Visiting Jake in person didn’t really provide any more answers than
we already had to the mystery surrounding his being there. He was
never asked the big question, “Jake, why South High? Why not Holly-
wood? You could have Hollywood if you wanted it!” He was never
asked because the answer was obvious. He was exactly where he be-
longed, completely in his element and savoring it.
In most ways, his time spent at the university had prepared him for
the challenges of this job as much as the challenges of Hollywood. This
included knowing how to tell a story, how to channel technology into
meaningful content, and how to capture beautiful pictures and sounds.
But his education never really covered the part of his job that dealt with
teaching. He clearly had that down on his own.
Once the mystery of Jake had been sufficiently addressed, we kicked
into “open mind gear,” a state of mind we had always found enormously
enlightening in other K-12 settings. In effect, we invited South High to
teach us something we didn’t already know about K-12 videomaking.
Not surprisingly, we learned a lot and right away.
Jake was very excited to introduce his boss, South High principal
Lorraine McBride. To Jake, Lorraine, was the shining star of this institu-
tion, certainly not the excessively positive manner we were accustomed
to when it came to teachers talking about their principals. She, along with the students, was a major reason why he looked forward to coming to
work every day. And she was the reason why the media program
worked so well at South High. It worked because McBride saw media
Paths
lxxxi
and the students’ involvement in it as fundamentally healthy for and
relevant to their education.
This view of media by a school administrator was uncommon in our
K-12 observations and experiences. Most K-12 administrators we had
interacted with over the years tended to think of media as a basement
vocation or one of those programs that looked good on the school’s stat
sheet but in practice only involved students with special interest in the
media. In terms of school priorities, it was seen as tertiary at best.
McBride had a very different view of the role of media in her school,
especially as it related to nontraditional learning. Perhaps it came from
her interest and involvement in media in her particular education and
career and the colorful path she took to become a school principal:
I worked my way up through making a film in school to get into an art
program, and then into history, and connecting those two, and then
going into environmental science and connecting that, and then envi-
ronmental psychology and how it all impacts your life.
And then, now feeling really obligated to give to these nontraditional
learners because some of us took years to get to a place where we could
put the world together and these kids can’t do that in a traditional
classroom.
But Principal McBride’s framing of media was not just in its nontradition-
al novelty. Media production had a much more central role in her view of
the school’s academic mission. This grew out of a broad concern for the
overall health and well-being of students. She found a certain short-sight-
edness built in to the traditional educational system:
One of the things school leaders don’t really recognize as being valid is
dealing with the health—the mental health, and the physical health
and the social health—of kids within schools. They [traditionally
trained teachers and administrators] don’t get that, because they’ve
never been trained to get that. They just look at the academic piece.
And I’m thinking that’s really the missing link towards the academics
for many of us who didn’t have the traditional paths to getting some-
where. All this other stuff got in the way of our doing well, and if
somebody could have dealt with that or validated the creative pieces,
sort of the alternate thinking, that would have only strengthened, at
least giving us a balance of, “Hey, if we could do that some of the time,
then alright . . . we’ll do the math if we have to.”
But if you can’t do it at all, it’s going to play itself out in either complete failure, anger or doing crazy things, and it could have been addressed
in school. So it’s looking at our responsibility as teachers.
Lorraine created a fitness center, outfitting an old room with new floors,
mirrors, spin bikes, treadmills, weights, and even a Wii to promote the
lxxxii
Chapter 14
importance of life-long heath. She took extreme pride in exercising along-
side her students:
When I go in there and exercise with them, I’m not “the principal”
anymore, I’m the person who also wants to be healthy.
She saw media—in particular Jake’s array of media classes—as central to
her academic mission of promoting kids’ explorations of paths to educa-
tion that fit them:
I feel this obligation like you do to help them figure out who they
are . . . so that they can do something. You know you raise a kid’s self-
esteem and they discover “I’m good at this, maybe I can also be good at
that.”
