Measuring Student Progress

One student recently asked me if he would be receiving a certificate at the end of the TMS class in March. We haven’t yet talked to Remy & Piya about any end of the year logistics, so my response was ‘Sure, I’ll give you a certificate.’ His next follow up question was ‘Whose signature will be on the certificate?’ to which I said ‘Hmmm…I’ll sign it!’ I’m constantly asked, by students, teachers, and my own family members, why I am in India and what I stand to gain from teaching The Modern Story curriculum. I truly believe in what we are doing, but I wonder how we can effectively assess how students have grown in the past couple of months through the course. As a teacher, it’s easy for me to say what I’ve learned, but it becomes more difficult when I think about this issue from the students’ perspective. I definitely sense their excitement for the class, but wonder how much that has to do with the new friendships that they have made. For now though it seems easiest to understand their progress by reviewing the photographs that they have taken and the stories that they have written.

For their most recent assignment, students at the Railway school were asked to identify a family member or someone in their community to interview. After interviewing them, they took images related to a story about that individual that they would then combine in a Power Point presentation. While many students chose younger brothers and sisters or other immediate family members, I was impressed by Hajera’s choice of a nearby bake shop owner. She asked him why, in addition, to breads and pastries, he also sold soaps, shampoos, and other miscellaneous items. Many other students didn’t push the limits with similarly challenging questions, asking instead what people’s favorite foods were or what their biggest secret was. Her questions were thought provoking, resulting in the creation of a unique story about one of her community members.

Here are a couple of Hajera’s photos for this project:

Getting to know our students through their digital 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

“Once upon a time…” The beginnings of Mubeen’s story entitled “Rich Man.”

Student work

My brother is like a star
but he likes little stars
He loves me a lot
But he doesn’t like my bad things

I like grape trees, my brother says
But I don’t like the grape seeds, he says.
I like the taste
but I don’t like the peel
-Gauthami

My mother loves me a lot
But she doesn’t like useless things
I like rose flower trees
but I don’t like the thorns
I like the smell
But I don’t like the useless tree smell
- Angel

My friend is like a newspaper
She loves gossip
I love to read her
When I read her
I read myself
-Hajera

Look closely. Two Face: A beautiful sketch from Mubeen

“Sir, I love drawing. Look at my art. But there is no time. Look at my school. Look at where we are. What can you expect. I will do a drawing for you, only one. Okay, maybe two”

-Mubeen

Good fun. Excellent poetry. All around, the past week has provided more insights into the students’ creative writing abilities.

At Nalgonda, the boys have been behaving much differently in our class than in the other classes. Their creative work is paralleled by physical movement; ideas for films are acted out, memories are recounted with a storytellers mastery of body language. Even when answering a simple question their bodies are in an excess of motion: When asked if they are eager to use the cameras each raised their hand, then two hands, then all ten toes and ten fingers went up into the air as the boys jumped out of their seats.

But this free movement in class – both of ideas and of bodies – is not easy to manage. There is a hard balance to strike between lenience that encourages creative work and discipline so that work can be produced. There is also a second issue about teaching at Nalgonda. The boys only see us twice a week. We have a great time together. They always ask us to stay longer and help us get rickshaws back to the bus stand. But there is a distance I feel between teachers and the students. Why shouldn’t there be? We only see each other twice a week (for students with regular attendance). Some students do not come to school on a regular basis and we see them even less. Perhaps because of this distance, students are a bit reluctant to share certain emotions, insights, or details about themselves in their creative work. Understandably so. I feel close to them personally, but when I wonder about the impact of the lessons I keep going back to Mubeen’s comment, “Sir, I love drawing. Look at my art. But there is no time. Look at my school. Look at where we are. What can you expect. I will do a drawing for you, only one. Okay, maybe two.” His comment points out at something that has been gnawing away at me. To be effective our class might do better if we were there more days a week or the lessons did not feel as peripheral to their overall curriculum. At Railway, the opposite may hold true. The staff are actively engaged in using our skills to showcase the school’s talent. At Railway the girls are more disciplined and the staff more ready to instill computer literacy skills. Yet, this perhaps takes place at the expense of that devilish mischief so valuable to poetry and storytelling.

