Voices of the New Millennium

Plans for 2007-2008

Voices Camp Network (VCN)
In July 2006, 20 teens gathered at Harold Washington College
for what they did not know would be an intensive 6-week media
training CAMP (community arts media partnerships). Paid as junior
apprentices in dance, media broadcast, digital publishing & design
and more, these young community voices for change worked with
adult mentors on campus or with their peers collaborating in the
community (reporting, video, mural). As a network of community sites
instead of a single camp, VCN aims to distribute this vision of youth-led
community media activism across the entire city of Chicago - and beyond
through the iCAMP virtual community and learning landscape.

For more information, visit www.voiceit.biz 

iCAMP Advocates
Youth have often felt frustrated about the limited opportunity
during the regular school year to take on the kind of engaging
and challenging community service learning that they were offered
during CAMP projects or workshops. With the support of After School
Matters and Harold Washington College, about ten CAMP Advocates
will receive training in community media organizing year-round
through partnerships with local groups and community-based organizations
across the city. These will be students who have formerly served as
Youth Staff in any CAMP-affiliated program, classroom or workshop, or
who apply and demonstrate their readiness for this kind of work.

Nancy B Jefferson Youth Leadership Collaborative
We will continue to work with our colleagues at National Louis University
(Terry JoSmith, Eleanor Binstock) to bring NBJ teachers and students critical
support to improve curriculum. As part of this effort, we will launch the iCAMP
website with NBJ as our model chapter of a web-based platform to provide both
teachers and students with media-rich content and resources that encourage
personal growth, classroom collaboration and lifelong learning.

Voices of a New Millennium

Voices of a New Millennium (VNM) is a not-for-profit community building organization envisioning a hybrid network of voices organizing for individual and community education through sharing using aesthetic communications (poetry, music, visual arts, dance, theatre) and digital technologies (audio, video, web) to create their own multimedia content and build community off-/online. As artists and educators, we are committed to giving children, teachers, parents, and other adults access to the arts in person and via the world wide web.

To achieve this mission, we are currently:

· developing school-based curricula and after-school programs that promote literacy and technology access through arts-media student-teacher education workshops

· collaborating with schools, college student groups and community-based organizations to design and implement exemplary projects for change

· creating an open-source web-based community platform to support youth narrations and showcase media stories/art produced by youth participants

Our work at this time is guided by 5 core principles:

· to create a safe environment that engages youth to be self-directed learners and express their voice through a wide range of arts-media forms

· to provide each participant with instruction that includes theoretical approaches, technique building and performance development in several arts-media disciplines

· to encourage literacy through fun language-/arts-based activities and games

· to cultivate a spirit of leadership and community service amongst urban youth

· to utilize technology and expressive arts to provide opportunities for teens to gain life experience and a varied set of highly markeatable skills

A Multidisciplinary Approach: Perspectives from the Field

From Storytelling to Going Online
(Marilyn C. Scala and Virginia C. Schroder)

"storytelling is a universal experience, encompassing that which is oral and written. It embraces all that is communicative and visual, is appropriate for all grade levels, fosters cognitive language, and social development in students, and connects reading, writing, listening, and speaking with performing arts skills"

"in storytelling, students are encouraged to visualize the story in scenes rather than memorize a script (storyboarding)"

"stories encourage reflection on the diversity of human experience and help us recognize that there are always multiple perspectives"

"teachers and students learn how artists make aesthetic choices; how to develop skills of perception, communication, and understanding applicable to other curriculum subjects and to other aspects of life. using storytelling as a tool across curriculum areas teaches not only the components of reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also aesthetic understanding and collaboration which will provide today's students with the balance they need for the 21st century"

"media technology can bring the real world into the learning environment, and take students where they could not otherwise go - beyond classroom walls. as such, storytelling is a natural link between
home and school."

diagram: cycle of production in a media-arts curriculum
(concept > schema > plan > create > present)

Student Conversations
(Eleanor Binstock)

"one of the major aims of education is the development of multiple forms of literacy. what we ought to develop, in my view, is the student's ability to access meaning within the variety of forms of representation that humans use to represent the contents of their consciousness"

"unless the boundaries between classrooms and communities can be broken, and the flow of cultural patterns between them encouraged, the schools will continue to legitimate and reproduce communities...who control and limit the potential progress of other communities and who themselves remain untouched by other values and ways of life"

picture: students recording podcast in the digital music studio

Music-Makers/The Magic of Poetry/Poetic Representation
(Laurel Richardson, Michael R. Strickland)

- each child is a poet
- the visual of a poem is like a symphony that is written in notes on a pages;
it possesses the potential to come alive when performed.
- linking poetry and music, utilizing the sound of poetry and its performance,
helps students become involved with poetry in meaningful ways.
- poetry may come closer to presenting "lived experience" for literary,
sociological and cultural reasons. Poems exist in the realm of making
rather than knowing or doing; they are representations of human experience ...
not speech uttered by, or speech acts performed by individuals who happen to be poets.

Creative Partnerships:
VOICES CAMP NETWORK

While community service learning is now considered an essential part of undergraduate education, it is seldom done with the intention of having undergraduates learn skills - let alone advanced skills like programming or filmmaking - for the purposes of mentoring in a community technology center (Kafai & Peppler, 2006).

Voices Camp Network (VCN) will take up efforts to build lasting hybrid community links (face-to-face and online) between multimedia artists, educators and youth leaders to form an active citywide network of valuable shared resources for mentoring, collaboration or performance purposes. Read more about VCN.

 

School & Community Partnerships

Voices CAMP
Community Arts Media Partnerships

Question: What do the musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, web
designers, writers and photographers below all have in common?

