TMS’s new workshop at the Sultan Bazaar school is different from our other classes because we are working with students and teachers on projects that will relate directly to regular class subjects. This model will serve TMS’s goals of better integrating the multimedia tools we teach into the government curriculum and providing skills that can be used even when the fellows are not present to facilitate. Even as I teach the value of multimedia lesson planning, I too am learning its usefulness. For instance, showing the Sultan Bazaar participants the short video (see last post) that I made with their photos and videos was an effective way to review the skills and tips they’d learned in the previous session.

And with our Railway and APRS classes, I’ve seen students equally engaged in sessions where they’re using existing media as thinking tool as when they are doing hands-on work. On Thursday, when we wanted to draw out more of the Railway girls’ thoughts about women, Ilana proposed that we start by showing a series of 10 photos of women and asking the girls to write three words that came to mind when they looked at the images. The activity blossomed from a run-of-the-mill brainstorm to a discussion about the ways that photographers influence their viewers. Having these sorts of conversations with our students is squeezing a drop of soap into their minds: as everyone shares ideas and encouragement, I get to watch that drop balloon outward in a bubble that expands and expands until…pop! The students’ usual hesitations and decorum is thrown to the wind as a new idea or question bursts out and they can’t contain their excitement to speak up. Seeing these mini mind-explosions occurring all over a sea of thirty students is one of the things I enjoy most about being in the classroom. After all, who doesn’t love playing with bubbles?