Some of the boys are doing extra homework to deal with the difficulty of expressing themselves through conventional digital stories on Powerpoint.. They are drawing illustrations in preparation for a short graphic story that deals with issues in their lives such as religious tensions, coming of age in a boarding school, estrangement from home etc. These issues are then set to fictional characters. Reservations about divulging certain emotions may be more freely painted onto their characters. The boys are both practicing story boarding for their films and also using a different platform of  illustrated fiction to practice their poetic license. See some initial sketches on flickr: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/21955629@N03/sets/72157622797101614/)

Past fellows have used Powerpoint to organize these students’ stories and develop their photography skills. We are too. It has become apparent that more classes than expected will be required to put their stories onto the computers. And yet, watching the clock tick by I feel the students are asking for class to return to our lessons on the art of the story. I do not know if there is a standard, or appropriate, balance between computer literacy education and lessons on story telling but the students seem to hint that there is something more unique about learning the art of the story. Maybe its just me. But I am reminded of the following quote from the Center for Digital Storytelling:

Technology has added a new twist to storytelling, although we must always make sure that the content is the driving force behind any project. What our students are saying should always be more important than how they are saying it. That said, the use of technology can pique interest in a variety of students with a story to tell. Digital storytelling uses the available tools of the computer and Internet, and morphs it with words and narration, with the final outcome being an interesting multi-media mix of images and voice. Digital Storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. Digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences, and insights.
- Leslie Rule, Center for Digital Storytelling

A sketch by Mubeen for a villain in his illustrated story

Demonstration of beautiful student calligraphy

As we begin to prepare for our digital stories with the video cameras the boys have pitched a few ideas for their film projects:

“Sir, I want to do a film on the builders of Nalgonda. You say that the headmistress wants us to do a film on the new housing developments here. I want to do a film on the builders asking ‘Why is this not my house?’ While they are working on the housing project why should the rich people have the big building. Our neighbors also want buildings.”

-Patan

“Sir, let’s do a film about an all-boys fashion show. This will be funny.”

-Salu

“Sir, let’s do a film about India and Pakistan. But drama. Lots of drama. There will be war. There will be cricket. There will be a Sir in a classroom instructing Indian students with humor. Lots of jokes. This fighting, what a joke.

-Baba

Incorporating Individual and Community Stories

At APRS, students started PowerPoint projects on the following topics: traffic, mosquitoes, water, and religion. Because we are only at APRS twice a week, it didn’t make sense to do individual projects, since they would require much more time considering the limited number of cameras we have. We asked students to research these topics and create a draft layout of a PowerPoint presentation, including both photographs and text. From the work that the students produced, I got the sense that these topics were a bit tiresome for them. They know that traffic can be deadly and that mosquitoes can spread diseases. It felt a mistake to have assigned those topics to begin with. In response, we changed our direction for the students at Railway this week, asking them to choose one individual (either a role model, family member, or friend) to interview and then highlight in a digital story. As this project progresses, it will be interesting to note the differences between the stories created at the two schools.

As we started work on group and individual digital story projects, Danny and I had many discussions about the topics that we want our students to focus on. We must strike a balance between allowing the students creative freedom, while also giving them enough direction so that they can produce high quality work. As former students of International Relations and Development Studies, we both get excited when talking about issues affecting communities and development projects that seek to address them. We want to instill our own passion for social justice in the students that we teach, but we’ve been marinating on some words that Mr. Prabhakar, one of the teachers at the Railway School, shared with us the other day. He asked “Why can’t we focus on something happy? Why does it always have to be something related to a problem in the students’ communities?” It wasn’t an extraordinarily profound sentiment, but it brings to mind some other thoughts that I’ve been having lately. Although these community issues are only a part of our curriculum, another focus being that of individual stories, I feel strange broaching such topics as pollution, traffic, and health in the classroom. While we feel that we are bringing awareness to under-discussed topics, it seems that students are well aware of these issues and the disproportionate impact they have on their day-to-day lives. When students ask “Do you have mosquitoes in America?” or “Do you have a washing machine in your apartment in Abids?”, it is only because they understand these differences between our lives. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of initiating conversation on these topics; however, I feel uncomfortable giving weight to them. Allowing students the opportunity to share both personal and community stories has tremendous potential for empowerment. How do we ensure though that we are emphasizing dynamic stories that students will feel happy sharing?

Using the Digital Camera

During this past week, our students have been taking photos with the digital camera on their school grounds. While they were asked to take photos of images relevant to text that they wrote beforehand, they’ve been sidetracked by their camera access. It’s great to see their enthusiasm for being able to document their friends’ funny faces, their teachers, and the classrooms where they sit all day long. When I had to take a camera away from one girl, so that the next group could take their turn, she asked “Please can I just hold it for a minute longer?”. When class time becomes frustrating with the language barrier, and I feel that the emphasis on fundamentals is being outweighed by the encouragement of creativity, I remember the excitement and special feeling that overtakes students when they use the camera.

