One of the first questions the TMS girls ever asked us was, “When do we get to visit Google?” Ever since June, they’ve been anticipating this extra-special fieldtrip. Judging by their looks when they entered the Google complex, I’d say the experience was worth the wait.
After an early morning bus ride involving many snacks from home, (I think the girls thought I would starve to death on the journey and so they came prepared) “truth or dare” and singing, we arrived at Google. The girls were impressed when Suchi, energetic and welcoming as ever, ushered them to the lobby and began punching their names into a screen. They were then given printed name cards, something that raised some amusing conversations—I’m so thankful our girls are always curious and always questioning! Once in the conference room, the nerves began to set in. The session began and our usually vibrant and loud class refused to make a peep, until I gave Sravs some significant looks and she took the leap. She stood tall and explained that Google is like a book, but gives us more information. Sometimes I worry that we put too much pressure on Sravs to always be amazing, but she continues to dazzle.
The girls learned all about Google Maps and literally saw the world from a new perspective in that hour. From an aerial view of Charminar, to my favorite beach in Australia, the girls learned that we can travel the world with these tools.
While the Google team prepared some great sessions for our girls, I especially enjoyed watching their worlds expand before my eyes with each new experience on the trip. There was the time we went for a bathroom break and I literally had to pull the girls away from the automatic sinks. The elevator ride, when we exaggerated our dizziness because it was such a strange sensation. There was the foosball table (look, a new game!) At lunch, the girls went wild. In the words of A. Sushma, the ice cream was “mind blowing!” They also appreciated the chance to chat with some of the Google employees, who were enthusiastic and very encouraging.
Everyone loved the lunch, but most girls told me afterwards that their favorite part of the day was the interview session with Kodukulla Suryanarayana (Suri). I was inspired to see our girls push aside their nervousness and conduct an engaging interview session. Suri encouraged the students to always take the extra effort to grow; for example, if you like film photography, learn chemistry to better understand the process of developing photos. Needless to say, the girls were impressed.
The ride home involved more singing and even some dancing. The girls couldn’t stop grinning, and I have to say I was right there with them—what a great adventure to share with these students!
When Emily and I stepped off the plane from Hyderabad to Tamil Nadu, a giant stone warrior goddess watching over baggage claim immediately captured my attention. Our drive from the airport to Villupuram revealed several other huge deities, such as a two-story high Hanuman. The only other time I have seen gods this big was during Ganesh Chaturthi in Hyderabad, where icons are lifted by cranes to be submerged in the lake.
I didn’t know when I saw that airport goddess that her size and power would mimic the potential of the students we would meet through Communities Rising. Over the past two weeks, we have been conducting short TMS photography and video workshops at several schools. Our students faced a very condensed curriculum interrupted by a multitude of holidays, but still they managed to take to the concepts and cameras with amazing creativity. These students made our stay in Tamil Nadu unforgettable.
Anilady Boys Stand Tall
At Anilady School, we taught 7th and 8th standards. With Philip as our trusty translator and Siva as our go-to for drawing out the best in the kids, we found a new rhythm in our teaching. The students were clever, eager and kind. Each class had a “free-shoot” period in which we would break into small groups, venture outside and explore the beautiful school with our cameras.
What was striking about this experience was the fact that most of the students did not speak any English. We wanted to push them to incorporate other useful skills in their photographic pursuits (such as emotional expression, English practice and teamwork), but to do so made the support of our teaching team essential. We needed more than just translators; we needed teachers who truly understood the objectives of the program. The individuals we worked with far surpassed our hopes and stand as prime examples of how programs such as TMS can overcome immense cultural and language challenges with the right help.
These classes were very gratifying for us as teachers. In spite of having a large number of students, we were able to form special relationships. I also feel that we achieved our key goal of having each student contribute his or her ideas and have hands-on time with the equipment.
