In two short weeks, the students and teachers of Communities Rising invited us into their worlds and shared some of their stories with us. Here is their work:

1) The teachers of Communities Rising, ranging in age from college-goers to parents of college-goers, discuss the media as it has entered and changed the character of village life.

Effects of the Media on Children from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

2) About an hour from Vikravandi, where we were staying, is Aniladi, a tiny village with a giant personality. Join the overwhelmingly energetic 4th and 5th class students at the RC Primary School as they guide us through their home town.

Where I’m From from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

3) The “hostel boys” of Vikravandi were only a stone’s throw from where we were staying. They were a bunch of busy bees, as is evidenced by the blue paint some of them are doused in in the following video, but they did manage to squeeze in a few very crucial lessons in Tamil!

A Beginner’s Guide to Tamil from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

One of our goals in continuing the partnership between The Modern Story and Communities Rising is to train staff to carry out the same type of workshop that we conduct to teach students to use the cameras and brainstorm, write, shoot and produce their own short video narratives. In the spirit of creating a sustainable, long-term digital story-telling program, we conducted staff training with all of the Communities Rising teachers and walked them through the process of producing a short film, so that they might replicate that process in the classroom with students.

Srilekha's group planning their video on the effects of media on children.

We began with the brainstorming process where we had each staff member share out an idea for a video topic and then conducted a blind vote to select the top three ideas. Each TMS teacher directed a group in producing a short film on the three winning topics:
• Child Labor
• Differences in Schooling Between The City and The Village
• Effects of Technology and Media on Children

We planned the format and sequence of our videos in our first meeting and made arrangements to carry out those plans at the three hour staff training the following Saturday. When the time came, we quickly introduced those teachers to the camera who did not have experience. There was a wide disparity in the technological knowledge of the group. Some teachers came to the group with a clear-cut vision of what the video would look like and a plan to shoot and edit advanced scenes and sequences. Others had never taken photographs or video with either camera and had a vague, yet eager, sense of what we were trying to produce.

Teachers practicing with the flip and digital cameras.

Each group gelled in its own unique way as leaders emerged to complete each task and less experienced teachers asked questions and contributed their ideas. The grounds at SAMSSS were transformed into an impromptu studio as members of all three groups ran around planning, shooting, directing large groups of school children, and speeding off to shoot scenes on location. It was a very exciting and inspiring atmosphere, and extremely productive when you consider the fact that we were able to shoot all the necessary video footage and introduce editing in only 3 hours.

Vikram posing at the brick factory.

My own group worked on a video about child labor. In our planning session, we decided it would be most powerful if we could tell the story of a child who had been directly affected and pulled out of school to work. A teacher knew one boy and promised to bring him along to the training the following week. Sure enough, she showed up with Vikram and he was a great sport and brave young man for showing us around a brick factory similar to the one he had worked in, and answering questions to help raise awareness about the issue of child labor. Although he was in fourth grade, Vikram looked more like a seven year old to me, and it broke my heart to see footage of him hauling clay for bricks at the factory, knowing that he had been forced by circumstances to grow up so fast. The good news is that Vikram is back in school and with the help of his teachers and their film, raising awareness about the problem of child labor in India.

Seenu and Vikram setting up the tripod on site at the brick factory.

As our two week stay at CR wraps up after today, it is sad to go, but I know that we are leaving a very competent and committed organization behind that will pick up where we left off in our digital media curriculum. I look forward to seeing the finished product of the Analadi Hostel boys’ “Discipline” video that Shiva will work on shooting and editing with them when they return from the break.

Communities Rising Staff: Child Labor from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Srilekha introducing the camera to students at Peter Paul School

It’s been a real joy to join the efforts of Communities Rising in educating and empowering students in rural Tamil Nadu. While it is quite different from our busy home in the city of Hyderabad, the last week has been a welcome change for me. I’ve settled into a peaceful morning routine of cycling down the small country roads through verdant fields on either side, amidst coconuts and grazing cows. Later in the day we travel to three different schools in villages in the area: The Peter Paul School for differently-abled children, Analadi RC Primary School and Boys and Girls Secondary Schools, and the Vikravandi after-school program for fifth class students and hostel boys at the SAMSSS computer lab.

