the democratization of media through education.
The following year, I traveled to Johannesburg South Africa with an NYU study abroad program focused on documentary video production. I lived there for seven months, and worked closely with the youth at a community art and feeding center in Kliptown, Soweto to produce two films about the township community. When I returned to Yale, I worked with three students at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School to produce a documentary about the tense and complicated relationship between Yale students and the New Haven youth. While they showed me their New Haven, I showed them mine.
Through the reciprocal act of filming one another we were able to begin to cross the socio-cultural divide. Towards the end of the project, I asked one of the students to explain what the project meant to him. He answered, “We’re understanding each other. It’s not ‘a study on the species of urban youth’, you know, it’s a documentary on…let’s get to understand these kids, so they can get to understand me. I think that’s what makes it different.”
I graduated from college in 2008, and spent the following year working for BioTour—an environmental education non-profit that travels the country aboard vegetable oil and solar powered school busses. As the Media Coordinator and Documentarian for BioTour, I helped lead over 30 educational events, and produced a series of short educational videos about sustainability, the youth climate movement, and our journey on the bus.
My time with BioTour was a sort filmmaking boot camp, and when it was time for me to step off the bus, I couldn’t wait to work more directly towards ensuring that all youth have access to the same opportunities as I have had to explore the art of media production. I found my way to HOME Inc. and am so grateful for the chance to fully immerse myself in the hands-on practice of media education.
YMR: Describe the context in Somerville that supports youth media and youth media organizations like Home, Inc. Talk a little bit about the district-wide mandate to put media education in all schools. If you know a bit about the history of this mandate, please tell us.
Stiles-Royall: The district mandate that has established media education in every Somerville elementary school grew out of the success of HOME Inc.’s work at Somerville High School with Media Lab Coordinator Craig Leach. Craig teaches a TV and Media Production elective class, and collaborates extensively with classroom teachers to integrate media projects into their curriculums.
Inspired by the enthusiasm and achievement of Craig’s students, and bolstered by a grant from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the school district designed a new initiative for every 7th and 8th grader in the system to receive media literacy and production training. The program requires each student to work in a small production team to complete an interdisciplinary media project on a topic of their choosing. To support the first year of this initiative, the school system contracted three additional HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators (myself included) to coordinate the program and provide technological training and assistance to all students and teachers. The HOME Inc. staff has also been responsible for developing and implementing a yearlong curriculum to guide the development of the students’ media projects.
This initiative marks an enormous commitment to media education on behalf of an urban school district whose students have little exposure to technology tools at home and in the community. By requiring every middle school student to participate, the district is insuring that every student in Somerville has the basic skills to navigate the world of media. Hopefully, some students will develop identities as “media-makers”, and choose to continue cultivating their voice in Craig’s high-school program. Somerville should certainly be commended for introducing students to the power and possibilities of media, and for taking action to ensure that every single student is armed with the technology skills that are essential for success in higher education and the future workforce.
YMR: Describe your position at Home, Inc., including the relationship between Home, Inc. and the Somerville school district, the where & when of the classes you teach, and the key actors involved in making it all happen.
Stiles-Royall: My official title at HOME Inc. is “Media Lab Coordinator.” It is a stipended service-year position. The Somerville school system contracted me through HOME Inc. to teach media literacy and production classes to the 7th and 8th grade students at the JFK and Healey elementary schools.
I teach three separate sections of class a day (twelve a week) between JFK and Healey. Each class is 40 minutes long. My position is supported by the Library and Media department, and so I teach each section of students during their weekly specialist period with the librarian. (Basically, I see each of my 200 students for 40 minutes a week.) I also teach small after-school programs once a week at both schools, as well as a weekly elective class at Healey.
There are three other HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators with identical positions in each of the five middle schools in Somerville.
In terms of “key actors”…
There’s Alan Michel, my boss at HOME Inc. He is responsible for all the networking and organizing that made my placement in the Somerville school system possible. I meet with him and the other media lab coordinators at least once a week to collaborate on lesson plans, discuss best practices, and trouble-shoot challenges.
Then there’s Charlie LaFauci, who is the Supervisor of Library Media Services in the Somerville schools. He is our primary point of contact within the school system, and it is through his department that we were able to get the funding and equipment to work within the school.
There is also Vince McKay, the Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Somerville. He is responsible for pushing through the district-wide mandate to deliver student-driven, hands-on media literacy and technology instruction to every 7th and 8th grade student in the district.
