Section 6: JAVC In Camera

The Junior AV Club began as a one-off experimental project of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) and turned into a multi-year exploration of media rich pedagogy for early childhood learning. Multiple iterations were carried out at the IML beginning in 2010 and culminating in 2013 when I took the project out of the laboratory to work with a kindergarten teacher and her class of students at a public charter school in Los Angeles, adapting some of our learning to a more traditional classroom environment. I want to provide a narrative overview of the project’s iterations and my key takeaways as they relate to video practice within the context of the In Camera project. For a deeper dive into the relevant videos in the archive please see Junior AV Club - Video practice and early learning.

The Early Sessions

The Junior AV Club began with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy director Holly Willis wondering if active media making and computational literacies could contribute to development of traditional literacy skills with early learners. This line of inquiry was sparked in part by the findings of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Ready to Learn initiative which found that exposure to educational media improved the traditional literacy skills of early learners (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2011). The approach to media-richness in the study was mainly for students to consume media and play games. The question for the IML team was whether similar positive outcomes might arise if young learners were to actively engage in the practices and skills of creating media and games themselves.

A group of us organized a one-day activity for students from a neighboring preschool to come to the IML and participate in a workshop in database storytelling. Our aim was to apply a computational approach to the act of storytelling, thereby combining traditional literacy skills with computational literacy skills within a context of active media production. Students applied what they already knew about stories and the familiar elements that most stories share, to tell their own stories about an ideal day. Each story included a beginning, middle and end and was recorded on video. The stories were then broken into their constituent pieces and loaded into the Korsakow software system for database video making, resulting in a playable, interactive video structure wherein a user could click through the student’s stories, combining pieces from different stories as they went to create a unique story of an ideal day.

Our team went into the experience not knowing what to expect; we were adapting pedagogical approaches that we had developed for an undergraduate student population for four-year old learners and were unsure how they would respond and if they would engage. What we found was that they were deeply engaged by the process and imminently capable of doing the work of media making with appropriate instructor support.

From this modest success we devised a more ambitious plan for a 10-session iteration at 1 90-minute session per week with approximately 20 4- and 5-year-old students at the IML. I served as lead curriculum designer and instructor, supported by and in collaboration with the whole IML team, especially Sonia Seetharaman, Willy Paredes and Holly Willis. Ours was a constructivist approach focused on learning with and from the learners. We aimed to create a rich environment that was responsive and adaptive to the interests and needs of the students. We explored multiple modes of media making including sound, animation and video, and we continued to focus on basic computational literacies alongside media and traditional literacies. We found that a computational approach, in which larger problems or goals are broken down into smaller, achievable pieces, were compatible and complementary to the ways we were approaching media making and traditional literacies.

In one example activity, students worked together to form the letters of the alphabet with their bodies, taking still images of each letter, then working on computers to compose words with those still images, learning about composition, combinatorial authoring, and the ABCs all together.

A key finding of this pilot iteration was that making video cameras available in the environment without structuring or guiding their usage through specific instruction and goals was an effective way of facilitating organic student-driven learning. It became commonplace that there would be video cameras set up on tripods in and around the spaces where other activities were taking place. Students could then self-select when they wanted to operate the cameras, asking for help when they needed it and sharing their knowledge along to the next student to take interest. This allowed for individual mentorship and peer learning, negotiated around and through the video camera.
We carried out several different multi-session arcs over the next three years, some focusing more on narrative video making, some of shorter duration and more modest scope focusing on media making skills. My remaining focus will be on sessions in Summer 2011 and Spring 2013.

2011 and 2013

The session in Summer of 2011 was the most fully realized iteration of the Junior AV Club in the specialized instructional space of the IML. Multiple IML staff people worked with instructors from our partner early learning program with students from a School Aged summer childcare and learning program. Students were of a mixed age range from about 5-years-old to 10-years-old. This mix facilitated peer mentorship and learning between the older and younger students but it could also create challenging divisions in certain situations when older students showed signs of exclusionary behavior due to the limited skills and attention spans of younger learners.

This was especially apparent in a large-scale dynamic storymaking activity that we carried out in the courtyard space at the IML. In previous sessions students had used a grid system in the courtyard to experiment with writing instructions and rules. The real-world activity had been linked with a digital activity in which students wrote instructions to guide a robot around a grid space and pickup target objects. The real-world and digital activities reinforced each other and students enjoyed learning the foundational skills of computer coding by writing elaborate instructions to guide each other through the courtyard maze from square to square, navigating obstacles and retrieving target objects.

