This year, teachers from all three middle schools in Champaign are each mentoring teams of 10 African-American students and equipping them with audio and video gadgets to gather and create authentic stories about their community through interviews with older members.
We at Illinois Public Media are mentoring the teachers to do this work since we’ve got the experience having done it ourselves for five years.
Will Patterson, founder and co-director of the Youth Media Workshop
With our founder and project co-director, William Patterson, we knew we could reach more youth if we taught teachers to do this work and then guided them through it during the school year. So we trained them in the summer and now they and the students are hard at work implementing this after-school project. Read their blog to learn how it’s going.
By connecting young people to teacher-mentors and their community, young people see new and advanced possibilities for their own academic achievement and ability to make a positive difference in their community.
Technology is the hook for this project which is really about creating empowered and effective citizens. Media can be used to make a difference or to maintain the status quo. We think the status quo needs a reality check.
Each student is given a FLIP video camera and shown how to use it. They pick a topic they’re interested in such as police violence, sports, music, or fashion and investigate it from an intergenerational perspective.
Community members have agreed to share their stories with the youth. Using Windows Media Maker, the YMW participants will edit their video stories and then publish them to this website and on YouTube. To see their finished work, visit the videos collections part of this website.
Projects are being led by Amos Lee and Kim Anderson at Jefferson Middle School, Michelle Bahr and Laurie Jacob at Edison Middle School and Whitney Stewart and Josh Wiechert at Franklin Middle School. Journalism major, Erica McKinney, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is this year’s intern. Shameem Rakha, master teacher; Henry Radcliffe, outreach producer at WILL; and Kimberlie Kranich and Dr. Will Patterson provide direct guidance to the teacher/mentors. Check out our Team Members for more information about the team.
If you’d like to learn more, please contact Kimberlie Kranich, YMW co-director at kranich@illinois.edu or (217) 333-7300.
The YMW is a collaboration between Illinois Public Media and William Patterson, Ph.D., associate director of the African American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois and is a project of Adobe Youth Voices.
