We felt like schoolchildren waiting to see what the students had done.
Perhaps in this footage we had tapped into the great secrets they were
holding and so unable to express in any other way? The more we hoped
and imagined, the more we began to feel this video might provide the
key to the secrets of the point of view of kids we had long searched for.
This was when we realized that whatever we had, and however good
or bad it was, it was something in precious short supply. We don’t really
have mechanisms to consistently track kids’ points of view. So in a lot of
ways, it didn’t matter what, in particular, was on the cameras the kids
had taken home with them. What mattered was that it was theirs—their statements, their expressions, their views.
What We Found
We all had expected much more than we eventually found in the
footage. In the tightly scripted “What’s Important to Me” video they had
done earlier in the year, the kids were clearly working under adult con-
straints. In this video, there were essentially no constraints—just tell the story of a day in your life on video.
It was literally dizzying to stay with their stories. All three were un-
structured and extremely difficult to follow, either wildly photographed
with constant moves and zooms and over-modulated audio, or inexpli-
cably drawn out, fly-on-the-wall “hidden cams” capturing the minute-
by-minute traffic in a private living room. You might say we got what we
asked for, but regardless of the chaos, it was still very helpful. At the very least it helped us figure out that we were looking for something between
completely structured and completely unstructured.
The Picture Project
Fourth grade teacher Hanna Patrick came up with a fairly simple
media project for her students. She called it the Picture Project, which she derived from the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. She
wanted her students to take pictures of things and attach written expla-
nations from their points of view. It would give the students a sense of
the relationship between written ideas and visual ideas and show them
how powerful visuals could be. She asked for our help in organizing the
Perspective
xcix
project and we happily agreed. She was doing what we had hoped she
would do with the equipment—making connections between her curric-
ula and video technology.
Shortly after she came up with the idea, we made the decision to
expand it to the 5th and 6th grades and added a twist: a time capsule. The
school was still reeling from the announcement that it would be closing
permanently at the end of the school year, and all students would be
reassigned to other schools in the district. Along with our interest in
collecting more footage of student stories we reasoned, why not use the
picture project to capture their point of view of the school, in particular what it was to them as students? In addition, as part of their grieving
process, they were being asked to document their school from the per-
spective of people in the future wanting to know what the school was like
when it was open. They seemed very excited at the prospect of being the
ones to tell the story of their school through pictures.
To give the project more “motion picture flavor” Mrs. Patrick sug-
gested that instead of written explanations accompanying the pictures,
we use audio commentary voiced by the students who took the pictures.
Each student would get to take at least one picture and comment on it.
Having learned in the “take-home experiment” the problems that might
arise if we gave the children no limits whatsoever, we decided to offer
them a set of categories of pictures they might take:
• The physical building
• Fun at their school
• What kids don’t like about their school
• The official view: What the principal wants people to see about
their school
• The people of their school
• Problems at their school
• What does teaching look like at their school
• How do kids see their school
Even though we conducted the exercise in manageably small groups of
three, four, or five kids at a time, the experience of running around the
school to collect pictures with them was organized chaos at best. Taking
pictures was the easy part. The hard part was running back and forth to
class, upstairs and down—three flights at a time—inside and out—rain or
shine. And of course, what would any school activity be without the
playful hallway antics you would expect of 9-, 10-, and 11-year-olds. It
was exhausting and, at times, endless. As we crossed paths with our
respective small groups of children we declared, “How can these teachers
work with twenty-eight at a time!?” It was nearly impossible to keep four
of them to a task! To capture their point of view meant not only that we
would get pictures, but also, hopefully, shades and hues of the students
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Chapter 17
themselves. This alone may be the reason why a child’s point of view is
such an endangered species.
Once we had gotten through all ninety children, we were so tired that
we didn’t even look at the pictures. We were also conducting this exercise
in the middle of the busiest time of year in our respective colleges, so the day job was always around the bend. The pictures sat on a hard drive for
a couple of weeks. We didn’t watch them until it was time to add audio
commentary. To do this we used the voice-over tool on the free Mac
software iMovie . We worked in the same size groups, found a quiet room near their classroom, selected the picture or pictures each of them had
taken and recorded their unrehearsed explanations of what the picture
was and why they took it. The hope was that the commentary would add
something to the picture that would further enhance their point of view.
