their seemingly overbearing and authoritarian teachers and the “prison-
like” school.
It was very easy to take the side of what looked like a poor and
defenseless student who temporarily lost their privilege to partake in the
video-making exercise of the day. The reality was that the quest for order
in the classroom was a continual battle and a proven and necessary part
of successful learning, and we had to be very careful not to succumb to
out-of-context cuteness that surfaced in many different forms.
The Context of Voice
Advice like this places a premium on the context of the learning envi-
ronment around the child’s voice. What is clear about the challenge in
finding and displaying a child’s perspective or voice is that it is not a
straightforward or simple quest. For example, over time, we learned
much more about children when we stepped into their worlds and did
things with them. They would casually reveal their feelings and thoughts
either in their actions or in natural conversations in the context of some
activity we, or their teacher, had constructed. It was neither the activity nor our interview with them that taught us the most about them. It was
the between-the-lines unscripted and intangible moments that revealed
the most compelling insights into their views of their world.
This was clear when we were conducting an introductory exercise
designed to begin a dialog with the children about their personal views
and perspectives. The teachers and our research team thought it would
be good idea to ask each student, “What’s important to you and why?”
and record it on camera for an introduction of each class and its students.
Our thought was that this was a very open-ended question inviting crea-
tive and unique responses from students. In the end, a discernable major-
ity offered virtually the same answer: “My family and school. Because I
love my family very much, they take care of me and I want to make them
proud by doing well in school.”
Talk about romantic. Students in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades of an
underprivileged and under-performing K-8 school agreeing that family
and school were the most important things to them? What better founda-
tion was there for learning than that? It was heartwarming to listen to one child after the other answer this question.
But what does this response—call it voice—mean? Are they telling us
what they really feel? Or are they telling us what they think we want to
Noise
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hear? Our reaction based in romanticism was that their response was
pure. But our hard-learned lessons from past dealings with children said,
“Wait, watch, listen to the context of their remarks and see what else rises to the surface.”
It didn’t take long. After the children performed their socially desir-
able responses to the exercise, many of them extended their on-camera
activities in their own way with their own questions and their own color-
ful designs.
One child interviewed another about his performance in school. When
she asked the boy how he was doing in school this year he said, “Really
good!” She asked how his grades were and the boy replied “I’m an ‘A’
student!” In talking with his teacher afterward, it became clear that he
had misrepresented himself on camera and clearly was not an “A stu-
dent.” Did that mean that he was lying? Or, with a little reflection, that he was indicating to the public a certain perception of himself that he
wanted others to gather from him?
The truth is, we don’t exactly know, at least so far. But what we do
know is that the rising complexity around the voices of these children
makes us feel like we’re on the right track of this creative and crafty
subject we seek—the “noise” that children make in expressing their
voice. This noise can be very easily passed over and ultimately ignored,
especially in a school culture where students are seen as problems and
deficits in the equation of educational reform. The fact is that students are potential resources in the struggle to improve education. Video can help
with this if we allow for it, but we need to open our ears to the noise that children make about their education. They can be partners in a successful
educational enterprise.
Though the term voice may be a rather daunting term when it comes
to the articulated perspective of a child or student, whether we label it
something neat and clean (voice) or unrefined (noise), it is more than fair to say it is currently ignored in the learning process. Capturing the voice of a child involves not only listening to what they literally say, but also capturing the noises that they make in between.
NINETEEN
Fringe
Over almost twenty years of making movies with kids in K-12 environ-
ments, we have learned that there are some things that are simply off
limits. These items come in all shapes and sizes, from all directions, and a lot of them are in middle school.
We have only recently begun to get a clear picture of the elusive
middle school media-maker, let alone the middle school student. There
are a couple of reasons for this elusiveness. Institutionally speaking, students are more difficult to get at in the elaborate block scheduling that
moves them from class to class to class, none of which is a media class.
Without the comparatively pristine K-5 traditional single classroom
space, it is difficult to find a moviemaking space in the middle school
space.
