Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind

“Not in my classroom, you don’t!”

  Our first reaction was concern for Talia. We worried the sounds would

  upset her, and rekindle her anxiety, but she actually seemed confident,

  almost content, like she had an idea.

  VIDEO:

  “You need to put that camera away!”

  “Not in my classroom, you don’t!”

  We asked them what they were thinking. Leia asked if we could use the

  clip in Talia’s story. Talia’s eyes lit up. “But you can’t see anything,” Talia concluded.

  As in just about every step in this story process, this situation present-

  ed a path of messy engagement. The TV production teacher in us saw a

  teachable moment, something that could be seen as us coming up with an

  idea for Talia’s project, but regardless it rose naturally out of Talia’s story process. This particular brand of messy engagement happened all the

  time in the college teaching environment, specifically when students

  were deeply involved in the creative process.

  Students’ creative challenges usually invited a consideration of ideas

  and approaches that were just outside of their own ability to comprehend

  on their own. We call them teaching moments because they invite an

  expansion of a student’s existing creative process. Such moments usually

  involve questions like, “Have you considered this technique for your

  story?” or, “Is that the best shot for your story to lead with?” or “If you’re trying to tell a story about ‘x’ wouldn’t it make more sense for the story if you moved in this direction?” Though it involves a process of giving students other ideas, the purpose behind such creative interaction is not

  to do the work for the student, but rather to engage the student in a wider contemplation of storytelling process that their idea may be best served

  by.

  When it came to Talia’s story we presented the girls with such a con-

  templation of their story idea. What if they were to re-enact the rest of

  their story in a similar way that Talia actually captured those ten seconds of off-camera action, sideways framing, and accidental-recording-style

  real footage? This would involve laying down Talia’s voice narrating the

  Confabulation

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  story, and inserting a reenactment of the classroom incident to fit it. They could shoot the reenactment from a tilted point of view of Talia’s partial

  torso in reaction to a teacher yelling at her off-camera. Viewers could

  then get a visual sense of what was happening without disclosing a spe-

  cific identity of a teacher.

  Talia and Leia loved the idea, and felt comfortable taking ownership

  of it in relation to their story. We shot the reenactment a few days later

  during their lunch period and then chose some music to complement the

  emotional tone of her feelings about the event. We even added the actual

  audio from the shouting teacher and repeated the lines to reflect Talia’s

  anger and helplessness in the story.

  Messy Collaboration

  Our research team regularly visualized the collaborative part of our

  project as something that happened after the students told their stories, for instance going with them to present their stories to the school board

  and helping them follow up on their stories as they inform best educa-

  tional practices for the future. But in Talia’s case, we were clearly collaborating within the process of her expression of the story.

  Was this truly Talia’s story, if we helped her? In the hours and hours

  we had spent with the Smart Kids, we had helped some of them a lot, and

  others, not at all. It depended on the story and the child telling it. Were the stories we helped them with better or more presentable than the ones

  we had not? Not necessarily, but the fact remains that the process was not

  neat and clean—rather parallel to the messiness that storytellers must

  deal with. Virginia Woolf (1925) advised storytellers to trace the pattern

  of their expressions “however disconnected and incoherent in appear-

  ance.” This is something our minds, in Michael Gazanniga’s work (2012),

  are conditioned to do every day:

  Our subjective awareness arises out of our dominant left hemisphere’s

  unrelenting quest to explain the bits and pieces that pop into con-

  sciousness. What does it mean that we build our theories about our-

  selves after the fact? How much of the time are we confabulating, giv-

  ing a fictitious account of a past event, believing it to be true? When

  thinking about these big questions, one must always remember that all

  these modules are mental systems selected for over the course of evolu-

  tion. The individuals who possessed them made choices that resulted

  in survival and reproduction. They became our ancestors.

  The messiness we were experiencing in our particular storytelling pro-

  cess was in fact an exercise of a naturally human sense-making process.

  In the end, we determined that our success would depend on the extent

  to which students took ownership of their stories.

  Conclusion

  [S]chools need to think hard about how they should respond to the

  more participatory forms of media culture that are now emerging. . . .

  —David Buckingham in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media

  We saw Talia when we delivered her Smart Kids movie poster announc-

  ing their premiere date and time. She looked very happy and proud at

  the prospect of the upcoming event in her honor. She asked if she had to

  dress up and seemed pleased when we told her, “Of course you do. It’s a

  movie premiere!”

  A new challenge had emerged: what dress would she wear for such

  an affair? It had not been that long ago when we were looking at a

  defeated and humiliated version of Talia surrendering her camera and

  announcing she would no longer be part of the Smart Kids project. At

  this point it felt like we had done the right thing, to push Talia to contin-ue with her project, and we couldn’t help but feel a tinge of relief—all this at a point weeks before her project would be formally, publically listened

  to.

