Comunicar 39-ingles - Revista Comunicar

78Comunicar, 39, XX, 2012was precisely the goal for the Temple UniversityMedia Education Lab project «Powerful Voices forKids» (PVK). This program focused on a primary andmiddle school student population (five to fourteen yearolds) at an urban school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,United States. The participating students were enrolledin a remedial summer school for the first half of theday and a supplemental youth media program wasoffered as an optional activity for the afternoon.According to Program Director David CooperMoore during a personal interview, the PowerfulVoices for Kids program was developed as a university-schoolpartnership. The three-week program servedapproximately 150 students. Undergraduate, graduateand alumni students from Temple Universityserved as instructors, and the primary and middleschool students were enrolled at the Russell ByersCharter School. A unique aspect of this program wasits ability to create a strong academic experience notjust for the young students, but for the student-instructorsand the schools as well. The stated mission of thePowerful Voices for Kids program is «to strengthenchildren’s abilities to think for themselves, communicateeffectively using language and technology tools, anduse their powerful voices to contribute to the quality oflife in their families, their schools, their communities,and the world» (http://mediaeducationlab.com/ourpartners-rbcs).On the first day, students were grouped by ageinto «classes» and connected with an undergraduate,graduate or alumni instructor. It wasn’t just the youngstudents learning to analyze media and create mediamessages. For many of the instructors this was theirfirst formal teaching experience. Others had taught buthad limited-to-no experience teaching media andinformation literacy.Adding further anxiety to the experience, therewas no pre-set curriculum for the instructors to follow.Class time was used, in part, to discern student interestin a particular area of popular culture and teacherswere expected to integrate those topics into the nextday’s lesson plan on a component of media and informationliteracy. Many days began and ended with theinstructional team meeting together to brainstorm ideasand troubleshoot issues from the previous day. Topicareas and activities weren’t just influenced by the student’sinterest; they were influenced by the instructor’sexperience and interest as well. If a particular instructorhad experience or an interest in, for example,music production he developed activities around thatinterest. The central requirement was that the foundationalconcepts of media and information literacy beintegrated into the lesson plan. Instructor Osei Alleynetaught his students about music remix culture.Together, they researched the history and elements ofremix culture and discussed relevant issues of copyrightand ownership rights. Using Osei’s music connections,the students visited a professional recordingstudio to produce their own remix using clips from thechorus of Eminem’s «Not Afraid» and Gyptian’s «HoldYuh».But lessons weren’t just about learning how to usethe technology; the focus was on using one’s voice tobe an engaged citizen. Early discussions uncoveredconcerns some young student’s had about violence intheir neighborhoods. Their remix spoke of that violenceand contained a strong anti-violence message. Thesong was uploaded to an all-access website to sharewith friends, family and the community at large(http://soundcloud.com/davemoorepvk/powerful-voices-for-kids-stop).Students in a different class expressed concernsabout homelessness after seeing several homeless peopleon their way to school. Seizing on the studentsown desire to tell others about what they had seen, theinstructor encouraged them to create a media projectwith homelessness as the theme. The students decidedto write a song about homelessness. The instructorused the student’s interest to help them understandthe importance of getting multiple points-of-viewwhen telling a story, especially when the story concernsoppressed or minority populations. As part oftheir preparation for writing the song, the studentsspoke with local homeless people. The song reflectedon images of homelessness seen in the media andcompared those images with the student’s own experiences.Another instructor capitalized on his student’sinterest in recent news stories about flash mobs by helpingthem make a connection between the choices areporter makes when gathering and editing newscoverage with the choices a video game developermakes when designing a game. Using the programScratch students created their own video game usingthe concept of flash mobs as the central theme.Students learned to evaluate mediated messages byusing a local event as an example and began to recognizethe impact media messages have on democracyand governance.Moore shares that «despite the constantly evolvingnature of the program, by week two students werealready showing an increased understanding of thecore concepts of media and information literacy andconsistently making connections between those conceptsand their impact on civic engagement and demo-© ISSN: 1134-3478 • e-ISSN: 1988-3293 • Pages 73-80