And honestly we’ve always been more than a little reticent about the
idea of engaging with the middle school age group, with all its stigma
and stereotypes from the raging adolescent hormones to the awkward
physical changes that go with the human transformation from sweet,
innocent child to not-so-sweet-and-innocent young men and women.
This is simply the way, however misinformed, we have grown to concep-
tualize the American middle school and students who are sentenced to it.
All of this was why it was easy to avoid going to middle school to make
movies with children and their teachers there. Up until the current pro-
ject, what little media-making we did with this age group was safely
outside of middle school grounds.
But the Smart Kids Visual Stories Project took us to the heart of mid-
dle school. Our research centered on working with kids in difficult and
troubled schools to tell visual stories about what school was like for
them. What better place to be to accomplish this than middle school?
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It didn’t take long to learn that making movies with middle school
students was, on the whole, not all that different than making movies
with kindergarteners in their single classrooms or 12th graders in their
specialized video classrooms. The administration allowed us use of
spaces reserved for part time instruction (art or music rooms and special
instructional spaces in or around libraries and technology/computer labs
and Home Ec. kitchens). As we used these places for predominantly
planning purposes—shooting most video on-location in story-specific
places—any room w
ith a basic table and a couple of chairs was a fine
place as far as we were concerned. The instances of hormonally-induced
bad behaviors never competed with the myths about them, and, in gener-
al, the motif of awkward physical transformation failed to suffocate the
sweetness in the kids we worked with. Our middle school was by no
means perfect, but clearly it was nowhere nearly as off limits as we had
expected it to be.
Story Development Process
After all the technology training and warm-up exercises and getting to
know each other in the first phase of the project, it was time to get to the substance of the Smart Kids Visual Stories Project. The fundamental
premise behind our project was that students were capable of intelligent,
helpful, creative, and inventive ideas when it came to the subject of their schooling. If we had the time to ask them and listen to what they said, it
should be clear that they were smart kids when it came to the subject of
their own education.
So here we were at the point of no return and simultaneously the
point of reckoning as far as the project was concerned. We met with kids
in small groups and began asking them: What do people need to know
about what it’s like to be a student in this school? Even though we ex-
plained that there were no right or wrong answers to this question it was
somewhat daunting to the kids in much the same manner as the opportu-
nity for college students to make their first independent film in a class.
There is more often than not a pause to take in the gravity of the opportu-
nity as there is so much that can be said and done.
Little by little their story ideas trickled out. Some of them were exactly
what we had hoped for. Inspired by their absolute adoration of their
teacher, two sixth grade boys decided to work together on a story appro-
priately titled “What a Good Teacher Looks Like . ” Two other students focused on challenges they faced every day in school: one coming up
with a story about racism in her classes titled “A Day in My Life,” and the other on the difficulties in always “Being New,” having changed schools
three times in her first six years of school.
Other stories the middle school students came up with were compara-
tively far from our expectations. While chewing through a particularly
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unappetizing tray of food, one student decided his story would be
“School Lunch Is Nasty.”
An empowered team of four girls decided to use their storytelling
powers to shine light on a problem at their school in “Interview with a
Bully.”
In one of the more “appropriately middle school” topics, four girls at
another school decided they would tell a story about the most prevalent
phenomenon in middle school life in their story, “Drama.” In the devel-
opment of this story, the girls were having a little difficulty coming up
with an acceptable story topic and as the end of our meeting time drew
closer, we tried a different technique to stimulate their creative thought
process. We talked about the idea of how human minds are filled with
movies of all shapes and sizes, clamoring to come out to the public realm
to be shared. We started with seventh grader Aidila, simply asking her to
describe the first movie in her head about her school life. It didn’t have to be a good idea or even a scripted film. We just encouraged her to free it
from her mind. Following is what she described:
GRADE 6 MOVIE—SCENE OUTLINE
TITLE: “DRAMA”
INT. CLASSROOM—DAY
• As Ms. V tries to cover the day’s lesson plan, a dramatic incident
breaks out among the students.
• A boy tells the girl next to him (his girlfriend, according to Face-
book) that she is ugly.