  This exchange confirmed to us how important the first step of the

  story process is in the goal of capturing student stories and perspectives

  on education, or more broadly the power and strength of exercising per-

  sonal expression through media.

  Yes, there was certainly more to gain (or conceivably lose) in the pub-

  lic screening of the stories: the listening phase of the storytelling process.

  But there was already a sign of real success here in the first phase—

  expression—along with a deep well of possibilities to explore in future

  research projects.

  We held a Hollywood-style movie premiere—complete with red car-

  pet—of the ten Smart Kids Visual Stories at our large university auditor-

  ium filled with friends, family members, and other fans of the Smart

  Kids .

  As long as the projector doesn’t break, or the power doesn’t go out,

  such events are as a rule very neat and clean and enjoyable for those

  involved. The Smart Kids premiere was certainly no exception.

  But behind the façade, those involved in the story process will know

  how messy it was to make these stories. From the process of negotiating

  with the schools, to the closing of a school to
the following of as many of the original students as we could, to the enormously complex parental

  permission process, to the even more complicated transportation process

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  Conclusion

  to get middle school kids to the university (not to mention back home

  after that), to the training sessions, to the lapses in time—sometimes

  days, weeks, or months between our time together—and through it all

  these kids were turning into young adults before our eyes.

  As the account of Talia’s story process demonstrates, at just about

  every turn, considering young people in urban school environments as

  qualified authors of media content involves far more than simply placing

  instruments of production in their hands, or asking them to tell a visual

  story.

  Telling a visual story in a school environment involves careful

  thought, hard work, tough choices, and nearly constant uncertainty—in

  short, a messy process that most schools are not yet equipped to handle.

  Does this deem K-12 videomaking unadvisable? Based on this and every

  other visual story these students created—absolutely not. Why is this?

  Despite the fact that kids in urban schools are often characterized as

  not caring about doing well in school (Alonso et al., 2009), the young

  storytellers we worked with demonstrated a consistent passion to do well

  in school and saw their successful education as a vital part of their fu-

  tures.

  These Smart Kids truly enjoyed the experience of telling stories for

  others to hear. It made them feel important and respected. And as far as

  their telling of these stories goes, schools and the process of education are messy, so why wouldn’t the stories around them be similarly messy:

  messy questions involve messy answers.

  Kids enjoy talking about education not only because it is very impor-

  tant to them but also because they enjoy the experience of expressing

  their ideas about the world in general. Expressing through video stories

  empowered Talia and the other Smart Kids. Our work with them only

  scratched the surface as far as opening up their channels of expression.

  We—researchers, teachers, public school administrators—need to invite

  more stories from children and prepare ourselves to listen to them.

  As David Buckingham (2009) advises above, and others back up from

  various points of view (Alvermann and Eakle, 2007; Burke and Burke,

  2005; Burke and Grosvenor, 2003; Cook-Sather, 2002; Cushman and the

  Students of What Kids Can Do, 2003), the evolving media landscape

  poses a frontier of sorts for student expressions. Based on the Smart Kids

  project, some aspects of expression are familiar, and others, Talia’s story for instance, are potentially inventive. Such expressions seem worthy of a

  genre of their own.

  The production process is rich with story content and meaning, cer-

  tainly giving credence to calls for looking as closely at the periphery of

  visual stories (Rose, 2007) as at the stories themselves: in other words, the stories are not the whole story. But also, transcending Rose’s largely still picture methodology, when pictures move and contain sounds, their

  richness increases exponentially.

  Conclusion

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  Change is hard: both changes that are intended, university-school

  partnerships to seek student perspectives on education, and changes that

  are not, like people getting hurt and offended along the way.

  And finally, returning to the question of why? Why do kids of all ages

  and grade levels so consistently light up when movie cameras enter their

  worlds, especially classrooms? Beyond the novelty, beyond the techno-

  logical gadgetry with all of its resident complications there is clearly a

  deeper, more meaningful force at work. Perhaps the most important key

  to unlocking the moviemaking mind is understanding that we are all

  living, breathing, confabulating stories in the making. The process

  around our living involves making sense of those stories, telling those

  stories, aspiring to the expectations of those stories and embodying those

  stories as they slowly bring to view a dynamic image of our sense of the

  world we live in and who we are as characters in that world. A camera

  provides one conduit, among many, for these stories: stories that will not

  only show the world who we are and what we are about, but more

  importantly, in the same way show ourselves.

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