Grade seven students learn life skills through documentary filmmaking

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 7-9 pm
Location: Langevin School (107 – 6A Street NE), Calgary

After five months working with Calgary 2012 Artist-in-Residence Chris Hsiung, 120 grade seven students from the Langevin School are showcasing their best documentary short videos at a school-organized film festival. The film festival will be taking place tonight from 7 pm to 9 pm at the Langevin School (107 – 6A Street NE).

Two years ago, Chris Hsiung, independent owner of Hidden Story Productions, started Reel World Youth Documentary (RWYD) with funding from the Awesome Foundation and the Calgary Foundation. This project used documentary films to give students a fun way to learn from life outside the classroom. Too often, youth associate learning with sitting at a desk or doing homework. Instead RWYD pushes students to chose their own topics and investigate it off site, then shoot and edit their own footage.

After a successful pilot at the Alice Jamieson Girls Academy, Chris expanded the program to four grade seven classes at the Langevin School with the support of Calgary 2012 project funding. The result is documentary shorts ranging from video game addiction to bauxite mining to “making a difference” and exploring the subject of death. Audiences of the Langevin Film Festival will for the first time gain direct insight into the mind of the modern day grade seven student.

More importantly, students got the opportunity to learn life skills. Calling adults, following-up, setting up interviews, doing interviews, planning for the innumerable details of production, communicating in a professional way, dealing with failure were just some of the basic abilities students exercised. This was one of the few times students were given complete responsibility for their projects.

In the end, their motivation came not from marks or homework, but from a desire to exhibit their work to their classmates, friends and family.

About Hidden Story Productions
Chris Hsiung is the independent owner of Hidden Story Productions, a small video company that helps people to use video as a tool to educate, engage or advocate for social issues through short documentary stories.

His commissioned works has sent him as far afield to Kathmandu, Nepal to investigate youth activism and Tokyo, Japan for a karate tournament. He has delved into the lives of seniors and the marginalized community in his hometown of Calgary, and continues to seek stories worth sharing.

Chris has the honour of being a Calgary 2012 Artist-in-Residence and the Creative Director for TEDxCalgary.

http://hiddenstory.ca

Contact
Hidden Story Productions
Chris Hsiung
108-210 86 Ave SE
403-660-2187
Availability: 10 am – 4 pm
chris@hiddenstory.ca
http://hiddenstory.ca

The Goal

As before with the Alice Jamieson School, I wanted to see if I could use documentary videomaking as a way to encourage youth to learn more directly from life outside the classroom. School has this

funny effect on students where learning is seen as something done in a classroom or searched for on Google. My hope was that if we let the students choose a topic they were interested in, gave them a fun tool to investigate it, and let them loose, they’d find their own motivation to learn.

For myself, I had some key criteria in my mind to stay true to the primary purpose of doing this project. I know myself. I’m the parent that will do their kid’s science project for them so that they can succeed. Of course, it should be about their process of learning and not my own need to look good. Here’s some non-negotiable that were important to me:

• The film had to require some level of investigation of real life. Fiction films tend lead students to create purely out of their imagination. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I wanted students to develop some ability to test their ideas with reality so I kept the focus squarely on documentaries.
• The project had to take place in iterations over time. It’s not often that students get to invest in something over time. And in any case, with time, more possibility for learning opens up.
• The students had to select their own topic. In the end, the motivation for the topic must come from the student. I’ve learned that even if initially the topic seems too big or challenging to do, the students surprise with their tenacity and creativity in approaching the topic. Who knew that death or ex-criminals could actually work as junior high school topics.

Conditions for School Selection

Choosing a school is no small task. I was looking for a teacher willing to deal with the chaos of a curriculum where students choose their direction. In this respect, I was thoroughly impressed by the Langevin Science school. Flexible hours and inquiry based learning meant that teachers often expected a certain level of chaos.

I was looking for a school that had the computer resources to be able to run the video editing suite. The Langevin School got a smoking deal on Premiere Pro, but the cameras the students had access to often ran out of space or battery power. Luckily, many had iphones and ipads to supplement the filming.

New Challenges

Last year, I worked with an all-girls school at a grade eight level. This year I worked with grade sevens mixed. I had no idea how huge of a difference it would be.

