Photo Stories

Smart, sassy, socially conscious — another update from Railway

Namaste!

While our first few weeks in Hyderabad were filled with hotter-than-hot temperatures, things have drastically cooled down with the arrival of a cloud filled sky. The nonstop barrage of rain has been perfect for settling into the classroom and doing some quality brainstorming with students. The girls at Railway High School in Lallaguda were the first ones to get classes underway at the start of the semester and are thus further along with the curriculum than the rest of their peers — which means the beginnings of a photo story!
The girls have been musing and marinating about various problems that they perceive in their community and so for homework we asked them to illustrate two images: one picturizing a problem, and another showing a solution. I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of issues that the students spoke about: Jyoti was concerned about water wastage, Vennela is particularly interested in the plight of child laborers, and Mohammedi had this to say about child brides: “It’s very sad when someone’s childhood ends at the age of eleven when they get married”. Nearly all proposed contacting the government for solutions to the problems with Pooja even inquiring about the best way to organize a march downtown! I’m certain that the class contains the next Indira Gandhi or Pratibha Patil; these kids are not to be underestimated!
Sirisha diligently photographing Pooja interviewing Ms. Nirmala

Sirisha diligently photographing while Pooja interviews Ms. Nirmala

Most of the girls centered their problems around the plight of those located outside of Hyderabad: “in the villages there is no electricity, in the villages there is too much pollution” and so on. Picking up on this common undercurrent the first photo story has been tentatively titled “Village Life” and will focus on four main themes: Roads/Pollution, Water, Education, and Electricity. Students then picked which topic piqued their interest the most and split into the appropriate group to do research on the internet and to interview adults. We’re still in the beginning stages but the girls are so enthused and energetic that  big things are sure to come — stay tuned!
19
Sep

A Spring Morning and Photo Story Round Up

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 Railway 8A from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Team 1: “A Spring Morning” (Railway 8B Photostory) from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Team 2: “A Spring Morning” (Railway 8B Photostory) from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

Team 3: “A Spring Morning” (Railway 8B Photostory) from The Modern Story on Vimeo.

 

“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.

 

23
Aug

The Birthday Biryani and The Rainy Day

The time has come to officially post the TMS photo stories of 2012!  All the videos are available for your viewing enjoyment on our Youtube and Vimeo channels, but I wanted to write specifically about the Audiah Memorial and Bansilalpet photo projects. While the students of Railway School were assigned a poem by William Wordsworth to interpret photographically, our AIF schools had the added challenge of writing and storyboarding their own original ideas. With the hopes of prompting some “change the world” thoughts, Emily and I held a cause-and-effect lesson.  We talked with the students about how one action can often have multiple, unforeseen effects. We crafted several mini-stories out of photographs pulled from the web. The classic example of someone throwing a stone into still waters and thereby causing continuous ripples proved particularly helpful in getting our point across.

From this lesson we moved into a brainstorming session, which was easily one of the most fun and exciting days for us at these two schools. The students thought of stories about the carelessness that can lead to life-changing traffic accidents.  They talked about the dangers of bad habits such as smoking, and the impact of one person using a trash bin instead of the street. Once everyone’s creative juices were flowing, we moved into making a full story based (loosely) on the cause-and-effect theme. Emily and I really tried to sit back and let the students take the reins. We were rewarded by two very different stories: one about the good and bad effects of Hyderabadi rain, the other about the rewards of perseverance.

We liked both stories for their connection to life in Hyderabad and for the fact that they were pieced together by all of the students in each class. That is, every student contributed in at least one way to the final product.  Since some of our students are significantly less outspoken or less brave with the cameras than others, we felt that this inclusiveness was an important achievement.

At Audiah Memorial, we discovered that a balance is needed between action and planning. While our brainstorming and storyboarding sessions were very useful, some of the best ideas came spontaneously when we were shooting images for the story. Bansilalpet stuck more closely to the script, but also came up with some excellent on-the-spot solutions when their original ideas weren’t living up to their expectations.

At both schools, making the photo stories was an incredibly fun and rewarding process. We have high hopes for the next piece in the TMS puzzle: video shorts!

17
Aug

Independence, Fight for Rights, and Photo Stories

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.

Looking forward to sharing more in the future!

Until next time,

Kelly