Packaging Media
This class was about using films, media, photographs, etc as pedagogical tools to open up spaces for conversation and learning with youth.We talked a lot about hooking the learners- beginning the lesson with something fun and interesting- pop culture-esque. This I think is fairly clear for most people, finding some way to enter the subject matter through the lives and interests of the youth. Whats not clear, I don’t think, is that this is do-able in media. Elementary school teachers always do this in math, science, whatever the subject matter. How many apples did you cut to learn fractions? How many times did you play a game to start talking about rhythm? Yet for some reason we lose this creative way of learning when we leave elementary school.
Packaging kind of brings it back. Media learning re-introduces inductive learning in this way. I was very interested and inspired by speaker Pablo Toledo, who spoke about packaging media and his own experiences at Venice Arts and other youth media orgs. Something I found especially interesting was the partnership between Venice Arts and USC. There’s something innovative and similar to what I wish to do in academia about the partnership of this amazing org with an academic institution, even though it is USC.
I was so inspired by the discussion. I kind of got lost in my own thought about the subject and tuned out my fellow students rsponding verbally because I was so caught up in ideas…
In hooks to education. In excitement. In the sheer joy of learning when its fun and emotional and makes you smile. It made me want to get a sketch book and sketch out all of the hooks I can think of. This is why I loved being the training director for East Bay AMIGOS- because Sita and I would spend hours eating fruit, drinking coffee and tea, and coming up with hooks to hook in a a new generation of amigos, to hook them in and make them emotional about something so deeply personal to us. What comes to mind is the AI workshop (appreciative inquiry) we started in the DR in 2002- wow, 2002- and still facilitate. We’ve worked it over and over again, drawn pictures and re-written methodologies. I could recite it in my head backwards and inside out while I am sleeping. We lived with it, dreamed about its potential. Knew how promising it could be. And just kept shifting that hook, trying new hooks, drawing in the wondrous people we shared it with. How many different groups did we do this with? Of course, the AMIGOS version with every AMIGOS group we encounter. But what about everyone else? Its like it has become alive this workshop of Sita and mine, born in a hot and sweaty staff house. Our intimacy with it makes it so much better, so much deeper, so much more relevant. And it makes us, as educators, so much more able to teach and to relate and to really listen.
Films with holes to open pedagogical spaces. Full of holes, and holes and emptiness coming to represent and becoming potential and energy and hope and power. Peter always goes on about this, and I feel it reflected in that one activity that Sita and I seem to always find in our lives, together or not.
I drew on my paper a couple of things:
The first was the numbers one through ten, representing ten weeks of youth media. And weaving in and out of them, holding them together, making them alive are squiggly lines of critical consciousness, hope, empathy, tolerance, compassion love, care, nonviolence, caring, respecting, celebrating… I can think of so many more.
I think the year Sita and I spent as the East Bay TDs are the most embodied moments I have of being an educator and really, really hardcore focusing on these things. Of really constructing and believing in our youth to be capable, beautiful, colorful beings. Of really feeding our own spirits by simply being and sharing and facilitating together. I don’t think either of us would consider ourselves teachers in that role. More like mentors, facilitators. What care and hope went into each activity planning. What love and spirit went into each retreat, each interaction, each moment we shared with the vols. I want to capture that and bring it with me always, to remind myself of the kind of facilitator I want to be.
Of course, we in class were talking about human rights and getting youth to identify human rights issues, and to name them. But similarly, we were trying to get these youth to name leadership capacities of those they work with (among a thousand other things). And that, I think they did. I wonder if being able to name those powerful qualities of leadership or wonder in others is just as valid in human rights ed as being able to name human rights issues or kinds of child labor. If we sent vols into communities knowing how to name human rights issues/violations, how would that affect them? I think I would rather they be able to name celebratory aspects of where they are. I think it has to do with their age- the potential they bring to their communities is about hope and love and compassion. And so I wanted them to be able to name hope, love, and compassion in a community so different from their own.
The other thing I drew underneath that list of ten numbers with little boxes around them and words weaving in between was a “picture” of the tension of value systems in youth media that happens in schools as opposed to after school, or the tension between educator and funder. There is a value system there- two, in fact, running at each other. We can use what youth give us as entry points into their lives, of course. Anything they give us? I think, but yes?
So we enter their lives via their videos. And the value system-educator-tension begins to play a role. What are they supposed to be doing, what are the goals, who needs what and what needs to happen?
But at the same time I think there can be- and should be- the flexibility to move through the canon freely, and to slip outside of it for the skilled educator who can navigate both school principle and funder in ways that address youth and address the powers that be/fulfill their needs.
I think if I could go into my youth media program with the same kind of wonder and hope and sheer excitement with which I entered AMIGOS vol training, truly amazing things could happen. its not that I don’t enter with wonder and excitement. its just that with AMIGOS, it was as though every bone in my body was wonder and excitement. With my project right now, I am more easily bogged down in a thousand other things that don’t pertain to the moment- teachers, principles, grades, guns, people who work for me. I need to relocate myself to the place of magic that AMIGOS training grew from. Its personal!
Lastly, this makes me want to do a youth media project next semester with the daughters of sweatshop workers to continue to build that body of work of mine that is being archived on sweatshop workers. Problem? I tried this a while ago and could not really find the right org to work with, or really an org that was working with sweatshops. Which of course, I need.
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