Hi! My name is Srilekha and I am extremely excited to be one of this year’s three new fellows with The Modern Story. Although I grew up entirely in the US, mainly around the DC area, I spent a lot of time in Hyderabad as my family is actually originally from the state of Andhra Pradesh. So I have always really loved the place, but I never really got to know it. And so here I am, looking to get to know the place through the stories of the children growing up in it…and hoping to to lend guidance and support as they find and tell those stories.

To tell you a little bit about myself, I recently graduated from Columbia University, where I studied History, Math, and Economics and also cultivated a deep interest in the fields of health and education. As college came to a close, I was looking for an opportunity to learn something about these fields while hopefully contributing something important to someone somewhere. And that is when I discovered The Modern Story. As Piya, the director, said, the goal of the organization is to teach people to use technology to convey a message. For those of us that have been making powerpoints since middle school and have been blogging since college, this is something we routinely take for granted and yet it is something we do consistently with pride and confidence that our ideas are being ushered into the world. This is a feeling that is sweeter when it is shared, so these kids, who have new stories to take from and new messages to share with the world, they just have to know how to find those stories and to use the technology! I know I have found something important to do, and it’s a cool feeling.

The TMS experience actually began today, as the three of us fellows, along with Piya, the director, and Asma and Neha, the teaching assistants, made our way to the school where we will be teaching. The trip there was actually quite the ordeal. I began the day by fiercely haggling with auto drivers, only to choose the one that would ram into a motorbike and throw off its two occupants and would later get the auto stuck between two giant buses, freezing us a mere stone’s throw from when I would be able to thankfully get out. And upon my exciting removal from this mad vehicle, I promptly got run over by another auto. The crowds and traffic in Secunderabad were utterly overwhelming, and yet the moment we could even see the school, all of the chaos and stress completely evaporated. The kids gave us the warmest of welcomes, and were followed by the greeting of a very friendly and supportive administrative team. I hadn’t really thought about what to expect, but I will never forget our first day with the kids that will consume our minds for the next sixth months…and I couldn’t be more eager to get started!

Srilekha’s Story from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

As a high school English teacher in Brooklyn for the last three years , I have learned a great deal about myself, my students and the power of education.  My name is Samantha Love and I am excited to be one of the three fellows participating in the Modern Story for the 20011 semester.  As my third year of teaching was coming to a close, I began to think about transitioning schools and carrying out another of my goals – to live and work abroad with students in another culture.  I have been fortunate in my life to have had the opportunity to travel and learn in other countries and these experiences have opened my eyes to the world and shaped me indelibly as a person.   This desire brought me to the Modern Story fellowship and I am so excited to embark on this journey with them.

As an inner-city teacher, I realized how lucky I was to have been exposed to these different peoples, places and cultures, and I truly believe that traveling has an enormous impact on our education and development as citizens of a global community.  All too often, however, these opportunities to learn from different cultures are not available to the youth I’ve worked with.  As an educator, I hope to work to create opportunities to learn and travel for my students and to constantly open their eyes to the myriad possibilities of the world around them.   I am committed to the ideals of experiential education, social justice, and travel and I’ve tried to introduce my students to different peoples and places as a teacher.  We traveled to Washington DC in 2010 and have recently started a project to learn more about the culture of India. Our first excursion was an Indian lunch which was a huge success.  For these reasons I am setting up a virtual exchange between my students in Brooklyn and the students in Hyderabad in hopes that they can learn about each other’s cultures and use the technologies that we must embrace in the 21^st century.  I am so excited to bridge these two very different worlds as I maintain my connections with my former students and foster new bonds with students in India.  I can’t wait to begin this project!

Samantha Love’s Digital Story from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Hello!

I’m Stella, and I’m one of the 2011-2012 teaching fellows for The Modern Story. I’ve posted a short video below to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about why I’m so excited for our digital storytelling program and its mission.

I’ve spent the past four years as an English major at Columbia, thinking a whole lot about what exactly makes up a story, the different ways of telling one, and the many things that a story can do. I’ve loved studying literature, but it’s a bit of a paradoxical activity in college—to be thinking hard about scenes of war, or grief, or family reunion, but to be doing it all insulated in a dorm room. Storytelling does involve a set of techniques and theories, but at its heart, I think, is the process of living and experiencing things openly, thinking about these experiences, and then trying to create something that rings true.

I’m really happy about getting back to this heart of storytelling, by collaborating with a group of students every day to work out our thoughts narratively, and utilizing technology to contribute to a global conversation.