As we stood back and watched the kids do their work—independent-
ly, as they effortlessly became masters of the software and hardware—
that feeling came back to us again. It was a feeling of anticipation that we had found something rare, something unique, something very special:
their point of view. This focused, audio form was comparatively more
coherent. Having a little bit of structure seemed to enhance the clarity of their feelings and ideas.
Furthermore, when we arranged the pictures together into one pres-
entation, including an instrumental music track, the student point of
view resonated even more. What really hit us was that we were looking
at things we saw all the time when we came to their school. But this
presentation was allowing us to see these things through their eyes and
voices. It made us more critically aware of the school, and what it meant
to be a student there. And it wasn’t really all that complicated. It was
pristine and compelling.
The experience brought some things to life for us about a child’s point
of view. First, it reminded us how powerful a point of view is. In film-
making, we use the concept of point of view to limit the viewer’s involve-
ment in a story to a particular character’s view
point. That means we
don’t see everything there is in the story world, rather only the things the character sees and feels. Certainly the storyteller (in a God-like way) is
capable of allowing a view from any point of view they choose. Experi-
enced storytellers recognize the power inherent in a limited point of view
that brings a viewer into the position of the character. From that position, viewers are better able to relate to the character and feel that character’s pains, joys, and perspectives, in a similarly singular way that we live our own day-to-day points of view from one limited position as individual
human beings.
Second, this gathering of a child’s point of view was very difficult.
Allowing kids to express themselves takes time, planning, and great pa-
tience because it’s not a neat and clean process. What kids feel is complex and messy compared to the adult and institutional settings they are edu-
Perspective
ci
cated in. Once again, this may be why a child’s point of view is such an
elusive entity to adults.
And finally, finding a child’s point of view is enormously meaningful,
especially in the context of school. Though we’re not quite at the point
where we can articulate exactly why, the research team, teachers, and
especially the students themselves were clearly moved when we sat
down in the auditorium to watch their collective slide show about their
school.
Some of it, we admit, was what media education scholar David Buck-
ingham would guard against: sentimental. Watching the story of a
school, only days away from permanently closing, from the position of
kids in that school. It would be impossible not to feel sentimental. But
there was more. A first grade teacher we had worked with in another
school, in another videomaking context said it best:
After a whole year of teaching the kids, some of them become so dear
to you and there are others . . . [sweetly grimacing] . . . there’s just that personality, that every day. . . . And I think that the video . . . it brought them back to six year olds for me. You can see their sweetness. And
someone like Willy, who tried your patience by 9:02 you’re ready to
kill. And you see that big smile and that grin. And he really is a lovable
kid, but you kind of lose that sometimes. But they became even more
lovable in the video . . . that brought them back to being six year olds.
It’s very easy to overlook a child’s point of view, even when they are
right in front of us every day. Though it is not the only point of view in
the process of education, it is probably close to—if not the—most important point of view in the equation—it is also very likely the most ne-
glected.
EIGHTEEN
Noise
A focus on identity requires us to pay close attention to the diverse
ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life, and
their consequences both for individuals and for social groups. It entails
viewing young people as significant social actors in their own right, as
“beings,” and not simply as “becomings” who should be judged in
terms of their projected futures.
—David Buckingham (2008)
In our quest to unearth children’s visual stories about their school experiences we found it helpful to regularly remind each other what our objec-
tive was and how fragile the process of obtaining it was.
You could say that we were looking for the truest form of a child’s
voice or an honest, subjective perspective on their school experience,
stripped as much as possible from influence of the adults involved in
various aspects of their education.
Why Voice?
What is the value of “voice,” or a child’s innate views on the process
of their education? The simplest answer is that urban education is stuck
in a state of everyday failure. In spite of significant research, money,
policy initiatives, and interventions that have addressed educational fail-
ure in urban schools, this failure endures, shaping for the worse the lives of urban youth, particularly poor, Black, Latino, and immigrant students.