This excitement also makes me wonder how many photographs our students have of their families and childhood. I’m certain that it’s in great contrast to life back home, where every dinner or night out turns into a Facebook album. It seems that there is so much more value for each image that they capture, their product inherently telling a story with greater depth.

Throughout my day, there are so many moments when I wish that I had a camera with me–if our students carried one all day long, what spontaneous images would they capture? I would hope that they would expand their idea of an interesting image, which seems to currently include, trees, flowers, and nature, to underappreciated parts of their homes, schools, and greater communities. As we weave together writing and images, I hope that we can successfully encourage the students to think outside of the box to tell unique stories.

Islam and India: Student writings on world faiths and recent floods

The boys pose in front of their mosque nearest their boarding school

I asked the students to write about a special memory they had. Munna, a student whose group project was on religion, misinterpreted the assignment and wrote to me: Religion is like memory (for) anyone who cannot see with his eyes, he sees with his mind.

A temple near The Modern Story's fellows' apartment in Abids

When asked, ‘If there was one thing you would change about the world,’ Krrish responded: I would convert the whole world to Islam. I asked him what he would do if he met someone who believed in a different religion and did not want to be converted. He said, ‘I would respect him. But I would tell him how he was living was wrong.’ In response, Krrish will be exploring how the diversity of religions in India relates to him by working on fictional conversations, a dialogue, that he would imagine to take place between himself and people of different faiths that he meets. His responses reminded me a lot of the delicate discussions I took part in with World Faith in Lebanon following the 2006 war. Arbani, an energetic small 9th grader, will be exploring religion through a graphic novel he is working on. He is a visually oriented student who cannot wait to draw and is always sketching something in his notebook. He will be exploring religious tensions in his community, Hyderabad, and India through a series of illustrated stories that I hope to be posting soon.

A Hindu temple near the Muslim APRS Boys school

Another student, Khasim, wrote a poem about the afternoon sunlight near the mosque where he prays:

Afternoon comes
it goes
to the river to ride on buffaloes
to the big animals
and enjoys them all
This way the afternoon, like a crow, enjoys the whole day.

Both religion and issues related to health including dengue, malaria and the recent floods seem to be issues that concern the students on a daily basis. Nadeem, for example, wrote about those Indians that have had to deal with the heavy rains this summer:

Mud in our homes
Mud in our beds
Mud in our bones
Where do we eat.
Where do we sleep.

Sajjid, a student that has a lot of experience with cameras and has been patiently waiting his turn to show his skills, wrote the following about the floods in Andhra Pasha.

There is a man
in the water
in the (midst) of his poverty
floating on the flood
There is a man
by the water
eating all the money.

One theme students will be exploring this semester is health. This is a photo of one of Hyderabad's most famous hospitals: Osmania

Arshan had one of the most poignant insights into the crossroads between religion and the floods in Andhra Pasha in his letter to the Chief Minister:

“Look at how the people are before the flood. Look at how they collect money to help. People go to the Mosque, the Temple, the Church and they all come away with money to give to people of the flood.”

Some More Photo Presentations from the Girls at Railway HS

As the girls that I am teaching at Railway HS are smoothly moving on to learning about the video camera, I uploaded their final Powerpoint presentations, which they put together with the photographs that they took in our little field trips. If you remember from my previous posts, the girls were divided into groups and were working on a four separate projects: on traffic, life in the slums, the culture of the Hindu temples, and, respectively, their own school.

I therefore invite you to take a look at their work on slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/themodernstory

All the photographs are taken by the girls, and the text is written entirely by them. All this after learning Powerpoint just a few weeks ago! (You can tell that I am PROUD!).

The eraser and other simple poems

At Nalgonda A.P.R.S. Boy’s Residential School the chalkboard eraser is a newspaper. The students unfold the front page, read the headlines, the day’s events are then torn up and the paper is used to erase the board. Is someone willing to donate erasers to this school? The boy’s lessons are wiped out by current events.

Here are some images students wrote on the back of index cards with their name to describe their daily life. The language is simple:

Mohammed Saleem
I have seen a tree of apples and the men who steal them
I have seen a picture of a Matador a bull is hitting
My house is behind the big Mango trees
Where men are walking their road.

Munna:
Water is moving on earth
Sun is falling on earth
We are walking on the earth
Moving a bike, running for the bus.