I just flew into Hyderabad last night, equipped with a bottle of pepto bismol and many, many stories from friends and family about what it’s like to be in India. But I still have no idea what this city will become for me over the next six months. I’m looking forward to learning those things about a place that you can only really know by experiencing them for some time—a city’s different moods in the morning and evening, or during sunny days and monsoons.

Introducing Stella from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Hello Readers!

TMS is back from summer break, and our new Fellows, Sam, Stella and Srilekha are settling into Hyderabad and ready to begin teaching next week!

Stay tuned for the Fellows’ Intro Digital Stories and their initial thoughts from the classroom! This semester, they will be working at the Railway School and at four American India Foundation DE/Dell Centers of Excellence.

You can check out last semester’s final projects here and here. Kara and Ilana rushed off to their next endeavors, but their students are remembering them fondly and they just might make a reappearance on the blog!

Let the Stories Begin!

When I was younger, I counted Ms. Frizzle, the zany teacher from Joanna Cole’s The Magic School Bus book series, as one of my personal heroes. She’s smart, unpredictable, fun, intelligent, and loves taking her classes on wild field trips. Sitting at my desk, coloring in diagrams of the human body, I’d dream of floating down the blood stream on purple cell inner tubes, or being blown out of a nostril when someone sneezed (see Inside the Human Body if you need this explained). While my own elementary school field trips to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, or the Baltimore Aquarium were cool, they were nothing quite like what the “Friz” offered her class.

Now that I’m a teacher, I idolize Ms. Frizzle even more. My reasons are the same, if perhaps a bit more nuanced. To begin, she gets her students involved in their material – every day she pushes them to ask more questions, poke around, try daring new methods of learning. She approaches subjects in many different ways, tailoring each lesson to the evolving needs of her students, and doesn’t dumb down material; she has faith in the nascent genius of her kids and trusts logic and clear explanation to help her students connect the necessary dots. Finally, she always  encourages her kids with the mantra “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” words I’ve always taken very much to heart. I’ve thought about this phrase a lot over the past six months, and about how necessary it is to encourage my own students to overcome their fear of “wrong answers” and rigid test structures. Watching our students at Railway slowly shed their anxiety and inhibitions, as Kara, Asma, Neha, and I pushed them to take small creative and inquisitive leaps, has only reinforced my belief that the Friz provides an exemplary teaching model.

On Friday, January 21st, I had the wonderful opportunity to put into action not just the Friz’s classroom methods, but also her out-of-class methods. That’s right, we took a field trip, and not just any field trip, but a field trip to beat all other field trips: we went to Google.

With the fabulous organizing efforts of our friends at Google, Suchi, Vignesh, Rohit, and Raji, TMS was able to accompany our students at Railway Girls’ High School to Google’s headquarters in Hyderabad for a day of exciting learning. Accompanied by our “multimedia storyteller” friend, Daniel Schwartz, Kara and I helped the girls document their experience at Google. Below is a small photo essay of shots taken by Daniel and me, an interview that the girls conducted with Suchi, and a link to the entire album of photos that were taken by the girls throughout the day.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

9:20 am – Dressed in their “Saturday” best (the girls wear blue uniforms the other five days of the school week), our students line up in the school’s maidan, each equipped with a notebook, pen, water bottle, and a prepared list of questions for the Googlers. In creating our interview sheets, we focused on questions we could ask about the choices and decisions Googlers had made which brought them to the jobs they currently hold. This line of query connected to our final project on “Choices and Decision Making.”

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

9:30 am – As Ms. Frizzle says, “Class, to the bus!” Google sends a lovely luxury bus to pick us up, and the girls are giddy as they settle into their comfortable seats. Along with Kara, Daniel, Asma, Neha, and myself, Mr. Prabhaker, Shailaja (the computer teacher), and two other Railway teachers join us on the field trip.

Photo by Ilana

9:30 am – Neha boards the bus!

Photo by Ilana

10:15 am – About half way to Google, our students plead with the teachers sitting in the back of the bus to sing them a song. Preethi (left), Sara (center), and Monika (right,) were among the most vocal proponents. After some debate, Kara and I decide to teach everyone the old Girl Scout tune “Make New Friends (But Keep the Old)”. It’s a hit.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:00 am – Arriving at Google, we are greeted by Vignesh, Rohit, Raji, and their Googler friends. The girls are agape with wonder at Google’s impressive, colorful foyer. Vignesh helps us get name tags, and we enter the google offices.

Photo by Ilana

11:10 am – Mr. Prabhaker poses with students as we wait for everyone to get name tags.

