Last fall, staff at the Archdale Community Center proposed holding a video festival for their teen and adult participants. The videofest would be a collaborative effort involving the two of us--Deborah Schwartz, Coordinator of Archdale's Family Literacy Project, and Maurice (Mo) Penn, Athletic Director at the Community Center. We felt that, by showing both popular and non-mainstream videos that asked hard questions, provoked thought and discussion, and were personally relevant and dealt with our participants' own issues, we could use those videos as a tool for learning. It would also allow us to expand our definition of "family literacy," since we were hoping our audience would include various adult and teen-aged family members.
At the time we were watching our community mourn the senseless death of yet another of its young men. It was months after Marco Charles, age sixteen, was stabbed, and we were still grabbing at straws. Not only did the neighborhood teens feel more isolated, alone and angry than ever, but there didn't seem to be any on-going attempt at reconciliation and healing, let alone a commitment to decreasing, if not ending the violence. We felt the need for some kind of literacy event that would bring adults, young adults, and children together in a venue that would allow them to relax, open up, and learn about and from each other. We knew instinctively that the bringing together of people to share ideas and passions would be part of the healing process, and we hoped the more we knew about one another-really knew-the kinder and more compassionate we would become.
The process started with a discussion of what type of movie to watch and talk about. We wanted to come up with videos that would draw out a particular issue, mood or piece of contemporary history, and we wanted to choose movies that the community members could relate to and that would develop their critical thinking skills. Our preliminary discussions about which movies would meet these criteria were filled with debate. Even though we "knew" each other, shared many similar political values and outlooks on the world, and certainly respected one another's methods of teaching, still we argued. Maurice, determined to choose movies and activities that would engage the participants and ask them to relate to and question the characters' motives, held fast to the notion that we had to show popular movies and focus on dramatic, personal questions. Deborah, on the other hand, as literacy teacher/artist/feminist, was invested in low-budget movies, movies about young women and girls, movies that weren't made for popular consumption.
We wound up choosing seven films to show between December, 1997, and March, 1998. They were: La Vida Loca, which explores the lives of young Latina gang members in Los Angeles as they learn how to remain friends despite the obstacles of poverty, family obligations, and betrayal by their boyfriends; The Road to Brown, about the life of lawyer and educator Charles Hamilton Houston, who paved the road for the landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education; Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee's powerful film, set in the steamy Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which deals with issues of racial conflict; Selena, the fictionalized life story of the popular Chicana singer/song writer who was murdered by the president of her fan club; Girls Town, an off-the-beaten-track movie of four teenaged women who, in their senior year of high school, confront the reality of date rape and domestic violence; Air Force One, a high-action movie about the hijacking of the President's plane by terrorists; and Get on the Bus, another Spike Lee film about a group of African-American men on their way from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March.
We previewed each movie, in order to analyze the film and hash out our own reflections on it. After viewing the film and discussing it ourselves, we generated two or three focus questions to help frame the discussions we hoped would follow the viewing of each film. We drafted the questions so that the participants could get at what they were seeing in the movie, their likes and dislikes of character, and an honest assessment of how the film related to their lives. For example, with The Road to Brown video, one of our questions was, "We've prepared a list of qualities that we think defines Charles Houston. Now write about one of these character traits which you believe you have. Tell a story that demonstrates how you possess any of these qualities." For Do the Right Thing, one of the questions was, "Have you ever had a conflict or argument with a person of another race or ethnicity? Write about it, in detail, from your perspective." The goal was for us to help participants identify their feelings in order to understand their emotions. We wanted them to further develop their critical thinking based on facts, not opinions. Finally, we, as facilitators of the project, wanted to participate in the viewing of the movies, to engage in the conversation, so that we could both learn from and lead the youth and adults with whom we work daily.
During the course of the videofest, different groups of people attended each film, participated in the discussions and activities, and wrote about their reactions to the films. We learned a lot during this process. We learned that conversations about power, about race, gender, class, and difference, about resolving conflict when all parties involved are invested in winning and are well-armored, are not only difficult, but that the words themselves are still, mostly, unformed. More than anything this videofest provided a forum in which to begin that ongoing conversation. It taught us that the important work of bringing this community together to discuss thoughts and feelings about racism, power differences and money is a mandatory part of our jobs as community activists and teachers. We learned, again, how these forums need to be ongoing and accessible to participants. And we count our successes by the quality and the passion of some of those conversations, one of which we were able to document on videotape, thanks to Martha Merson, ABE Specialist at the A.L.R.I.
We believe that the atmosphere was conducive to learning because a traditional classroom structure, rigidity and expectations were non-existent. Although we did lay down ground rules in order to produce an environment of respect, we ultimately created an informal and relaxed atmosphere where learning happened naturally. Also, we relied on our own and the participants' personal connections to the material. We asked ourselves and the participants to bring their experiences and their stories to the conversations. In fact, the learning that happened was driven by our sometimes varying, but always powerful, life experiences.
We learned some practical things along the way. We learned through experience that showing a complete two-and-a-half-hour movie, then expecting the participants to be involved in a group activity and a writing exercise was too much. Next time, we will divide the movie into parts, screening segments of it at a time. Or, if we want to preserve the integrity of the experience of viewing a whole movie, we could format the activities differently. For instance, we could view the whole movie in one sitting, asking the participants a question about the work before the movie begins. That would allow the participants to focus on some particular aspect of the movie as they watched. Another way to structure the videofest, one that we talked about, but didn't experiment with, would be to show the movie in one sitting, but save the formal writing and discussion activities for a later time. If we structured the events in that way, we would probably start the activity session with a powerful or important scene from the movie so as to jar the participants' memory.
The videofest was a learning experience for the group participants as well as the facilitators. The community has become used to having videos, not just to watch, but to discuss. Now when a teen requests a video for the center, we hear his or her peers ask, "Why that video?" Which then turns into a conversation about the merits or lack thereof of the recommended video. These conversations prove that the Archdale Community Center's members are reflecting on the content and substance of what they're watching. The sharing of opinion, thought and personal narrative, expressed in so many kinds of discourse, affect and tone, conversations that happen with and without teachers, conversations that get documented and ones that we let go of or lose, ones we are privy to, hear about later, or are excluded from entirely, all of these modes of expression and connection, just by simply happening, work to produce literacy and learning. We hope we have the energy, time and support to bring continuous video literacy programming to the Archdale.