As objects of this failure students are ideally positioned witnesses to
the problems their schools face. Though not necessarily skilled at school
subjects, they do possess multiple skills and insights into the problems
urban students, teachers, and principals face.
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Chapter 18
In fields as diverse as pediatric medicine, advocacy law, and urban
education, researchers have shown that collaborating with young people
on their futures increases the quality of the service.
For instance, Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Michael Rich
(Rich, 2007) gave adolescents video cameras to document their lives with
asthma in order to improve their treatment outcomes. Rich explained,
“When patients are framed as biomedical problems and not asked to
contribute their experiences and strengths to their own healing, they are
not engaged as partners in their own health care.” This simple, but revo-
lutionary, step transformed both the classic model of the profession and
the situation of his patients.
Reconsidered in the landscape of urban schools, these findings sug-
gest that students whose lives and futures are affected by the failures of
urban education must be engaged not as educational problems, but as
partners in the reform of urban schools. The deficit approach to urban
education, which frames students as problems that the educational sys-
tem must overcome, ignores students as resources in a collaborative ef-
fort for educational reform.
Finding the voice of a child is about engaging both sides of the nature-
nurture dynamic in education. Though there is no shortage of well-inten-
tioned nurturing in the form of top-down curricular imperatives, there is
little doubt that the student’s voice—call it “nature” in the nature-nurture continuum—is rarely consulted and, at best, poorly represented in the
process of education. The first among many challenges in our Smart Kids
Visual Stories Project was to search for a way to capture that voice.
Finding the Voice of a Child with Video
In earlier videomaking research with K-12 kids (Schoonmaker, 2007)
we imaged we could find it just by asking children what they thought of
things in their lives. That is when we realized the problem of accurately
representing a child’s perspective without tainting it (consciously or un-
consciously) with our adult viewpoints. We ran into this several times
when we tried to interview younger (K-5) school children.
Following is a transcript of part of an interview with a second grade
girl, Meredith, about TV shows she liked to watch. Her mother, Cheri,
facilitated.
Interviewer: Why do you like Full House?
Meredith: Just cuz it’s good.
Cheri: What’s good about it?
Meredith: I don’t know.
Noise
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Cheri: You like all the characters?
Meredith: Yeah.
In effect, Meredith was being asked to translate her internal viewing
experiences as a child into an adult characterization. It obviously didn’t
/> work. We had a similar problem with Jimmy, a sixth grader. We were
looking for his thoughts about the second grade movie his sister had
made.
Me: Do you remember the movie now?
Jimmy: Yeah.
Me: Any favorite parts, or did you think it was good or bad?
Jimmy: Pretty weird.
Me: What was weird about it?
Jimmy: Funny weird.
Most of these children were simply not comfortable expressing ideas
verbally. They would more often than not answer questions with “I don’t
know” and laugh, embarrassed about being put in the formal spotlight of
an interview, a temporary and unfamiliar position of authority. When
asked directly in adult ways, children seemed inclined to tell us what
they thought we wanted to hear.
Inviting Plurality, Resisting Romance
In line with well-grounded scholarly suggestions (Buckingham, 1993,
2008) to see students as competent individuals, we should not expect one
consistent and universal voice; instead, we should expect many voices,
perhaps in conflict and or contradiction to each other, when seeking their
voice.
In addition, another potential problem in trying to understand chil-
dren from an adult perspective is the frequent temptation to over-roman-
ticize them. David Buckingham (1993b) warned:
In the case of research on youth culture, for example, the attempt to
identify oneself with the ”other” has occasionally led to a romanticiza-
tion of forms of ”resistance.” . . . In the case of younger children, it is often hard for researchers (and their readers) to avoid a Wordswor-thian marveling at children’s innate wisdom and sophistication, or a
vicarious identification with their anarchic—but nevertheless terribly
cute—rejection of adult norms. The difficulty many adults experience
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Chapter 18
in listening to children without patronizing them is a direct conse-
quence of their own power.
The “terribly cute” temptation regularly surfaced in the 4th, 5th, and 6th
grade classrooms we worked in. There was a continual struggle for order
in these classrooms. Therefore, the children often sought refuge from
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Page 12