Photo by Ilana

11:15 am – Students and teachers marvel over the intricate rangoli-style art made by Googlers to celebrate Pongal and Sankrati. The students of Railway Girls’ High School make lots of handicrafts for school programs and events, and really appreciate lovely art.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:20 am – Students settle down in one of the Google office rooms.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

11:40 am – After a great introduction by Suchi, we all participate in an icebreaker activity: everyone writes his or her name on the top of a blank piece of paper, and then puts the paper down on his or her chair. Walking around the room, we stop at each person’s paper and write down something positive about them. In this photo, Nikhila adds to the long list of positive things others have already written about one of her peers.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

12:15 pm – After our icebreaker activity, the Googlers lead us to the wondrous Google lunchroom. Each girl grabs a tray and investigates the variety of lunch options – salads, a pasta bar, a sandwich bar, veg, non-veg – although most girls settle on the good and familiar: rice, papad, sambar, and some curry. The girls sit in small groups at scattered tables, with one or two Googlers per group, and Kara and I are delighted to hear them bravely chatting and laughing with their new Googler friends. The biggest hit at lunch, by far, is the ice cream freezer. Above, R. Monika, Firdous, and Divya (left to right,) enjoy their ice cream.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

12:50 pm – Back in the Google meeting room, Preethi and Kara (right) discuss the morning’s events, while Sandhya, Amreen, and Nikhila (left to right) chat and sip some Diet Coke (soft drinks and fruit juice were another big lunchtime hit.)

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

1:10 pm – Eager to learn more about what Google does, and everything it can offer us in the classroom, the girls listen attentively to Sri Laxmi explain a few things about the company and its products.

Photo by Ilana

1:45 pm – A Googler assists Sara in a demonstration about how to create  a gmail account.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:15 pm – Sandhya, R. Monika, and Firdous (left to right,) pay close attention to the presentations on YouTube, YouTube EDU, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Earth, and more. They each hold gifts given to them by the Googlers – a Google notebook, a pen, and a beautiful decorated box to hold notes.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:20 pm – We conclude our day at Google with two interviews conducted by our students. Here, Jayashree works the Flip camera as Firdous interviews Sri Laxmi about her job at Google,  how she decided to become a Googler, and any advice she has for us.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:30 pm: R. Monika (back to camera) interviews Suchi, as Srilekha, Pravalika, Lalitha Vani, and Shailaja (left to right,) look on.

Railway Girls School’s Field Trip to Google: An Interview with Suchi Kumar from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:45 pm – Vignesh answers a question asked by Preethi (standing).

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:45 pm – Our Googler friend Vignesh.

Photo by Daniel Schwartz

2:50 pm – Our day concludes with a group photo of our teachers and our friends at Google!

Our field trip to Google was a wonderful experience – something straight out of one of The Magic School Bus books. We are all incredibly grateful to the Googlers for hosting us and teaching us about so many things.  As a token of our appreciation, the girls made their own digital thank you to send to the Googlers:

Thank you, Google! from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

For more of the girls’ own photos from the trip, click here.

As you may have read in recent headlines, the state of Andhra Pradesh has spent the last few weeks anxiously awaiting the release of the Srikrishna Committee on Telangana’s report.  The Srikrishna Committee was officially commissioned by the Government of Indian, on February 3rd, 2010, to look into whether  Telangana should be granted independent statehood, or if it should remain part of the current state body, Andhra Pradesh. This issue of division can be traced back to India’s Independence, when national  borders and state lines were being drawn, and the Andhra and Telangana regions were  fused to become what is now AP. For a more detailed explanation of the root of the current Telangana separatist movement, you can start here.The Srikrishna Committee report was originally scheduled to be released on December 31, 2010, but was delayed due to concerns that AP was not prepared to handle the potential fallout from the announcement, and rescheduled for release on January 6th. Thus, after police and paramilitary units have been deployed across the state, many Hyderabad now hunker down at home, avoiding public transport, and waiting for the afternoon’s news.

As is characteristic of separatist movements, the parties involved are extremely passionate about their respective cause, and each cause is, of course, more complex than it first appears. The push for a separate Telangana state is inextricably knotted into a plethora of social, economic, and political issues that exist within AP, and throughout India as a whole. At stake are government job and education “reservations” (a sort of affirmative action or quota system that is intended to promote the advancement of the disadvantaged, but often lands in the hands of politicians eager to offer slots to their own support base,) water access, centers of commerce, government funding, etc. The distinctive scent of xenophobia floats over the whole matter, each group – Telangana and Andhra – resenting the incursion of the other into their lives, eyeing each other suspiciously as potential job usurpers, and painting the “Other” as something horrid. This is slightly baffling to me, as many Andhras have lived in Hyderabad for generations, making them as much a part of the fabric of this community as any other group of people.

