(horse) there is, as a rule, no value (cart). The sheer novelty and recrea-
tional qualities of the video production experience are not enough to
carry the experience.
This is why we work to encourage teachers to allow video production
in their classrooms regardless of how little or how much experience they
may have with the technology and conventions. The purpose the techno-
logical activity of videomaking is connected to matters more than the
technological activity itself. And in the classroom, that purpose is a lesson plan. Teachers should think of the process of video production as a blank
canvas to paint learning upon.
This said, it is still important to acknowledge the recreational (that is:
fun) qualities of the experience of videomaking as part of the reason for
success, much like a cart in a horse-cart arrangement brings goods to a
destination. It’s just that there must be a clear leader in the venture. That leader is an educator with a defined educational objective.
Shortcomings we have witnessed in K-12 videomaking have had one
circumstance in common: they were without purpose. Examples include
videomaking pursued only for videomaking’s sake. Also when the activ-
ity was centered on copying something, like a movie, for the sake of
demonstrating to others that they could make something that looked like a movie, but it was just a copy with no purpose of its own.
This is not to say that every successful videomaking experience must
be chained to deeply rational purposes and strict educational objectives.
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But if such experiences stray too far from the context of the learning
environment, they tend to become purely recreational, self-serving, and,
in the end, not all that valuable—even to the children.
Some recent videomaking experiences in a middle school environ-
ment provide a good example of the horse and cart metaphor.
Egg Drop: Following a Teacher’s Objective
One fifth grade teacher with no videomaking experience decided to
use the camera we provided him to record a classroom science experi-
ment. In small teams, students were tasked to devise a means of insulat-
ing a conventional raw egg from impact as it was dropped from a second-
story window of the school. The object was to prevent the egg from
breaking.
After the groups finished, the teacher and a small group of students
descended to the playground beneath the second floor window to watch
and record the egg drops. Though the resulting video will never win any
awards for excellent cinematography (but if there were such a thing as a
“seasickness factor” they might be nominated for that) the video clearly
captured the educational joy in this kinetic classroom experience. The
camera captured each egg’s fall and the success of two of the drops. No
matter the egg outcome, the students were positively delighted by the
activity, and the video camera allowed for future viewing of the event. In
the end, the egg drop experience involved a teacher with a learning objec-
tive and no videomaking experience: mission accomplished with clearly
lasting impact.
Take-Home Video: Following a Technological Objective
In a research exercise we engaged in with middle school students, our
objective was to get a sense of the students’ innate videomaking abilities
and styles. We called the exercise the Take-Home video project, and it
involved just that: students taking a video camera home and making a
freeform video about whatever they wanted.
We had hoped to capture great levels of student creativity and origi-
nality, but what we ended up with was a reasonably garbled, topsy-turvy
collection of disjointed randomness. There was little to discern in the final projects because they did not have a specific purpose in and of themselves. We had hoped to isolate their natural videomaking abilities out-
side of educational constraints, but it was the lack of such constraints—
call them pedagogical objectives—that led us to failure in this case.
We did end up adding more clearly defined parameters to the second
generation of the Take-Home project, and they delivered success. It was
as simple as giving them a clear explanation of what we wanted them to
film. This particular experience demonstrated “best practice” tendency
Purpose
xli
when it comes to the role of a teacher in a video activity. The teacher
serves as a monitor, interpreter, and consultant in the endeavor, and
without them in this role, videomaking success is unlikely.
Interview with a Bully: Following a Learner’s Objective
In another research exercise, we asked students to share their perspec-
tives on their day-to-day experiences in schools—to share some sense of
what it was like to be a student in their school system.
As they had plenty to say right away, the challenge in this exercise
was in getting them to decide which perspective among many to share in
their visual story. One group of four fifth grade girls decided that they
had the most to say about the bullying problem in their school, so they
came up with a list of their fellow students they agreed were bullies and
interviewed them. Their plan was to simply ask them, “Why are you a
bully?”
This educational objective around the videomaking process was dif-
ferent than the egg drop in that it was coming from the learner in the
educational equation rather than the teacher, but it was an educational
objective tied to the goal of capturing a student’s understanding of some-
thing (in this case their educational environment). It would be just as easy to ask them for their perspectives on any other topic from social studies
to English to mathematics.