Stella's group at the Peter Paul School

Meeting all our new students and teaching them has been a great experience over the last week. As Srilekha pointed out, the students at the Peter Paul School are particularly endearing and there is a very tangible sense of a loving, helpful community as soon as you walk through the gates.

My group at the Peter Paul School.

My experience my first day there was truly impressive. We divided the class into three groups and each introduced them to both the digital and video cameras. I was working with Sathish, a college student who had made a film with Kara last year, who was well versed in the technology and a huge help in translating to the students. Thanks to Sathish’s translation skills, my group caught on to the concept of a photostory immediately. After he explained that the photos should fit together to tell a story, the students mobilized under the direction of a particularly creative student. They came up with the following narrative about a boy who is pulled out of school because of family troubles in less than one hour! While their creative skills are impressive, it is sad to see how prevalent and common-place the problem of child labor is in their communities. Check out their photostory below:

Communities Rising: Peter Paul Photostory from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

We have made significant progress in all our classes in the last week — introducing students to the technology, planning individual film projects and filming the necessary footage to complete the videos. The students have been hard at work running around to shoot scenes of their daily routines, girls playing various sports, tours of their schools and villages, music videos, skits, Tamil – English lessons and more! For our video about the village of Analadi, the fifth class students were even able to get an interview with a member of the Panchayat.

The fifth standard students filming with the flipcam.

The older hostel students have done a wonderful job planning unique and creative narratives and video topics. I was impressed that the hostel girls voted overwhelmingly to create a video about women in sports. The hostel boys at Analadi voted to write a short narrative about two boys to showcase the importance of discipline in education. They planned a video that shows the parallel stories of two boys in the same class — one who is  disciplined and another who is acting out and failing to study. The acting skills of this particular group were also fantastic. Little Muthuselva had all of us cracking up as he played the “bad boy,” traipsing into the classroom late and trying to cheat off other boys’ papers!

Students from the boys hostel planning their discipline video.

There is a lot of editing to be done in the week to come, but I am confident that we will have some very interesting final products to show the students. Unfortunately, they have a holiday break next week so we will be unable to screen videos to the hostel students who have already returned home for the vacation. The upside is that the Analadi boys will be able to finish filming their story with the computer teacher when they return and they will also have the opportunity to learn film editing once they finish shooting the remaining scenes. Stay tuned for the final products!

As our students in Hyderabad enjoy a long three week break due to exams and Dasara holidays, the three of us fellows have migrated south to Vikravandi, a small village in Tamil Nadu. Here, we are in the course of teaching a two week workshop in partnership with Communities Rising, an organization working with local educators to provide after school enrichment programs in rural schools. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with the teachers and administrators of Communities Rising, it is clear that they know the place and the students well and they have really welcomed us into their community!

Life in Vikravandi has been a sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle we have become accustomed to in Hyderabad. We are surrounded by fields and greenery and a variety of living things, from cows to the strangest of insects. Amidst this peaceful and relatively quiet landscape, we have travelled to three separate villages and discovered three schools containing the most vivacious and energizing students. One school that was particularly interesting to teach at was the St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children. This school houses and educates about 60 differently abled children and orphans. Like many of our other students, none of them had ever used a camera before, so they were supremely excited by the prospect of taking pictures and being in them. What particularly struck me though was how they interacted with each other. Like other children we have met, they instinctively wanted to push and grab in order to get their hands on the prized cameras. But they also had a wonderful way of helping one another to understand. The older boys helped the younger ones, the ones that could understand more English translated for their peers, and everyone offered support and encouragement to those whose disabilities made it more difficult for them to operate the camera. It was truly inspiring to see such a close-knit community where boys and girls of all ages worked together and shared us and our cameras. Additionally, it was also fun to see how excited they were at the prospect of being able to teach us. We have been challenging ourselves to try to pick up some Tamil while here and the kids were very excited to help us. They were challenging themselves to understand us and to help us learn what they knew, offering words of encouragement like, “Akka, [your] Tamil super!” These are kids that are eager to share what they know with the world, and meeting them has certainly made my quest to teach digital storytelling feel particularly rewarding.