Many of the most vocal advocates for Telangana statehood are young, University-aged males, who find their rallying base at Osmania University in Hyderabad. Kara and I have spoken with a number of older teachers and neighbors – both Andhras and Telanganas – who feel that the main public figures and agitators – older men, who have been disgruntled about the union of Andhra and Telangana since it was first formed – are careless with their acerbic rhetoric, and use their public positions to incite the youth to violence. I certainly don’t know enough about the entire movement to declare any sort of judgement on the matter; however, as a pacifist and an advocate of mediated community dialogue in general, I simply cannot accept frequent small-scale riots, bus burnings, transportation disturbances, and city-wide bandhs, as well as all the collateral damage that comes along with them, as justified means of achieving the desired ends.

This morning, I received a hurried call from Neha, one of our teaching assistants at the Railway Girls School. She told me that she had been on her way to the school when her bus was blocked by a large groups of police and boys throwing stones. She realized that many bus routes were being shut down, but managed to find a bus that would take her back home. Unfortunately, that bus also encountered groups of agitators, and the passengers were forced to disembark and find autos to transport them home. While getting off the bus Neha was hit by one of the stones the boys were throwing, which cut her thumb. She’s confirmed that she’ll be fine, but to me, the violence and senseless injury it obviously causes, are upsetting. As you would expect, today’s TMS class at Railway was canceled.

I’m safely waiting things out in Abids, keeping an eye on my Google newsfeed and hoping that as in the case of the recent Ayodhya verdict, the actual reaction to the Srikrishna Committee report will be far calmer than that predicted by some in the media. We’ll know in a few hours.

A few weeks ago, before the exams began and school was off for the winter break, Kara and I handed out a homework assignment aimed at helping our girls imagine what their lives might be like ten years from now. The worksheet was designed to look like the front page of a newspaper (in this case, the imaginary “Railway School Chronicle”), and dated “Thursday November 26th, 2020, with space for a Headline, a cover image, an image caption, and an article. We asked the girls to imagine themselves ten years from now, and to write an article about an accomplishment they’d achieved.

The students’ responses were incredibly creative and wonderful to read. The girls put a lot of effort into finding photos or making collages to match their stories, and their grand ambitions and dreams are evident in the articles they wrote about their future selves. Many of their imaginings are what you might consider the typical dreams of 13 year old girls around the world: surprise stardom, wealth, top athletic achievement, etc. However, if you consider that many of our students’ own mothers, older sisters, or Aunty’s are housewives, it is particularly heartening to see the girls’ desire for success shining through these stories. It is a large leap for some of the students to imagine a career that takes them beyond school and into adulthood – whether that career be in Bollywood, or on the Olympic field.

The class decided to use “Choices and Decision Making” as the theme for their final multimedia piece, and they are currently wrapping up a series of component projects that all touch upon this topic. I hope that by engaging the students in a variety of activities that catalyze creative and critical thought, we can help them explore the wonderful possibilities they can pursue in their future. It’s a well-worn phrase, but I believe it’s quite fitting: If you can perceive it, then you can achieve it!

Below are three students’ homework sheets – click each image to view a larger version on Flickr. To see more students’ “Railway School Chronicle” homework sheets, you can visit “The Railway School Chronicle” Homework Flickr album.

We’re only three days into the New Year, and it’s already off to a great start!

As Kara has shown in previous posts, our classes at Sultan Bazaar have been proceeding wonderfully. After the first class, we divided the class into three groups, each comprised of four or five students, and one teacher. Each group worked together to brainstorm lesson topics for which they could create supplementary classroom multimedia. The three groups independently decided to focus on: Natural Resources, Cotton, and Triangles (the former two being used in natural science classes, and the latter in a maths class.)  With only a few more workshops to go, the students and teachers have been hard at work brainstorming, creating storyboards, writing production plans and scripts, and filming and photographing!

While each student and teacher made her own initial storyboard during the brainstorming process, each group collaborated to eventually choose one storyboard out of the five or six available. Below is a sampling of the wonderful storyboards that the students and teachers produced. Click each image for a closer look! The students’ drawings are great.

Cotton (front)

Cotton (back)

Minerals (Natural Resources)

Badam (front)

Badam (back)

Triangles (front)

Triangles (back)