Arul Prakash, a star student
One student in particular comes to mind: Arul Prakash, a Vikravandi hostel boy whose friendliness and intelligence shone through even on our first day of class. Arul is a student that any teacher would dream of having; quick to learn, dependable and sweet with just a hint of mischievousness and humor to make working with him a joy. I taught Arul how to edit on iMovie using my laptop and spent some extra one-on-one sessions with him. By the end of the stay, he could easily put together a basic stop motion animation, add text and transitions and burn his work to a DVD.
These two weeks at Communities Rising have been some of the most memorable during our time in India. Just as that first image of the stone goddess stands out in my mind, the smiles, creativity and joy in these students will stay with me forever. I certainly plan to be back!
A student makes bubbles during a clean hands video shoot
The past few weeks have been intense, with extreme highs (like celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi with our students) and quite scary lows (like Kelly ending up in the hospital with Dengue fever). We’ve all taken a step back to be thankful for our blessings, from health to children’s games and everything in between. Our students are now sitting their exams and being away from them has made me realize how much they anchor us in our life in Hyderabad. I’ve felt pretty lost without our regular routine of laughing, learning and producing with the students!
As much as I love Hyderabad, I’m very excited to be heading to Tamil Nadu with Emily for our Communities Rising adventures. This should be a challenging couple of weeks, filled with projects, interesting people and of course a whole new group of students. I’m looking forward to posting about our experiences and sharing some new videos!
Our students met the challenge of moving from photo stories to video projects with new confidence and bright ideas. We’ve explored a wide range of formats and concepts, from public service announcements and silent films to full-blown dramas. At Railway 8A, we divided the class into two groups and had each produce their own videos. Interestingly, the group with all the girls who love to dance ended up acting, while the group with the girls who aren’t as interested in dance ended up dancing!
A highlight of the short video production at Railway was when Prabhaker and HM called one of our students at home to congratulate her on her good work in the video. Her joy at this recognition was infectious and very gratifying. There were many benefits in dividing into two groups, such as getting to work more closely with each student and ensuring maximum participation, but the best part was the fact that some of the shyer, quiet girls were able to come into the spotlight. While the videos address completely different issues, they share a similar theme: bravery. Fighting for your rights and recognizing that your own talents and interests are of value require the kind of strength in character that we hope all our students will develop. They certainly seem to be on the right track!
We had decided long ago that the public service announcements were the way to go at Audiah Memorial for our short videos, because these students seem to have an endless supply of ideas along this line (perhaps stimulated by our early “cause and effect” lessons). These students recognize that “consequences” can be interesting to portray on camera. Since we were sliding into festival season at the time of pre-production, they were especially excited to make videos about their favorite celebrations. On our first day of shooting for the Sankranti PSA, I was dismayed to discover that our main actor was absent. Looking back, I realize that this was actually a blessing in disguise, as it required one of our shyest students to suddenly become the main character. Rahul really stepped up and it was so nice watching him finally relax and have fun in front of the camera. I enjoyed teaching the students about silent film and showed them some classic examples that amused them. While Sankranti production took several lessons, the Diwali team tends to be a bit more focused and was able to finish filming in one day—incidentally, the day that my parents visited the school. This was truly special for me to show off the students in action! Both PSAs address actual dangers that our students and their families face during what are otherwise joyful times. Every year, explosions from fireworks cause serious harm and small children flying kites from the rooftops are in serious danger of falling or being electrocuted. I feel that our PSAs captured the spirit of each festival while expressing a subtle message to enjoy carefully.
At Bansilalpet, Emily and I wanted to have a lesson about point of view to kick start our brainstorming session for the short videos. We thought of a way to demonstrate how individuals can see the same event differently. We split the class in half and lined them up on either side of the room while we stood in the middle. Then we hugged each other, while I smiled at one side of the class and Emily pretended to cry while facing the other. We asked the students to describe what they saw. They were surprised to discover the difference! My group of students came up with a story that looks at the perspectives or opinions of three people in one family: a grandmother, a mother and a daughter. I enjoyed this project because I felt I was gaining a small glimpse into some of the family dinner conversations of my students.
