“Until the lion learns to write, the story will always glorify the hunter.” -Chinua Achebe
While pursuing my life’s calling, I’ve found myself working in proximity to young, impressionable Black children. My kids range from preschool age to the brink of adulthood at 18, and even beyond into young adulthood around 30, and one of the things we try to infuse in them is a clear sense of self-worth. My experiences brought two stunning revelations: people can only dream of what they know is possible and the image they have of themselves will always dictate how high they go. The great hope for education is that schooling will expose young minds to every possibility in the world. However, 8 hours just isn’t enough to both educate to state required standards and introduce the students to a wide world of possibilities. When this gap is left after-school care programs can be the light to guide exploration.
What is Media Production?
Media production is defined as the art of storytelling using visual and audio means. Today we often encounter these combinations of skills on television or online at sites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Young people all over the world share their abilities and talents for the world to see but many don’t see their futures with the cameras, they see this as a passing hobby. Today, 75% of all kids have a cellphone by the age of 13 (Robins, 2022) and many of them have smartphones with access to the internet and social media. With any new trend or media, educators try to find a way to implement it and relate it to the current coursework.
How do After-School Care programs focus on Media production help?
Curiosity
“Curiosity is the engine to achievement” – Ken Robinson
Many after-school care programs focus on being a continuation of the school day, and while this isn’t a terrible idea, this model doesn’t allow for interest exploration. Curiosity should be the method by which students dream about the future. At some point during the elementary school process, students will be asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, but it is unfair to ask a child this and never provide time or space for career exploration. After-school care programs can be a great space for this examination. With a controlled space and curriculum, media production after-school care programs can introduce students to a film or audio production career while adding in ties to their existing school curriculum. Project-based learning can layer different school-relevant subjects while the student stays motivated to reach the goal. Curiosity can be fostered by showing the students a problem that needs to be solved, then letting them and their imagination lead the way. After they become familiar with the ends and outs of video and audio production, they can apply these skills to create a resolution to their newly discovered issues. (Spencer, 2017)
Meaningfully Related to One's Goals
“Pistol, don’t nothing work better than a try”- Robert Hardison, my grandfather (he called everybody Pistol)
Life is full of challenges. Some of them you can fix, and some of them will elude your grasp, but nothing can be overcome until you try. Real-world problems sometimes apply to our lives, and sometimes they are abstract and foreign. When an after-school program wants to motivate a student, the designers must be careful to ensure that the project they are asking the student to engage in ones that have relevance to their lives. If the students come from a school or community that puts heavy emphasis on athletics, then it might not be the best path to ask them to produce a video about cabbage farming. A better project may be to have the students focus on the football team and their preparation for the approaching big game. Using a subject that is important to the students' lives will make motivation easier.
Protecting Intentions
After-school care designers will be the primary focus on protecting the intentions of their young students. When designing the projects, and their component steps, they must be careful to be culturally conscience. Often, teachers and instructors aren’t from the same community that their students originate from, and it is important to understand and protect the nature of the project. Since the basis of the program is to help foster self-esteem and self-efficacy, it is vital to provide a safe, nurturing, and protective environment that allows each student the proper soil to grow and develop. The designers of the after-school care programs have to be invested in protecting the veracity of the projects so that they remain relevant to the student while moving that student’s knowledge base forward. After-school care programs would find it beneficiary to not only place themselves in the community, they wish to impact but to be a part of the community as a whole. Having a strong connection to the children and the community will help the designers understand their constituents and ensure that the programs they are creating, focus on the true needs of the students.
Conclusion
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” – Proverbs 29:18
If proper care is taken to design the program, any after-school care program can be a massive benefit to the students it services, but an after-school care program that uses project-based learning to teach skills needed for media production will spark the next generation of Spike Lee or Ryan Coogler. Self-esteem may be what you think and feel about yourself, but programs geared toward empowering people will undoubtedly have a positive impact on self-esteem. Self-efficacy will grow as the student becomes more confident in the skills they learn and master, but neither of these can be impacted until we the designers put in place programs that can, and will, affect the learners.
Reference
Robins, T. (2022, November 21). Age that kids acquire mobile phones not linked to well-
being, says Stanford Medicine Study. News Center. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobile-phone-age.html#:~:text=About%2025%25%20of%20children%20received,the%20end%20of%20the%20study.
Anderson, L. (2015, June 30). The importance of after-school programs - the balancing act.
YouTube. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euZQYVul0js
Greene, M. (2014, March 20). Let's talk education: Before & after school programs. YouTube.
Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asNnjxVulv4
Spencer, J. (2017, November 12). What is problem-based learning? YouTube. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGoJIQYGpYk
American Standard Version. (1995). (Pr 29:18). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems,
Motivation as a Strategy
The Case Study “ReCapture Your World: Using the After School System to expose Black children to media production”, written by elhardison examines the role and impact of Instructional Designers in inspiring black, younger audiences. This case study examines the direct impact that motivation can have on young black youth residing in vulnerable communities. The author of the case study takes a layered approach in his approached to problem- based learning. Reiser & Dempsey, identifies the fourth portion of motivation to be depended on the “motivation to learn.” The “motivation to learn is promoted when learners anticipate and experience satisfying outcomes to learning a task (2018).
Elhardison provides an example of Media Production as the method of…
Lack of Positive Afterschool Programs
Hello Edward: I have many thoughts on this subject matter after reading your case study. Living in an economically disadvantaged, underserved community and seeing many of my classmates fall victim to drug addiction and gang violence, along with my mom being a teacher in that community, I have personally witnessed that there needs to be some extracurricular programming to keep the students off the streets and in a safer environment. Unfortunately, in my area, there is government funding for these programs, and the people operating them put on a front that they are there for the children and community; from my experience, many of the aftercare services are in it for the money only. …
This is a great case study, I enjoyed reading about how the after-school programs could help so many young people decide what they would like to do with their lives. After reading, I was thinking on how offering, essentially training in media, such as the visual and audio that you described, is similar to offering or teaching a trade, before they even graduate high school. That’s amazing! So with that in mind, I went to the EBSCOhost site and starting researching how offering trades in schools can help individuals in their futures and this is one that I read about; it’s a book called Identity, Pedagogy and Technology-Enhanced Learning: Supporting the Processes of Becoming a Tradesperson. Professional and Practice-Based Learning.…