http://themodernstory.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/kidnapped-in-india-getting-to-know-our-students-through-their-stories/

Ghani: I was kidnapped when I was two years old. My brother found the thieves. He fought to take me home. He brought the criminals to justice. The police approached my brother. They paid him money for his good work. They also paid him money so they could take credit for the arrest and get promoted. Now my brother catches criminals for a living. The police pay him. He works by night. He teaches guitar by day.

Me: Did this really happen?

(Many students shout in agreement at the same time): Yes! We heard it from many in the neighborhood.

Me: Sounds like a fiction, a comic.

Ghani: No, I am the fiction!

Ghani snaps a photo of our boys at Nalgonda, a residential school outside of Hyderabad

Conversations like this occur after checking the journals and notebooks of our students every week at Nalgonda, an all boys boarding school 3 hours outside of Hyderabad, India. I think one of my favorite parts of teaching is the moment before checking student homework. The moment of anticipation before the kids shove their notebooks in front of us, wanting to be the first to have their stories read. The best students don’t always produce the best work. I can never tell where the sharpest stories will come from. Some of the most fascinating narratives come from students who have previously been quiet or too rowdy to concentrate.

Today was a good lesson in delegating responsibility to rowdy kids. I took one group around their campus to snap photos for their project. At first the kids were yelling, screaming and jumping around for the camera. I asked one of the bigger students, Saleem, to be the ‘Control Man’ who enforces ‘quiet on the set.’ A big boy who is a newcomer and a bit of an outsider immediately set to keeping away older kids from interfering with the shots, organized his classmates into position for the photo and restored order. The transformation was impressive. Saleem, usually a passive boy who causes trouble, took more interest in the aesthetics of the frame, ensuring people were in their right places and the camera was focused. Vidya had suggested this effective approach to maintaining discipline over the weekend. This delegation of responsibility ensured the group’s work was completed in a timely manner and also that the students took an active interest in the aesthetics of the camera.

Group 1 snaps a photo of a cook near her wooden fire and the air pollution she breathes on the job

Rather than the frenzy over the camera or laptop  they focused on getting the right shot. This was a big step. Afterward, Saleem opened up. He started telling me more about himself and his life story that had not come through in his homework assignments. He’d seemed a stranger this whole semester. Then he got engaged in taking a few pictures and changed. How about that.

Sometimes I feel the message only hits home when a small group is listening. It could be the language barrier, but sometimes it seems the newness of cameras and the excitement of the underclassmen catcalling through the windows and banging on the classroom doors in distraction draws students in our big classroom (22 students) away from the lessons inside the camera: the shot, the story, their unique way of looking at the world.

Today, we had to change our lesson plan as the lab was closed unexpectedly. I would advise future fellows and teachers to have back up lesson plans for these surprises. We went back to basics of story telling. Identified possible stories and scenes and read examples of student work.

Mubeen poses with his latest illustrated story

In most of their stories the boys talk about money, corruption, friendship, cheaters, grandparents, family trips, poverty, traditional dances, weightlifting and housing. But even when the stories are true, the boys love to begin ‘once upon a time.’ Especially Mubeen, an amazingly talented artist who has turned his frustrations on the pages of comics he draws.

Rich Man - Illustrated Story by Mubeen

These past couple of weeks, the girls at the Railway High School have been eagerly practicing the use of the digital camera, and it has been an absolute pleasure working with them. After learning the technical skills of operating the camera and using its main features, the girls went on a Photo Scavenger Hunt, which is a fun way for them to hone their skills and improve the quality of their pictures. Once they completed the activity and took all the photos on the list, we uploaded them onto the computers using USB cables and card readers, and we critiqued each picture, one by one, discussing elements such as framing, orientation, zooming, perspective and lighting. You can see the photos that the students took on our Flicker page, or by following the link on the left of this page.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21955629@N03/

Once they mastered these skills, we started working on a few photography projects. The first activity consisted of me asking them questions such as “What is friendship?”, “What is injustice?”, “What is your role in society?”, “What does your future look like?”, etc., and asking them to provide the answers in photos. This was inspired by an old pedagogical technique used in Latin America in the 70s: Paulo Freire, a well-respected Brazilian psychologist, used this activity in the slums of Lima, Peru, trying to stimulate the communities’ creativity and civic consciousness by giving them disposable cameras and asking them to use pictures instead of words to answer a series of questions. The experiment successfully demonstrated the subtlety of pictures, rather than written or oral communication, for purposes of self-expression, and proved that the technique is especially effective when used with children. For instance, one of the questions he asked was “What is exploitation?”. In response to this, the adults took pictures of a policeman, a landlord, the tax collector, the rich neighborhoods, and so on – all understandable and somewhat expected answers. However, one of the children who also took part in the activity took a picture of nothing more than a nail on the wall. While all the adults were confused as to the meaning of this, the other kids seemed to be in agreement and to understand the significance of the picture. In the discussion that followed, it transpired that most of the kids in that neighborhood worked in the shoe-shine business. Because all their clients lived far away, in the rich part of town, and the shoe-shine boxes were too heavy for the boys to carry them daily, the kids used to rent a nail (usually in a shop) and keep their shoe-shine boxes there overnight. Thus, for them, that nail on the wall best represented exploitation.

The activity proved very successful with the girls at the Railway HS, and really enabled their creativity to come out. They understood the assignment very well, and even staged intricate poses and situations as responses to the questions. The query “What is your role in society?” was particularly enlightening: while some of the girls took pictures of themselves studying to represent their role as students or learners, others staged situations where one girl was helping another one up, or bandaging her hand, in order to embody the notion of “helper” or “caregiver”. Another rather eco-conscious girl took a picture of a blade cutting a tree in response to “What is injustice?”, while another student photographed herself on a construction site, piling up bricks, to express the concept of “builder” as a reply to “What kind of person do I want to become?”.

I then taught them how to use PowerPoint and integrate these photos in a PowerPoint presentation, and I was extremely impressed with how fast they learned the program and how eager they were to experiment. I showed them the basics of how to add slides, insert text and pictures and modify the layout and design of the slides, and I encouraged them to explore all the different features. By the second class, they were already adding animation effects to the text, selecting crazy colorful fonts, adding dissolve transitions on the pictures and using the slide design templates! You can see their final presentations, which include all the photos they took in response to my questions, and which they created in a mere 3 hours of class time, on our channel on SlideShare: www.slideshare.net/themodernstory

After this brief Q&A experiment, we organized little field trips to take photographs outside the school, about topics they were interested in. We divided the class in 4 groups, and each group went out accompanied by a faculty member. The subjects they chose after a session of brainstorming were: life in the slums, Hindu temples, Hyderabadi traffic and, respectively, a photo-tour of their school. They are now working on putting together PowerPoint presentations of these projects, which will include the pictures they took, supplemented by textual explanations that they wrote to accompany the shots. Stay tuned!