And of course, there are the librarians. The librarians are our most constant collaborators, and we work closely with them each day to teach class. They have been eager to learn how to integrate more media literacy and production skills into their lessons. Since the school system cannot necessarily afford to keep the HOME Inc. Media Lab Coordinators on site forever, it is important that we provide the librarians with the skills and resources they will need in order to continue running a successful and exciting media education program.
YMR: What are some of the challenges you have experienced as a media educator and/or what challenges face other young media educators like yourself?
Stiles-Royall: I was only out of college for one year when I started working as a full time media educator. Before my position with HOME Inc., I approached media production as a student—curious, experimental, and admittedly disorganized. Learning how to communicate about media as an educator has been like learning a new language. Like a typical film student, I developed most of my technical production skills by “playing around” and spending ridiculous 18-hour days experimenting with equipment and editing software until I had it figured out.
Since middle school students obviously don’t have the time or resources to do this, new media educators like myself must adapt everything that we’ve learned by “just playing around” into streamlined lessons and workflows. This is certainly a challenge. Articulating the nuances of shooting and editing can be clumsy and frustrating, and when you’re pressed for time (which, of course, happens way too frequently!), it is tempting to grab the mouse from the student to speed through the more complicated technical tasks.
As young media educators, we come into the field with big ideas and genuine passion, and though this exuberance is perhaps our biggest asset, learning how to balance our natural idealism with necessary pragmatism can be an enormous challenge.
We face many of the same challenges that every new teacher faces their first year. In fact, the biggest challenges I have experienced this year are specifically rooted in the public school setting of the program. I’ve found that I have too many students and too little time to give each the attention they need and deserve. Behavior and discipline issues have pushed me to tears, and this isn’t something I ever anticipated. The enormity of the task in front of me quickly became overwhelming. Most significantly, understanding the culture and operating procedure of the schools has been confusing, and communicating with teachers and administrators is difficult and stressful.
Most teachers and school principals have established routines and are already overwhelmed by crowded curriculums. They view the HOME Inc. staff as outsiders, and perceive the program as yet another responsibility that is being pushed onto their already way-too-full plates. Understandably, they get defensive about protecting their time. Though some teachers express enthusiasm for the project, few prove to be flexible and open to our ideas and methods.
I think this problem is ultimately rooted in the school system’s failure to include the teachers in enough of the planning of the initiative. The teachers have ended up feeling “out of the loop”, and were never really given the chance to fully get onboard. Though the intention behind Somerville’s bold efforts to integrate media education across the school system is admirable, a lot of the details of the program were underdeveloped. Roles and responsibilities were never completely delineated, and the district administrators failed to create meaningful opportunities for the HOME Inc. staff and current teachers to form true partnerships and work together.
YMR: Likewise, what are some of the successes?
Stiles-Royall: I try not to define success by the degree of my students’ technical skills. Success must go deeper than that—to the students’ ability to think critically about the media they are consuming and creating, and to work collaboratively to craft and communicate a message that is meaningful to them. Middle school is a time of such self-consciousness, and so my personal goal is for my students to develop a confidence in their voice, their story, and their creative choices. If I can help my students accomplish this, I will consider my work a success.
Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with the challenges of my work (which I’ve found is bound to happen in this field!), I remind myself of the successes that I experience with individual students every day: a shy 7th grader overcoming their fear and hesitance of being in front of the camera; a production group taking the initiative to write a five-page script over the weekend; a frustrated student emerging from the fog and chaos of brainstorming with a clear idea that they are proud of. These small moments are often enough to keep me energized and renew my passion and commitment to my work.
YMR: What is your advice to the field with respect to facilitating the transition of youth producers into young media educators, and cultivating the passion and enthusiasm of young media educators in general?
Stiles-Royall: Despite the challenges, being able to test my passion and ideals against the realities of the classroom has been an amazing learning opportunity. The youth media field can help young media educators meet these challenges, and take full advantage of this opportunity, by providing us easy and centralized access to successful lesson plans, curricula, worksheets, exercises, project assignments, examples, and best practices. There is no need for any of us to reinvent the wheel, and being able to follow in the footsteps of successful media educators will facilitate our fluency in this new language.