As might be expected, their story plan was not airtight. Their class-
mates did not take kindly to the notion they were being portrayed as
bullies. In the end the “bullies” that the girls interviewed did not say
what they wanted them to say, in fact, they often referred to some of the
girls in the production team as bullies themselves. Suffice it to say, the
exercise taught the girls a lot about bullying that they did not know and,
in particular, how subjective the term “bully” was.
As adult assistants to their storytelling activities, we were in the posi-
tion of talking with the students about their story idea and helping them
adjust their strategy to fit the unfolding narrative. The students ended up using their personal lesson learned through the interviewing experience
to frame their visual story. They used a voiceover of one of the students
to introduce the story, followed by the interviews themselves, and then
the concluding idea:
VOICEOVER INTRODUCTION
We wanted to tell a story about bullying, so we went around and took
people we thought were bullies. We wanted to know why they were
bullies.
VOICEOVER CONCLUSION
So we tried to find out why bullies bullied other people and we got
some answers. Mostly they bully because other people bully them and
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Chapter 6
some of them s
aid I was a bully. But I’m not a bully. But maybe that’s
the most important thing we’ve learned. It’s possible for all of us to be a bully to someone else.
In terms of the horse and cart metaphor, the children’s motivation to
express an idea about their educational environment led the video pro-
duction effort. But the complication they faced when their plan didn’t
materialize as they had expected presented an additional critical learning
opportunity. When teachers are in proximity to these opportunities they
have the chance to deepen the impact of learner-initiated objectives.
What teachers who lack media expertise tend not to realize—much
like most beginning filmmaking students—is that the true challenge of
mediamaking has less to do with technology and more to do with its
purpose-centered substance or content. In other words, the key to suc-
cessful filmmaking has more to do with a filmmaker having “something
to say” than in the filmmaker possessing technical filmmaking skills.
When it comes to video production and learning, K-12 students have a
built-in “something to say” any time a teacher puts a learning objective in front of them. Making the connection between the tools and the objective
is a teaching skill much more than it is a technology skill: teacher before video.
SEVEN
Solution
As we listened to the principal describe the challenges she and her K-8
school faced in the coming school year, we were disheartened—and at
the same time energized.
We were disheartened because of the problems we were hearing
about. Not only were the cards stacked against her and her new assign-
ment at C. William Bingham School, but they had also been stacked
against her at her last principal assignment in the district, O’Neill Middle School. The district had proclaimed O’Neill a “failing school” and closed
it down last year. Karen Everett had touched failure and was changed
forever by it.
She knew firsthand what happened when parents with seemingly
good intentions determined the distribution of children in a school dis-
trict. In the simplest of terms, privileged kids who had someone to look
out for their best interests usually wound up together in the “good”
schools. Underprivileged kids wound up together in the “bad” schools.
Her new assignment at Bingham reeked of déjà-vu.
Ironically though, the more Karen talked about the problems sur-
rounding her administrative inheritance, the more energized we got. The
school that our research team would be spending the next year with
faced many more challenges than we had realized. This meant that our
Smart Kids research project was definitely in the right place!
The Project
Smart Kids is a research project in search of a way to move beyond
deficit-centered educational reform. In spite of significant research, mon-
ey, policy initiatives, and interventions that have addressed educational
failure in urban schools, failure endures, shaping the lives of urban
youth—particularly poor, Black, Latino, and immigrant students—for the
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worse. Starting from the presumptions that urban children and adoles-
cents have knowledge and competence about the nature and quality of
urban education and that students must be collaborators in urban school
reform, the Smart Kids research project involves working with urban
students to help them tell “visual stories” about what it means to be
smart in an urban city school.
Video and Problems
In our K-12 video experiences over the years, we had witnessed a
surprising correlation—call it synergy—between video and problem
solving. They seemed made for each other!