• The girl proceeds to inform the boy that she is no longer interested
in him.
• The boy asks if that means they are broken up. The girl responds,
“No.”
• At this point Ms. V notices the drama and intervenes asking the boy
why he is calling his own girlfriend ugly.
• The boy proceeds to tell Ms. V to mind her own business.
• Ms. V motions for the boy to leave the class, and he does so without
hesitation.
• The drama continues to rear its head throughout the school day
clearly frustrating the students in the class who would rather be
focusing on school work.
Our technique had worked, however “non-academic” the topic might
have been in the grand scheme of pedagogical possibilities. And as we
developed the movie and shot and edited it, we not only learned a great
deal about drama, and the no man’s land of middle school in general, but
also that it was a relevant topic when it came to education.
First, we learned that students are frustrated by drama, defined by
them as personality and relationship disputes within school that get in
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the way of learning and often lead to physical fighting in school. Despite
the fact that it is prohibited for children of their age, social networking (Facebook) generally fuels and ignites drama in school settings. In select-ing this topic to tell a story about, these students were clearly not horsing around or being melodramatic.
They were expressing a desire for help from teachers and administra-
tors both in managing drama and reducing its interference with learning.
They also expressed their desire to talk about similar topics, but most
adults they know and work with don’t consider such ideas worthy of
listening to because they are not deemed important enough to take seri-
ously. In the end, the girls appreciated the opportunity to express their
feeling about drama through the crafting of their story.
In reflecting back to our beginning (and clearly erroneous) conceptu-
alization of middle school, we realized how inappropriate it was to think
of middle school as no man’s land. The drama these kids were going
through and telling a story about was no different than the drama adults
face every day when they go to work, and yes even while engaged in the
sacred practice of research. It’s just that most of the time, we know
through life experience how to separate and manage it in the context of
work.
The students telling the story about drama opened up the door to this
no man’s land, and it felt right and not at all foreign to be there in the
fringe with them.
TWENTY
Humanity
The representations of African American and Latino young people ad-
vanced by the culture talk of adult experts . . . draw on a long tradition
of radicalized images that have historically denied the complex and
multidimensional humanity of people in the United States.
—excerpt from Our Schools Suck (2009)1
On the surface, the challenge to unearth or even recognize such an idea as
large as the multidimensional humanity might seem daunting, especially when it comes to the institution of education, which is, in many ways, set
up to ignore it.
Over the years we’ve discovered interesting and effective ways to
connect video and emerging media to lea
rning in traditional public
school settings and curricula, including:
• Video and reading
• Video and writing
• Video and science
• Video and math
• Video and art
• Video and special education
• Video and creativity
• Video and class bonding
In this light it doesn’t seem out of the question, thus, to entertain the
notion of video as it relates to humanity. And when we reflect on our
most recent experiences in K-8 schools, it’s clear there may be more than
a little hope to capture and articulate the humanity in urban school set-
tings.
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Writing on the Wall
A society publicly committed to treating all children as equal can jus-
tify confining some children to unfunded, overcrowded, physically di-
lapidated and substandard schools only if those children are viewed essentially as different from the kids attending the “good” schools.
—excerpt from Our Schools Suck (2009)
From day one of our Smart Kids Visual Stories research project, it was
clear that the C. Robert Bingham School was destined for failure. First, it had an unsightly track record on the district’s school evaluation scale;
second, it was a magnet for kids who were not wanted or accepted at
other schools in the district; and third, virtually all students of this school were bused in from other areas of the city even though the school was
surrounded by a neighborhood. It was a choice of parents in that neigh-
borhood to send their children to other schools in the district, not Bing-
ham.
Interestingly enough, this was not a bad thing for our research project.
Our project was about working with youth to help them create digital
videos representing the experience of urban education and, in particular,
their knowledge and perceptions about school through their own stories.
We believed their perspectives could influence how communities, schol-
ars, and educators envisioned and transformed schools in the future.
We were not in search of a school that was functioning well. It made
much more sense for us to be in a place where we could experience and
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