We need (free!) professional development opportunities. Not just for technical skills or media project planning, but also for handling behavior issues, communicating and connecting with teachers, and navigating school bureaucracies. HOME Inc. introduced me to the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium in Boston, and it has been an amazing resource for me in my first year as a media educator. We need to build and strengthen these networks, and create more “ins” for new educators like myself. Perhaps communities like RYMAEC could even establish young media educator mentoring programs, where new educators like myself could spend time shadowing and processing our work with more experienced media education professionals.
Open Call : The MASTERPIECE Video Diary
The WGBH Lab Open Call is an invitation for you to make a completed video short and share it with the world!
This April, WGBH Lab is partnering with MASTERPIECE to launch The MASTERPIECE Video Diary Open Call, inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank, airing April 11th on PBS in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day. We’re asking Youth Media Makers, ages 13 and up, to create an inspiring video or audio diary entry about themselves, and post it to the Lab: http://lab.wgbh.org/masterpiece.
Our hope is to stimulate and nurture youth self-expression using media. We have asked those who might submit to consider intolerance in their creations by telling us how they overcome instances of bullying or being disrespected for the way they look, think, or for what they believe, and to tell the world how they or someone they know might have handled it.
Entries should be no longer than 3 minutes, and submitted before May 31st, 2010. Entries received this month may be part of a short video piece The Lab and MASTERPIECE are producing to air at the end of The Diary of Anne Frank on April 11th. All pieces submitted before May 31st will be considered for future broadcast opportunities.
Visit us at: http://lab.wgbh.org/masterpiece, to learn more.
*FREE* Music Production Workshop, 6/21 – 6/25
Now accepting applications!
http://www.bavc.org/bumptraining
Do you work with students/youth who are interested in music? Would you like to be able to offer a class where they can learn the technical and critical skills to produce their own music? The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) is offering a FREE teacher training workshop where you can learn what you need to know to start your own music production program.
Who is invited?
Community-based organizations, teachers, after-school programming providers, and anyone interested in offering a digital music production class for youth. Instructors with regular access to a computer lab are especially encouraged to apply. Any experience with music is helpful, but not required – we’ll teach you what you need to know!
What exactly will we be doing?
Working from BAVC’s BUMP Beats curriculum, we will be covering the basics of computer-based music production using the Reason software program. Technical topics will include drum programming, working with samplers and synthesizers, basic keyboarding and music theory. In addition, we will discuss best practices, such as critical listening exercises, efficient troubleshooting, and using web-based materials to enhance instruction. We will also be offering several supplemental workshops around classroom management, artistic responsibility and program funding/sustainability. Click here for more information (www.bavc.org/bumptraining).
Why should I be interested?
Many youth are craving the opportunity to learn about music and become creators, but don’t have access to the training and equipment to make this possible. Offering this opportunity can be a powerful draw to your program. From an educator’s perspective, music can be an excellent catalyst for teaching technology skills, media literacy and critical thinking. We will work with participants on how to begin building their programs within their budgets as well as advice around fundraising and sustainability.
Where/when will the training happen?
June 21-25, 2010 at BAVC’s Townsend St. training facility in San Francisco.
How much will it cost?
The training is FREE, but we are asking for a $100 deposit to hold a spot in the class. Deposits will be refunded at the end of the class.
For more information, please contact Chris Runde (crunde@bavc.org) at 415-558-2181.
Powerful Voices for Kids Summer Institute | Philadelphia, July 5 -9, 2010
The Powerful Voices for Kids Summer Institute is an intensive professional development experience developed by Renee Hobbs and taught by a diverse faculty including leading scholars, experienced classroom teachers, media professionals, and educational technology specialists. Participants learn about the theory of media literacy, engage in model lessons to deepen their understanding of the use of critical media analysis and media composition in the K- 8 classroom, strengthen technology skills, and explore the complex role of at-home literacies involving media and technology in the lives of children and young people.
The program combines discussion, small group activities, and composition with media and technology. Participants engage in three model lessons during each day of the program, helping them expand their repertoire of instructional strategies. Participants gain experience with media composition activities using video and online writing collaboration tools. All participants receive a Flip video camera to take home. Each day of the program, teachers engage in a production activity. As part of their learning, teachers interview an elementary student from the PVK summer camp using a video camera and edit a simple video, uploading it to YouTube. Teachers create a basic web page to compose and to share their writing. These practical skills prepare teachers to re-enter their classrooms in the fall with a repertoire of exciting strategies to engage and stimulate student learning.
Learn more about the program here.
Join us this summer for a dynamic program of professional development!
Philadelphia, July 5 -9, 2010 — REGISTER ONLINE NOW!