Being in a position of observing this striking synergy was a result of
working with teachers who had little to no video experience. It was rare
when we worked with teachers who had any idea of how they wanted to
use video in their classroom. The reason they let video into their class
was usually because they had heard that it was very successful in other
classes. When it came time to decide how to apply video in their class, the answer evolved into something like, “Why don’t we connect video to a
problem we’re having in the classroom?” as opposed to having video in
the class for video’s sake, which, as previously reflected upon, doesn’t
tend to work so well. The problems to which we were able to apply video
came in many shapes and sizes.
External Problems.
For third grade teacher Mrs. Redfield, it was
bomb threats. There had been a wave of school shootings across the
nation in the previous school year and if that wasn’t enough, “local ter-
rorists” were doing their best to exploit the fear in the air by phoning in daily bomb threats to the school district. The bomb threats were becoming so routine that teachers and students were scheduling evacuations as
regularly as math lessons. Mrs. Redfield felt she owed her third graders
more than an empty don’t worry, everything will be all right rationalization of the confusion and extraordinary insecurity of the past two months.
Together, Mrs. Redfield and her students created a story about the
bomb threats using a metaphor of a monster to represent the bomb
threats in a movie they made. This allowed both students and teacher to
step back from the “real” issue of bombs and project their feelings and
creative energy into a story that could absorb their anxieties and provide
a place for them to vent their fears and confusion. In essence, we were
using the medium of video to help solve a problem that traditional means
could not.
Behavior Problems.
Second grade teacher Mrs. Green was having a
problem with her students’ behavior getting in the way of learning. It
was early spring and her kids were showing signs of losing interest in
learning and gaining interest in things going on elsewhere.
Solution
xlv
She decided to point her movie project in the direction of class behav-
ioral issues. She and her students created a motto: The first time it’s funny; the second time it’s boring; the third time you’re out of here! Out of this came the story “Comes a Time,” about a school without rules where students
could do whatever they wanted. But in the end, because there were no
rules, they could not learn. The experience of framing behavior in a me-
dia work helped the students see their behavior in a reflexive manner and
they were clearly moved by it. In short, Mrs. Green found a significant
improvement in their behavior after the “Comes a Time” moviemaking
experience.
Research Problems.
When it came to Erin Bronson’s fourth grade
class, the lesson plan surrounding the practice of “research” had proven
very challenging over the years. Ms. Bronson thought that if video could
help her students get more interested in research and study skills, and see the value and relevance of these practices in their lives, it would be a
great accomplishment. In her experiences, the topic of research was
something fourth-grade kids were not typically
enthusiastic about. Our
hope was that incorporating video into the research process would
“charge up” this lesson plan for her students.
Ms. Bronson and her kids ended up doing a documentary story about
the Erie Canal. Following our experience together, Ms. Bronson reflected
back on process of working video into her curriculum:
I think that it motivates kids a lot. I think that it gets kids to want to do more on this topic. I noticed kids when we said “OK, we’re going to
study the Erie Canal,” they were like, “OK, well whatever. . . .” And
then it was, “OK we’re going to do this [video] project,” and then it was
like “Oh! Well, now we have to do this because we want to be part of
this project!” So they were a lot more motivated. . . . They had to do
their part.
The necessary process of research was therefore swept into the wave of
their motivation to make a documentary.
The Poetry Problem.
Fifth grade teacher Mrs. Catrell’s challenge
was making poetry meaningful to her students. She connected a music
video project to their poetry unit and was amazed at the way video came
through. She related:
Once they started thinking they were going to write their poem and
they were going to videotape their poems, it really just, they just went
wild with it . . . they really enjoyed what they were writing a whole lot
more.
The Business Law Problem.
We were skeptical about how Mr.
Mann was going to make a video connection to the subject of high school
business law class. His specific curricular challenge was “to demonstrate
how civil, criminal, federal, state, and municipal laws interacted with
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Chapter 7
each other and how understanding relationships between them could
help communities solve problems.”
Their video was about the dangerous precedent of RICO (the Racket-
eer Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act) in its application to
alleged gang activity in their neighborhood; it was watched by more than
a hundred attendees at a special university screening. The kids intro-
duced the film, and it was heralded as a great success. In fact, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the video Mann’s class made achieved near
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Page 5