Below are several of the short videos, and the rest will be posted to our Vimeo and Youtube channels in the coming days. Goodbye to Hyderabad for now, but our return will mean launching into our final projects, a trip to Google headquarters and reaching new heights with our students!
Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Rory Sutherland
At this point, we hope you’ve moseyed on over to The Modern Story’s video page, taken a stroll in Rainbow Park while pondering a girl’s struggle for education, and eaten birthday biryani on a rainy day. Our final batch of photo stories comes from the 8th standard class at Railway Girl’s High School, an extraordinary school in Lallaguda that was been partnered with The Modern Story program for three years. In a unique departure from the traditional photo story format, this year marked the first time that a TMS project counted towards students’ quarterly exams (representing 25 marks total). Through a collaboration with the 8th class English instructors, Mdms. Shimla and Vimala, the photo story assignment asked students to create a visual interpretation of William Wordsworth’s “A Spring Morning.”
“A Spring Morning” is fourteen lines in length and describes the beautiful day that emerges after a rainstorm:
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stockdove broods;
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;
The grass is bright with raindrops; – on the moor
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.
A Spring Morning is also first poem in the English Reader textbook for all 8th class students in the state of Andhra Pradesh and between the five schools where we teach, it is one of the few common denominators. Nearly every student has some working familiarity with this poem and especially its resounding introduction: “There was a roaring in the wind all night.” A few have even copied a verse or two in their homework and claimed it as their own. But that’s another issue for another blog post.
More pressing in early July was the challenge of interpreting a remarkably straightforward poem in an imaginative way. “A Spring Morning” is fourteen lines long and featured Wordsworth at his descriptive best. Read it again and you’ll see. The poem is constituted entirely of images. It describes the beautiful day that emerges after a rainstorm, pregnant with the sounds of birds chirping, water flowing, and a hare bounding through puddles. This hare is the closest thing the poem has to a protagonist and his splashy journey the extent of the poem’s narrative, leaving those hungry for a plotline (or a story to digitize) wanting. And while the other TMS photo stories drew from the personal lives of the students, ranging from the everyday of cooking biryani to broader themes of caste division, and had clear narrative conventions (a main character, a beginning, a middle, and end), the story that landed in the lap of Railway was a snapshot of the English countryside written over 120 years ago. What possible connection did Wordsworth’s pastoral paradise have to their personal lives?
It was a question the three of us thought about for a long time, as we read and re-read those fourteen lines in search for creative wiggle room and a story to conceptualize. We had the students choose their favorite line of the poem and draw it. They wrote poetry for homework and read poetry in class. Kelly wondered if we could represent the emotional arc of the poem, showing the ascension of family calm after a storm of domestic violence. As a warm-up, she and Dana choreographed an expressive dance around the poem’s major images, which 8A enthusiastically memorized by heart.
Over in 8B, the girls turned the poem into a play – “acting out” what they read, roaring like a lion, chattering like a magpie, and raining like a flood. Neha and I were the costume department for that day, furiously scribbling “tree,” “sun” and that famous “hare” on pieces of computer paper and taping it to the front of their uniforms.
While these exercises helped the students in isolating the major “characters” of the poem, they didn’t generate a more profound interpretation than the literal fact of a spring morning after a rain storm. At first this disappointed me. Years of schooling had coached me in the “seek-and-ye-shall-find” methods of literary analysis, in which a careful reader cannot in good faith leave any symbolic stone unturned, but must dissect any verse with a mental scapula, extracting the meaning hidden by the all-knowing poet/creator/mastermind. If our students wanted to represent the hare as simply that – a hare – would we be allowing them to settle for a superficial interpretation?