Suleyman Ali is a promising students at the A.P.R.S. Boys residential school

Suleyman Ali
My house with a white wall, 5 people, a big tree and a garden around it
A river with water flowing, fishes moving, a bridge upon it
Michael Jackson, a tall man wearing a golden cloth and dancing
A sir teaching students. The students looking at the black of the blackboard
A lion, killing a rabit by jumping on it and eating its flesh.

Sirajuddin (Baba)

Siraj Uddin (Baba)
My friend
Short
Tall his Face
Smart his Face
Fat his body
He wears his clothes dirty

Siraj Uddin (Baba)
My school ground
grass
dogs
killing a rat:
our school.

Mohammed Saleem
Reflections on problems in my community: Smoking is a very big problem in our community. Now a days even small children start smoking. Through smoking many people die in our community. Air pollution is also a big problem. Because of air pollution human beings started suffering from many diseases in our community and the ozone layers in the atmosphere are getting smaller and the heat is seducing us more day by day. But, mainly, the air is polluted by smoke of vehicles and factories!

Please keep the girls in your prayers.

We have just started to get to know the girls at the Railway school where we began teaching this week. Please keep them in your prayers. I was just informed that one student passed away from Dengue fever today. We are not sure who yet. I’ll try to find out more as soon as I can. Again, if you have any words of encouragement for the girls please let them know and we’ll pass on your words.

Thank you.

Language Barriers and Storytellers

“Persons trying to find a motive in this story will be prosecuted.
Persons trying to find a moral in it will be thrown out of the country
Persons trying to find a conspiracy in it will be shot.
I pledge my allegiance to India, in whose happiness lies my own.”

These lines are published on the first page of an English reader for Huckleberry Finn found in our girls class at the Railway school. There is a lot of pride in producing stories in the many local dialects or the national language. The sentiment may not be so strongly felt today, but on finding that book I was reminded of the resistance to the myths of another people’s language and literature.

In my own class, I have felt a corresponding unease asking students to express themselves in a language not their own. Language barriers have not been a huge issue, but they do limit the students’ capacity for poetic expression. It is as if they write just enough to invite understanding. They intimate a larger world within where they speak of their family and of friendship and of love that understands them just to the point where a young child wants to be understood.

A colleague of mine asked me to define a ‘modern story.’ It’s opposite implies ‘traditional stories,’ but I’m not sure how to define either one. I’ve tried to walk around the city as much as I could to get a feel of the area before forming my own ideas on how telling ‘modern stories’ matters to our students. As we head into our third week at Nalgonda and our second week at the Railway, I am reminded of Joseph Campbell’s famous work, “The Power of Myth,” where he notes that more kids grow up nowadays with their own laws and myths and rituals that are not those of the city. This, for Joseph Campbell, makes the narratives that many children believe about themselves ‘modern’ exactly because they have fewer traditions and rites of passage in which to come of age. Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” seems to hold true in Nalgonda where many boys believe the laws of their own bodies are not those of the world around them, and there is a destructive element in their play. The saying ‘Boys will be boys’ has a unique spin in Nalgonda, the students’ childish wonder seems to acknowledge they live in a world that does not necessarily confer distinction upon them. Yes, it is easy to lose oneself in an urban center. The atmosphere of this rapidly developing city is not un-like the air breathed before waking, there is a magical-realism in those surroundings so conducive to suspending belief, each alley an invitation to retreat rather than succeed in a metropolis, easier to lose oneself beneath the skyline, itself the shore of a dream.

Class dynamics in response to this language barrier have expressed themselves in noticeable differences. At the all boys school, the effort to concentrate on discussions held in English makes many boys wriggle in their seats and act out. At the all girls school, the language barrier quiets many who might otherwise express their opinions in their native tongue.

So far, stories have concentrated on the family and community. Girls have talked about their fathers in positive ways. At the boys school I have not heard a single story about the students’ fathers. There is a natural tendency for younger boys, at least among kids I grew up with, to eclipse their own perceived shortcomings with a father’s infamy. Their stories tend toward the fantastic, while the girls’ stories are grounded in community issues and have a sense of immediacy. In both schools, I have seen promising examples that the students will produce excellent work despite the language barrier and the extra concentration it exacts upon them. Once issues of plagiarism at Nalgonda are worked out and the students begin their own original compositions to showcase at the Railway school in Hyderabad/Secunderbad we’ll post examples here for others to see. The Railway school is also preparing a function with thousands of community members at the end of December where students will have a few minutes to showcase their work completed during their TMS classes. Language might also be an issue there too and so we hope to coach the students in how to read in English clearly and with a unique voice to maximize the impact their stories might have on the mothers, fathers and other members of their community who will be in attendance.