This was such a refreshing perspective to experience in a world of educa-
tion so dominated by robotic conformity and adherence to narrowly de-
fined and clearly questionable institutional standards and assessment
practices. What Principal McBride was demonstrating in her approach to
education was that if we truly value the ideal of leaving no child behind,
we have to recognize that children do not follow a singular path in learn-
ing. They have diverse paths that cannot be measured in one way. It is far
more important to open paths to learning than to make sure everyone is
on the same measureable one. Although traditional paths to learning
have purpose and value in education, they are not the only paths.
In his 1963 book Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking William Bruce Cameron articulates a more grand, but nonetheless parallel idea to McBride’s:
It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be
enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines
and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that
can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
When it was time for me to leave South High, I felt like I had just arrived.
I wanted to stay longer. This was a very special place run by a person
with a contagious human touch. Sure, her job was to run the school and
oversee the day-to-day, and often unrewarding, academic and adminis-
trative tasks of a large high school, but all that she did was governed by
an uncommon and refreshing vision that came down to opening paths
for students to learn.
As far as finding what we were looking for at South High, we found
Jake and a whole lot more. Jake was doing everything that our most
passionate and successful graduates do in the television, radio, and film
fields: trying to make the world a better place by sharing storie
s and
perspectives through media—the difference was he was focusing on
spreading the techniques to young storytellers and could see the effects
of his work every day, face to face, as opposed to waiting for ratings or
Paths
lxxxiii
reviews. Much like his hopes for the students here was teaching at South
High, Jake found his path by having the possibility to explore many.
Video and Voice
What does it mean to have a voice? First and foremost, to have a voice
means to have the ability to speak, communicate, and articulate. To have
a voice means to have the ability to convey information, emotions, and
subjective experiences. To have a voice means to have the ability to raise
questions, assert dissent, and verbalize criticisms. To have a voice is to
have agency and, thus, to be an agent.
Agency is not something that we typically assign to students. The
rights of students are institutionally limited based on a concept known as
in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of a parent”), a legal doctrine stating that schools can abridge students’ personal freedoms in order to
safeguard the educational process. But even aside from such legal jargon,
the role of student in the modern education system is to be on the receiving end of knowledge. In contrast, the role of educator is to provide knowledge. Thus, agency is kept from students by the very nature of the
traditional relationship between student and teacher, which is one-sided
and characterized by a power imbalance that is institutionally sanc-
tioned.
One of the primary functions of school is to socialize students, espe-
cially younger ones, and for students to learn to observe the rules of the
student-teacher relationship as part of this process. Furthermore, stu-
dents learn what it means to perform the role of good student in the classroom. A good student is one who is respectful, polite, and receptive to an
educator’s methods and who never questions, doubts, or objects to an
educator’s authority. Good students exist in contrast to bad students, who need constant policing, supervision, and regulation.
Video can be a productive tool in disrupting popular notions about
what it means to be a student—good, bad, or otherwise. Video produc-
tion offers students a chance to discover and articulate a voice, and thus a degree of agency, without entirely subverting the dynamics of the student-teacher model. Video production offers students a meaningful form
of self-expression that is apart from other options available to them. Why
is this? In part, it is a reflection of students’ knowledge that media mes-
sages are often more noticeable and relevant than other forms of verbal
and written communication.
In moving from the consumer side to the production side of media
content, students envision an audience on the viewing end of the content
they create. This challenges their own assumptions about what it means
lxxxv
lxxxvi
Video and Voice
to be a student—to be a receiver, not a producer of knowledge—and,
therefore, stands a chance to change the way students perceive schools as
institutions and attitudes about education overall.
Although audience is a key factor in discovering and claiming a voice,
the makeup of the audience matters less than the role reversal that is at
the heart of video production in the classroom. Potential audience mem-
bers may include schoolmates, friends, teachers, parents, grandparents,
siblings, other family members, neighbors, and even the student-produc-
ers themselves. The act of exhibition is simply an act of sharing. In pro-
ducing knowledge, creating videos, sharing stories, and taking owner-
ship in their work, students begin to discover their voice and, in doing so, begin to consciously cultivate a sense of agency.