That's right! They are all members of Voices Camp - a media-arts
summer apprenticeship for teens (age 14-18) presented by
Voices of the New Millenium with funding by After School Matters.
Participants engage in a six-week youth-led community media project
implemented through the arts (writing, visual arts, performance) and
technology (video, radio, web).

Beyond the summer program (hosted at Harold Washington College -
one of the City Colleges of Chicago), VNM forms a citywide network
of artists, teachers and professional media-makers committed to
providing nu youth and adult voices with unprecedented learning-
teaching-performance opportunities in the media-arts.

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Question: what is nu?
nu~water in ga language (ghana, west africa).
One thing you could say that sets us apart from most community-based
organizations out there is that, as we teach teens the skills they
need to have in order to produce quality media/art of their own, we
also engage youth as organizers working to build community
through a variety of school and community collaborations (see community).

Thus, sharing, collaboration and community exchange are the principles at the core of
our approach to teaching, learning and organizing. We envision a hybrid network of
youth voices organizing for positive social change through community arts,  digital
media and edutainment . To this effect, Word.Sound.Life. (held on September 27th
at the Hothouse - the Center for International Performance and Exhibition) was the first
in an upcoming series of Multimedia Arts and Performance Showcase at some of Chicago's
best 'spots' to VoiceIt.

Nancy B Jefferson-National Louis University Curriculum Project
Incarcerated Youth Building Community via Story & Multimedia Accross the Curriculum

This project, developed in 2005-2006 with researcher Dr. Eleanor Binstock (National Louis University) in collaboration with teachers and students of the Nancy B Jefferson Alternative School, consisted of an Internet project, arts-technology workshops for teachers and their students, a reading series in the school Chapel as well as a final media forum with boys and girls from the upper and elementary divisions.

It is a media-arts project that conceptualizes teacher-student conversation within a nontraditional setting (i.e., a school within a jail) as an opportunity to raise important questions (Who Am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? What world (environment) do I live in?) while producing original thought-provoking creative narrations (comics, stories, drawings, poems, recordings etc). As a result, our approach to curricular design remained primarily guided by students’ interests, habits, hopes and aspirations. Topics like incarceration, the role of music in our lives or even teen violence were recurring themes in student conversations and often served as the starting point for further writing, research, discussion and other storytelling activities (songwriting, interviewing, storyboarding etc).

picture:  digital collage by Kelsky

During our weekly in-class morning meetings, we aimed to :
•    Engage/encourage students to speak from their own experience/knowledge
•    Review/discuss works, ideas & concepts (folklore, media, ecology)
•    Plan/organize specific tasks, prompts, questions or resources
•    Write/produce original creative narrations individually or in groups
•    Archive stories on the web for peer review and teacher evaluation

Constructionism (in the context of learning) is the idea that people learn effectively by making things. Learning communities are collaborative spaces where individuals develop meaningful ways to enhance, enrich, honor and celebrate each other, families, communities and society. Based on some of the often unexpected interactions, conversations, and collaborations which took place over the course of this research (between students, teachers, visiting artists and researchers) and resulted in actual products (writings, audio-visual compositions, etc), the project demonstrates that the Internet, tv/dvd media, and digital arts production tools (music, audio, visual designs and presentations) are powerful tools for organizing curriculum, engaging students as self-directed learners, stimulating constructive discussion and creating a sustainable learning environment. 

Following are some of the roles-responsibilities filled by students in the various classrooms we worked in, alongside specific skills learned or emphasized by researchers, classroom teachers or other students:

roles    
•    Narrator
•    Performer
•    Archivist
•    Writer
•    Visual Graphics
•    Web Designer   

skills
•    Reading/researching
•    Writing/spelling
•    Public Speaking/Oral reporting
•    Critical Thinking/Media Analysis
•    Computer Literacy/Technology
•    Habits of Mind/Thinking Tools

2006-2007 PLAN

This year, I wish for the questions below to be my guiding questions for all teachers participating in the story-media project. Also, as a way to frame our engagement this time around, I propose the following project outline for our sessions (with unit deliverables adaptable to the content for the course taught).

1.    What are the learning goals for students? How will classroom time, lesson materials & teaching strategies be organized to reach these objectives?
2.    How do teachers’ dual role as instructor and authority challenge (assist) their ability to motivate students to become self-motivated learners?
3.    What are the priorities of learning (literacy, discipline, cognition etc) from an individual/group perspective of students’ needs in this environment? How might increased/periodic collaboration amongst students, teachers, artists and writers help address some of these needs?


SAMPLE WORKSHOP
VoiceIT: What is Africa to Me?

Objective: introduce students to the study and culture of Africa through language and multimedia arts. An important aspect of this course is to counter myths about Africa, Africans and people of African descent (cf Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). We want to informally immerse students to black culture and expression by engaging them through song analysis, movie critique, creative free write, improvisation, visual arts and web publishing (blog) on topics pertinent to the African presence on the continent and beyond (Europe, the United States, South America, and the Caribbean). Following an overview of major historical periods and leaders, we will look at the role and nature of media as reflected through narrative, news, advertising and public entertainment. Students culminate the course by creating an online portfolio-blog to share their ideas/projects (elgg.net) and connecting with a foreign language partner online (sharedtalk.com).

Relevant Subject Areas: Social Sciences, English, History, Geography, Architecture, Music
Grades: 6-12

Units
1 – Who Am I?
2 – Media Wheel
3 – Word. Sound. Life.
4 – My Chicago, My Africa

Production Goals
> record podcast
> publish weblog
> produce digital story
> community map

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Digital Youth Network
a USI project funded by the MacArthur Foundation    


VNM is also in collaboration with the Digital Youth Network, an afterschool program
out of the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago,
where we are developing opportunities for urban youth to become digital.