Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind

by Michael Schoonmaker

  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

  cvii

  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?

  cix

  cx

  Chapter 19

  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

  Fringe

  cxi

  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

  cxii

  Chapter 19

  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.

  cxiii

  cxiv

  Chapter 20

  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