FIFTEEN
Listening
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught,
as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
—John Lubbock, 1889
Just what is school to kids? This was the question we found ourselves
asking when we learned that C. Robert Bingham School was going to
close at the end of the school year.
Bingham was not only the school we were basing our latest media and
urban education research on, it was also the place where our kids went to
middle school only a few years ago.
We probably should have seen the writing on the wall given the daily
news reports about the troubled city school district and shrinking state
budgets. There was always talk this time of year about which of the many
schools in the district would be next on the chopping block. But this was,
in so many ways, OUR school!
If the school closing hurt a group of fairly removed affiliates like
ourselves—whose day jobs were based at a large, well-to-do and compar-
atively protected private university, what was it doing to the kids who
called it their school? We tried to imagine how each of us would have felt
as 4th or 5th or 6th graders to find out that our school would no longer
exist at the end of the year.
Maybe the novelty of the idea would have been funny for a second, in
a child-like “I hate school” way. We all admitted to utterances of such
phrase at key points in our upbringing, especially those days right before
a big test, but deep down, we didn’t really hate it.
Parents could have easily rationalized it away for us as a, “Well, you
have to leave elementary school some time, why not now?” kind of ex-
planation. Dealing with change is part of growing up, right?
lxxxvii
lxxxviii
Chapter 15
A family member, 72, lamented his emptiness when he passes his old,
closed school. “At least your school is still there!” he lamented to his wife when she recently visited her old, and still functioning, elementary
school. A distant, but unforgotten memory of a 7th grade math teacher
who unexpectedly died in the middle of the school year rose to the sur-
face. No matter what any student could come up with to make sense of
such an event, in the end someone, something died and the emptiness
never went away.
Grieving
It happened that our research team began student focus groups the
week after the announced school closing, so we were in an ideal position
to gather their reactions to the closing. These focus groups (comprised of
students from 4th, 5th, and 6th grades, in groups of six to eight students) were created as a way to gather a sense of what urban education meant to
students and were aimed at achieving the broader objective of involving
students (a notoriously absent voice) in the process of curriculum design
and educational reform.
When the talking began, we expected them to be much more disap-
pointed than they were. Their first reactions seemed more expressions of
relief than grief.
“Maybe it’s a good thing.”
“It wasn’t that good a school anyway.”
“At least it wasn’t because we were failing, like some of the other
schools. It’s just because we were bad.”
“Bad?” we asked.
The fan of t
he discussion had lit the embers, as the subject of the
school closing was but another log on the fire of their disillusionment
with the idea of school. In short, the idea of their school closing was just about par for their expectations and definitions of what school was to
them.
School was a place where it was very easy to get in trouble even if you
didn’t do anything wrong. School was a place where you could count on
people not listening to you or what you had to say about anything.
School was a place where all suffered from the bad behaviors of a few.
For instance, an entire grade had lost the privilege of a graduation (“mov-
ing ahead”) ceremony when a few “bad kids” acted up during one of the
first weeks of school. School was a place that felt like a prison. Why
should they care about whether or not Bingham School fell off the Earth?
Acceptance
As weeks passed, the kids shifted their conversation away from the
idea of how they felt about their school closing to the topic of what school
Listening
lxxxix
they would be re-assigned to in the next school year. They were ready to
move past the initial shock about their school closing.
What was school to these kids of C. Robert Bingham K-8 School?
Based on the first focus group discussions, their school was a confirma-
tion of the fact that they could expect little in their futures.
Mixed Reactions
In terms of the research project, the focus groups were certainly work-
ing as we had hoped. We were asking students to share their perspectives
of school, and they did so. They seemed to trust us, and were increasingly
comfortable opening up.
In our first meetings they displayed a range of emotions, but most
often anger. In the second wave of meetings, they seemed noticeably less
emotional and progressively introspective and reflective.
This applied to topics outside of the school closing as well. Whereas in
the first wave of discussions they may have been critical of and angry
about some aspect of their teacher, they became more understanding and
open minded to the day-to-day challenges teachers faced, and they ex-
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Page 10