Maybe. But maybe not. For there is another kind of wealth to be found in poetry that operates on the pure level of language, of words. And meaning revealed by the simple stringing of several words together. “All things that love the sun are out of doors.” To read these words on page, to understand them, and to represent them artistically is an accomplishment for anyone, let alone students whose second language is English. Any deeper meaning lacquered upon the simplicity of Wordsworth’s words does not indicate a more meaningful understanding of the words themselves. And the more we worked through the project, the more I realized that our earlier fixation on finding a deeper meaning distracted us from the beauty of its delivery. We changed focus from questions of message (What do we think Wordsworth means by a spring morning?) to questions of medium (How shall we recreate a spring morning? How shall we evoke the feeling of a spring morning?), recognizing the ample inspiration in this spring morning to produce a photo story of substance.
And that’s when the fun began. 8A brought the outdoors inside, hanging raindrops from the ceiling and birds from the window, and embodying Wordsworth’s menagerie by turning their cheeks towards Kelly’s face paint brush, grinning hugely beneath rabbit whiskers, chattering like jays and magpies with cut-out speech bubbles, and forming birds wings with their adjoined thumbs. With a little help from Dana and the Electric Light Company, they learned to read expressively, to make their voices rise calmly and brightly like the sun, matching the cadence of Wordsworth’s iambic pentameter.
After breaking into three groups, 8B received blank story boarding sheets.”You choose. Its your choice,” Neha and I kept saying when they asked what to do next and after some initial discomfort, each team attacked the project from a different angle, with a different story board to show for it. Velankanni and Shanawaz took digital photographs on the school grounds and created rain where there was none, sprinkling “dew” on grass blades, draping leaves in puddles, and commissioning a few of the Tiny Tots students to pose with umbrellas. When a downpour did come, Srilekha and Ramya Sree bolted outside with a video camera and returned triumphantly to class with a sound recording.
Other teams delved into mixed media collages and stop motion animation, condensing a series of 30 still pictures of a run rising upward or a hare moving forward into a four second clip. While teaching them these techniques, their application and execution was entirely up to the students. It seemed that the more free they were to experiment with different media and represent the poem as they wished, the more personal responsibility they developed, as they recognized this project was in some way an extension of themselves and there was no “right” way to complete it. “A Spring Morning” may have been written by Williams Wordsworth, but “A Spring Morning” photo story was all theirs.
Their burgeoning sense of artistic ownership culminated in a showcase of the photo stories for their parents during the annual Parent-Teacher meeting and for the head administrator of the Railway schools on Teacher’s Day (see video below). Our students spoke proudly about their work and what’s more, seemed astonished that they themselves (rather than another adult or teacher) were speaking on their own behalf and representing their original work. Watching them from the side, I realized it mattered little in the end whether we were in England or in India. These students were resourceful enough to illustrate “A Spring Morning” poem on the moon provided they were given the moon rocks to do so. And therein lies the true success of Railway’s photo story project: that the students experienced the thrill of creation and just how personal it can be.
Festival season is in full swing here in Hyderabad – exacerbating the familiar sense overload of India and creating a series of obstacles to navigate in class scheduling and seeing projects to completion. August 15 marked the 66th anniversary of India’s independence, and coincided with a transition period occurring in our curriculum – photo stories finished and venturing into the new territory of video pre-production.
Each of our schools extended anxious invitations to join them for their special school programs to celebrate the brave actions of Gandhi and the Freedom Fighters that allowed India break free from British rule. However much I wanted to attend both schools, I should have anticipated that it would not be so easy to peel away from the students wrapped up in excitement at the first, MGM, to share their pride in being Indians. I also did not anticipate that I, myself, would be expected to contribute to the ceremony by giving a speech on India. I have to admit that when they announced I would be speaking it came as a complete shock, not entirely sure that I felt appropriate to speak on behalf of a country I feel only humbly welcomed to live and teach in. That said, it did not take me long to realize upon this spontaneous reflection on the Indian Independence Movement, that this was not an isolated historical event of localized importance – but rather, the introduction of the power of nonviolent civil disobedience onto the world scale. The whole world has, through its influence on global social justice movements, and can continue to benefit from a remembrance of the words and actions of Gandhi and the Freedom Fighters. I enjoyed incorporating this into this week’s lesson plans by having the girls make ‘protest’ signs inspired by various quotes from Gandhi – on topics ranging from Character and Truth, to Women, Religious Unity, and Democracy.