In the storymaking session we provided students with colorful printed images with colorful characters and scenes to prime their imaginations and then gave them a simple task to work in small groups and develop games with stories. They already knew the basic elements of stories and games; we left it up to them how to interpret and implement the design task of making a game with a story. In video documentation of that day you can see a wide range of strategies adopted by the different groups, from complex, fully playable games with rule-systems, elements of chance, win/lose scenarios and narrative framing, to a Dungeons and Dragons style guided story with a player facing decision making situations at each stage, to much looser shared imaginative scenarios that most resembled free-form makebelieve. What struck me was the way that video cameras functioned in many of the groups as a way of framing individual experience so that it served a productive social purpose.

This was another day that video cameras were not foregrounded as part of the activity. They were simply there and available in the space for students to use if they should so choose. I saw several of the younger students using the video cameras at moments when their older team members were engrossed in more involved tasks of planning and conceptualizing their games. The camera provided a productive activity to occupy downtime and bridge between non-participation and participation in a positive way. Rather than simply tuning out of the activity, a student might use the camera to voice and frame their own internal musings, connecting mind, body and place through the tripod mounted camera with its flippable LCD viewscreen. Even the most internal and self reflexive noodlings (students pointing the cameras at themselves, framing close ups of their own mouths and eyes, narrating a stream-of-conscious flow of daydreams or observations) could lead back to deep participation with the group.

The video camera became a vehicle for imagination; a site of crystallization and externalization of the fantasy frames and actions of the stories. Several groups made the camera a part of the game itself or else used the camera for extensive documentation of the game play and testing. There was no plan or expectation that their documentation would lead to edited pieces or public screenings but there was an inherent sense of audience made explicit through the language of the students operating the camera, often addressing ‘the audience’ directly.

The video cameras were a positive tool for negotiating the moment to moment social dynamics amongst the students and simultaneously giving them an added sense of a larger context of their own actions and an implicit sense of agency and intelligibility to a larger world. This sense of agency drove the direction for the final stage of the summer session. Our lesson planning and curriculum were designed to be responsive to student interests and the last several sessions had been left open for this purpose. When it came time to decide how to spend the rest of our time together the students had no trouble deciding on what they wanted to do; they wanted to make a documentary to save their school.

Due to programming changes at the USC Childcare facility that ran the summer program for school-aged children was due to be cut after that year. Many of the students had participated in the program for several years. They attended with their siblings and their friends and they felt a deep connection to the place, the teachers and the opportunities for enrichment that they enjoyed as participants there and they felt a deep sense of sadness about its ending that they channeled spontaneously into outrage and a strong desire to articulate their disagreement with this policy choice in hopes of influencing the outcome. They had already taken action to protest the closing of their school, making signs and creating jewelry items that they could sell as a way to raise awareness about their concerns. For them the natural next step was to make a movie to save their school.

To support the young learners in this endeavor we applied the problem solving skills and strategies that we had developed with them in the program. We started by looking at examples of journalistic and documentary coverage of school-related protests. The ‘news story’ model provided the best fit for them to approach their project as it came with an easily identifiable structure. As a group, we reverse-engineered a shooting plan for their project, breaking the larger goals down into smaller achievable elements, always tied to the story that the students wanted to tell. They divided into teams and divvied up elements that each team would cover such as b-roll, interviews with students and interviews with teachers. Within each group they chose roles for themselves so that someone would be behind the camera, another in front of the camera, and one person to keep track of the shots they needed to get.

The structure and workflow of the project fit closely with the professional practices one would expect to find in such an endeavor carried out by adults. It is important to emphasize that this structure was not imposed from the instructors as a top down prescription for the ‘right way’ to do things. It was an emergent set of practices that the students found for themselves with the support and input of the instructors, building on the foundational skills and interests that had guided our approach to curriculum and environmental design.

The production phase of the project was predictably fun and active. Students directed each other with robust but respectful interactions based on mutual agreement and shared goals. They performed multiple takes to get the material the way they wanted it. They practiced formal speech patterns modeled on interviewing styles they had seen in their own experiences of media and facilitated conversations amongst themselves and with the adults in their communities that were productive and novel. Video practice became an organizing principle and catalyst for self actualization and deepened community bonds.

It was surprising to see how much this sense of collaboration, participation and community energy carried into the next phase of the project where students organized and edited their footage. We worked around a large conference table with laptops setup with headphones for each group of students. We started with organization and had them watch all of their group’s footage together, picking their favorite video clips and moving them into folders. Watching their footage back was a rowdy, embodied experience. There was none of the quiet isolation you might usually associate with video editing. Students laughed and gesticulated, they took turns with the headphones, played favorite clips over and over for each other, signaled to members from other groups to come and join them and see how a particular moment of hilarity had played out.