On our first day at Peter Paul, here are some of the photos that our enthusiastic actors and photographs came up with to tell The Extremely Brief Love Story of Mani Annan and Gopala Krishnan.

Mani gives Gopal a Flower

Gopal accepts and they get married

Mani and Gopal dance at their wedding

I remember researching this fellowship and reading over Kara and Ilana’s posts about last year’s Teacher’s Day. As a teacher myself at the time, I was struck by the pomp of the celebrations the previous fellows described in their blog posts. I read about the origins of teacher’s day, a holiday that is a tribute to the legacy of a great educator and statesman, who asked that on his birthday, people recognize their teachers instead of celebrating his personal achievements.

This stands in stark contrast to the view of many back home in the US. We need only look to the current debate about our education system to note that teaching can be a thankless job. Teachers are currently under fire at the center of a debate about a system that has been allowed to fester and fail countless children over the years. What people seem to continually overlook is that fact that teachers are only a part of this broken system. Various other factors come into play to explain the failure of our public schools, yet we have focused nearly all the attention of a long over-due reform movement on teachers. Thousands of miles away from my old school district, at a time when I would normally be setting up my classroom for a new school year, sleeping little with anticipation of meeting my new students and building a positive and nurturing culture in the coming weeks, I was at Railway’s Teacher’s Day function with a jumble of different thoughts and feelings running through my mind.

Focusing on the here and now, it was what I have come to know and expect of a Railway function. Our introduction to the formalities and the importance of Indian “functions” was Railway’s Independence Day performance. The program was full of honors for chief guests, the girls had rehearsed for weeks, the school had purchased costumes for thousands of rupees, and the HM and Prabhaker had been talking about it all month to make sure that we would be there with cameras to film the girls’ performance. You could not overlook the importance of functions for the girls and the school community. This emphasis on performance and school-wide celebrations has a lot to do with the palpable community culture at the school. The girls take pride in their school and work together to represent it favorably.

View from the roof of the girl's Independence Day performance.

Our program began with the customary arrival of the “chief guest.” He was greeted by a tunnel of pom-pom waving girls, and a smiling HM Janaki. Prabhaker hustled us into the computer lab to showcase some student work from TMS class, and then we all marched through the girl-tunnel to take our seats by the stage.

girl tunnel

The first act of the program was an amazing kuchipudi dance performance by our very own, Srilekha! After she blew us all away, Prabhaker commented that “although she was raised in the US, she made many Indians in the audience jealous” of her dancing skills.

The second highlight was a choreographed dance to the pop hit, “Sheila” by the tiny-tots. It was almost too cute.

tiny-tots!

It has felt strange to be here the past week, as my friends and colleagues are going back to the classroom. I’ve heard from some students as they head back to school and I’d be lying if I said that I never second-guessed my decision to leave all that behind and travel to India to embark on this experience. However, the warm reception by the students and teachers at Railway, as well as their kind words and gifts lifted my spirits. To Piya, past fellows, and my wonderful co-teachers, Stella and Srilekha, I wish you all a happy teachers’ day!

With the completion of the photostory unit at nearly all our schools, we’ve begun to lay the groundwork for the first video project. It is exciting to plan these classes as I am learning along with the girls and experimenting with the different video editing skills I plan to teach them. I am also fortunate to live and teach with Stella, whose aesthetic and video-editing skills are far superior to my own. Here is one of my first, very humble experiments with Windows Movie Maker…

Pedestrian’s Guide to Street Crossing from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Aside from experimenting with the software myself, it’s also exciting to start the video units to learn more about what the girls have to say about the topics. We are exploring subjects that ask the girls to explain their world to an outside audience that is unfamiliar with certain aspects of their daily life in India. We’ve introduced the girls at Sultan Bazaar and Railway to the concept of audience and I’ve told them that my students in the US will be watching their videos to find out more about what life is like in India. With that in mind, our first video project at Railway will describe the Telangana situation and explain how it affects the girls’ lives. At Sultan Bazaar we are exploring the practice of three-medium schooling and the multilingual nature of India. Hopefully, the Brooklyn students will be able to make one or two videos in response to give the girls over here a sense of what life is like in Brooklyn. They were thinking about making a video that showcases the contrasts between the world-famous New York City that tourists see and their local community.