I also thought that Independence Day came at an appropriate time of switching gears in our curriculum, because it is our aim to engage the students in socially conscious critical thinking. As much as Independence Day could function as a celebration of where India has come – it is also a platform to focus on the issues still alive in present day India and to imagine what India can be in the future. I love this country and its spirit, but there is also a reality that it is a place with some startling statistics if you begin to look into them- where 40% of schools do not have functional toilets, 42% of children are malnourished and underweight, and basic reading and arithmetic levels struggle to keep out of decline. It was nice to reflect on the relevance of the stories written by students for the Photo Story in this context, and I am excited to share these below.
Completed Photo Stories:
The girls of MGM wanted to draw attention to the struggle women face to receive an education in India. The story, written by students, is set in a village, where a young girl dreams about going to school. She pursues this dream for education despite the lack of support from family and community, creating a role model for local girls.
The girls from Sultaan Bazar bring us a lesson in overcoming our superficial differences. A new rule from the Commissioner has created rifts between the various people of Rainbow Park – fighting and prejudice transform the formerly peaceful park into land divided in inequality. It is only with the help of an observant young girl and a ‘Friend Book’ written in multiple languages that recognition of unity in diversity is restored. I like this story because subtly it addresses themes ranging from caste and religious unity to the celebration of Friendship Day and Independence.
“Wow! That’s a very green caterpillar! Don’t come near me!” I watch as Tulasi, normally quite reserved, stretches her face into a grimace and shouts these words at the camera. Earlier, I had shown the girls a short clip of an actress “reading with expression.” The actress changes her voice to represent various characters in a story, and the girls were impressed. We watched the clip several times (upon request) and then launched into a “reading with expression” session. I shocked the girls a bit by going first and choosing to sing about the green caterpillar. My fake opera seemed to encourage them to be a little more daring, and they giggled as they used exaggerated enunciation and varied their tones for the different words.
A few days before, Kelly, Asma and I had listened to the girls’ first few rounds of voiceovers for their “Spring Morning” photo story. The girls knew the lines, but rattled them off in a monotone, unintelligible breath before ending with “thank you.” We knew we needed to help them discover how to convey emotion with their voices. In the process of practicing, I learned that we have several potential actresses in our class. Sudeepika wrote down her caterpillar line and promised to rehearse reading in different voices as extra homework. While some girls would blurt out the lines in the first silly voice that came to mind, Sushma thought about which parts she wanted to emphasize before speaking. All the girls improved their voiceover “style.” And we certainly had fun changing our voices!
One of the best parts about the last few weeks has been solidifying our relationships with each of our students. We’ve come to know more about their individual personalities, family backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses. At Bansilalpet, Bhavani dreams of being a fashion designer and is one of our master photographers. At Audiah Memorial, Rohit is our go-to for brilliant ideas. Divya keeps Bhushan in check while Yakamma is always cheerful. The students have become more comfortable in class, and we have come to genuinely enjoy and appreciate their individuality. This new familiarity also brings forth new challenges. As Kelly pointed out, the “novelty” of TMS has worn off. The students are more restless, completing tasks more quickly and ready for more. While I prefer to have our students less in awe of us as teachers and less timid around the camera, we must find ways to expand our lessons to keep pace with their growth.
Our first short video unit lessons have also uncovered some hidden strengths in some of our students. Mamatha has a knack for thinking of follow-up questions on the spot, and Divya Sree can quickly direct and frame an interview shot. I greatly enjoyed watching the girls work together as a team during these first practice interviews!
I also want to give a shout out to our volunteer Praneet, who has been an invaluable help with translations and with encouraging the students at Audiah. He is embarking on the next phase of his education and we will miss him in the classroom!! Meanwhile…we will continue to mine the gems hidden in the imaginations of our students as we progress through our first video stories.