We had planned to help them with the actual editing process, assigning an adult to sit with them and carry out their editing decisions, but as soon as they saw how iMovie worked they took over for themselves and needed very little assistance to put their pieces together. At this point there was some shuffling of attention spans and some of the younger students peeled away as the older students maintained focus to finish their pieces. One wall of the room where we were working was a floor to ceiling whiteboard. Many of the students started drawing on the board, making pictures, spelling out their own and each other's names. The whiteboard provided an open place to externalize, explore and share identity. The video camera isn’t the only or even necessarily the best tool for these vital processes of youth and learning, but it has a powerful potential to function alongside the others and in my strong opinion there is a vital need for it to be integrated early on with critical guidance and carefully considered pedagogic intent.

This was my main idea driving me in the final stage of JAVC in 2013 when I teamed with Darcy M. and her kindergarten class at a charter school in Los Angeles. I wanted to see if I could create opportunities for the kinds of organic, embodied, emergent learning and creative social collaboration and navigation that I had seen in our sessions at the IML. The students from the summer session had not succeeded in preventing the closure of their school; in truth, the decision had already been made and set in motion. But they made something wonderful together and when they watched the final video projected on a big screen at the IML they shared a real sense of accomplishment and joy. I knew there would be plenty of challenges moving the JAVC approach from the IML into a more traditional public classroom space with more students and no additional support staff, but I also knew that it was a challenge worth the undertaking.

I first met with Darcy without the students, so that we could get to know each other and I could get to know her space, her routine, her thoughts about the project I was proposing and her goals for the potential collaboration. I put on my own video lenses for this meeting, considering the space, shooting video as we went, thinking about how and what I could see there, what we could learn together. I learned about the ways she was using media in the classroom with her students; the kinds of videos they watched and sang along with; about their computer time; and about how she took pictures on her own digital camera that she included in weekly email updates to parents.

When I first met her class they were sitting in a grid taped-off on the central carpet where they gathered every morning. I asked them about their own experiences with cameras and there were lots of anecdotes they wanted to share, mostly about their parents’ use of cameras to take pictures and video. I introduced them to the video camera I brought with me, the biggish Panasonic AF100 setup on a sturdy tripod, and explained its functions in terms of their own bodies, comparing its lens with their eyes and its microphone with their ears. We all made a single lens by barreling our fingers in front of our eyes, conveying the sense that the camera sees differently than we do, that its frame will always be a limited window on the world.
Then I worked with them in groups of three, giving them all a chance to stand in front of the camera and say their names and their favorite room in their house (this tied in with a lesson they were currently exploring) while another operated the camera and another monitored the sound on the headphones. Each got to do each job. At one point I helped Darcy with something else and left one of the trios with the camera gear. When I saw the footage later I saw that they had worked together to do multiple takes with specific performance directions and adjustments. These students also had a sense of an audience at home or ‘out there’ and a sense of the culture and practice of video production already absorbed from the social and cultural contexts of their worlds.

Over the course of several weekly visits I explored storytelling and video making with Darcy and her students. We practiced story sequencing, creating story structures and making video recordings that we watched back as a group. Because of the size of the class, 32 students, and the limits of the space and the gear I was able to organize, bring and oversee, it was difficult to recreate a relationship to video making that felt open and dynamic rather than proscriptive, instrumental and restricted. The closest we came was when I brought a number of small Flip Cams to the classroom, enough that students could use them with a higher degree of freedom, videoing themselves and each other with only loose suggestions about how to do so and on what to focus.

Students had been engaged in all the activities I carried out with them, but they particularly enjoyed the time they spent using the small Flip video cameras on their own. To my mind though, the Flip cameras were not the best video camera for these young learners. On the surface they may have seemed so because they were very small, light and simple to operate. But those are features that allow flippancy to dominate your relationship with the video camera and with the video you make; you lose the sticky weight and slowness of the tripod that helps bring you into focus; you lose the bigness and shareability of the LCD screen for framing and viewing the world in real time even as you freeze it into your digital video stream.

I know that the students in Darcy’s class learned many things about making video and crafting stories, I know she felt the collaboration was successful for these reasons and I did too. But for me the success was also one of personal vision and understanding. I saw the experience through my own camera lens, I added the footage to my archive and I have revisited it, parsed it, viewed it and shared it. I’ve seen the fluency of young people expressing themselves through multiple media and their adept translation of experience into video with the values and practices of visual culture already always imprinted. I see the need for critical engagement with the ways those practices are taught so that video can be nurtured as a tool for questioning the world and the self and finding one’s own way to understanding instead of just accepting and internalizing the popular forms that will float into our lives if we maintain a passive posture. I think video practices in early learning should be embedded in the learning spaces themselves, they should be big clunky slow moving cameras with big screens that everyone can see. Moments of documentation should be intentional times for self reflection or amplification, whether the audience is one, none or many. That’s about where I ended with Junior AV Club. But the practice continued on into a new way of thinking about how young people activate their agency through the stories they tell and the media they make and share.