Significant Differences

• The maturity level ranged from still a kid to pre-teen.
• The inclusion of boys added to the rowdiness of the class.
• The boys tended to choose topics related to video games, war, or sports which wasn’t too surprising.
• The school had access to camera equipment but they were unreliable in terms of battery power.
• Reliable computer access was a challenge although we were able to get Premiere Pro installed on all the PCs. 

Learning Preferences

Perhaps I spent more time in the classroom this time or perhaps it’s just “that” generation. There was a tendency for students to rely on Google as the primary source for “learning”. I shouldn’t be surprised as how often do I pull out my smartphone and look up a fact.

Unfortunately, this got in the way of actual learning. Most of Google learning was copy and paste. I was hoping students would actually talk to the people directly involved with their subject or better yet visit the site directly. Why not visit Calgary’s landfills? Why not visit the penguins at the zoo? My hope was to show that life learning was may more interesting than “Google” learning.

There are significant barriers to this kind of learning though even in as flexible a school as the Langevin where field trips are a common occurrence.

• Students often could not get transportation to the site. 
• Students were not comfortable taking their own initiative to visit the site.
• There were limits to how far schools would let their students go.

Missing Skillsets

I also had some assumptions about skillsets that grade seven students would have. The big ones were:

• Data Management: students often did not understand the concept of storing data on the network versus storing on local drives. Also, organizing the files into appropriately named folders is a learned technique (duh). And I also found that data often got “lost” whether it was because they didn’t download the footage right away or they simply couldn’t locate it. Next time, I need to teach data management.
• Approaching Adults: I’ve forgotten how intimidating it is to approach adults especially with my upbringing to respect your elders. Some students were timid at approaching adults and also did not know how to talk on phones with adults. The preference was to email and not follow-up. Classic avoidance tactics that I still do myself to this day.
• Long-Term Planning: many students didn’t have a sense of how to organize their time for a long-term project. Come to think of it, when was the last time I worked on the equivalent of a “six-month project” (an eternity for a grade seven student)? It would have been helpful if I provided a few more milestones and checkin points.

Funding

This project was funded by Calgary 2012 and the Langevin Parent Council. Thank you to both of them! I appreciated being able to work on a project over the long-term and not just do a one-day session.

Hidden Story Productions provided the equipment, training, editing, and direction. This workshop was held as part of the employment training program run by the Affinities Group.

But more significantly, the issues we are facing are systemic, and so it will take a systemic approach. We can no longer take the approach of specializing in one area and hope that if everyone specialized we’d have a comprehensive whole.

For instance, good urban designers are systemic thinkers. Ken Greenberg’s days as an urban design consultant are spent working with biologists, politicians, architects, business owners and many others to come up with an integrative design that meets the needs as a whole. As a simple example, zoning land around transit lines to be high density helps to increase transit use and in turn makes it affordable to operate. In Calgary, the transit department is often isolated from the land department who is isolated from the waste management department.

Chris Turner (shown in the picture above) provides hope though of transforming our cities to become more sustainable in a future where oil and gas will no longer be viable.

Ideas like these that are researched and developed are critical to the development of society. What we find meaningful and what we understand of the world shapes how we act in the world. I’ve become more cognizant of the battle of ideas. There will always be those vested interests and con artists that try to distort are understanding for their own profit. But there are also those people who fight for truth and justice hoping to reveal the reality of the situation so that we might act well from our conscience.

One of the great cultural institutions that makes these ideas accesible is the library. One of my favourite projects was interviewing some thoughtful people about what libraries are for. Information is certainly one benefit of libraries. But the library plays a more important role in curating and organizing that information, in providing a space for the community to come together and learn together. In an age of the internet, it’s easy to forget that knowledge is not just what can be found on a screen and in any case knowledge on its own is rarely power unless it can be made sense of and turned into action.

Reading is a way of being in touch with the spirit of the human journey. In an interview with Samantha Nutt (left photo), she claims that she feels stupid if she isn’t reading or writing. And in a way that is true. If you are not familiar with history or science, how is one to make sense of the world? If you don’t take the time reflect on, analyze, test your thoughts, your understanding, how could you act well?

The unfortunate answer to that is we just rely on our instincts, our upbringing, and whatever society tells us. What if that society is on the wrong path? Well, we would never know unless we take the time to learn about the journeys of other thoughtful and dedicated human beings.