So far we have only dedicated one or two classes to beginning the film-making process at Sultan Bazaar and Railway due to holidays and exams, but we are off to a great start. Stella and I have a solid plan for our language film which we started drafting with the girls and put the finishing touches on ourselves to show them the creative possibilities for their next film project. We plan to teach them how to incorporate some short stop-motion animation to spice up the ordinary voice-over–visuals – interview format. The small class-size and eagerness of the girls at Sultan Bazaar gives us confidence that they will be able to pull this off while sticking to our tight schedule.

At Railway all thirty girls have divided into teams of 4 -5 to take on different roles in the making of our film about Telangana. An interview team drafted questions and interviewed a couple teachers about their opinions and the impact of the political situation on their lives. The photo team searched for images from the web to help explain the Telangana issue to a foreign audience. A research team began reading articles and writing a voice-over introducing the issue. A video team searched Youtube for news clips that could be spliced together for an engaging intro that conveys the importance of the situation and pulls the audience in.

The last two teams are looking ahead to our final project where students will hopefully go through the process of identifying a community issue they would like to research and address by making a film and perhaps designing a community-action project to help solve the issue. All students wrote a newspaper article about a community problem and the remaining two teams are typing up the articles, formatting them into a newspaper and photographing the various issues. The majority of students seem to be concerned with water scarcity in their communities. I think that my next step will be to identify a local NGO working to help those who don’t have access to clean water to see if they would be open to speaking with the girls.

The team-work approach has worked well in helping to get a lot done at a quicker pace. My hope is to let the girls rotate through each team so they are exposed to each task and learn all the requisite skills to make a video. Hopefully all goes well this week and we make significant progress on the shooting and compilation of the footage. Wish us luck!

It’s Sravana Masam (the month of August) and as everyone here knows, this means holidays! For our Muslim students, this whole month is Ramzan (Ramadan), which means they fast during the days and break their fast in the evenings with festive family gatherings and yummy Haleem. For our Hindu students, there has been an endless slew of holidays celebrating each of the many different Hindu gods. This past week, we missed a day of school for Krishna’s birthday and next week, they are all looking forward to Vinayaka Chavithi, a huge city-wide celebration in honor of the elephant headed god who is known as the remover of obstacles – probably a good holiday to come as we start the students on video!

The energy of holiday season is palpable, and the kids clearly look forward to each day eagerly. In class the other day, one of my students was showing us how to create the music of the boisterous street parade-dances  – he was one kid drumming with his hands on the side of a desk and he sounded like the entire percussion section of a band…and he was dancing at the same time! As loud and fun as the festivals are, it is clear that they also mean something deeper to the students – the word “belief” is the one they keep throwing around. This is the part they don’t talk about, and apparently can’t really articulate. They responded quite readily to questioning and challenging when it came to issues like education, the use of chewing tobacco, or the uneasy political climate in the city. But the word “belief” was supposed to explain all when it came to religion, and they just didn’t understand what more I could possibly want with my prodding and questioning. Coming from a world where we are taught to question religion and are expected to be able to articulate some sort of rationale for our faith, it was very difficult for me to figure out how to explain what I wanted. The culture around religion is clearly a given around here – Sravana Masam means street parades and deities all around, and Ramzan means evening Haleem at Iftar (fast-breaking.) But beyond that, “belief” is also a given for a lot of our students, and I am still trying to figure out what that really means to these kids that have grown up with it. How does it shape the way they think about the world and their place in it?