Community Voices
Part I

CREATING COMMUNITY VOICES

This series of articles is for educators who are interested in creating a video production program for K-12 students that will benefit the school, students, and community. As you know, school video news is a powerful vehicle to teach language skills, collaborative learning, and technology. However, I have found that it also has potential far beyond your school building. I want to share with you some ideas that I have developed over the past 14 years on how to create a media studies program that can become a voice for your community.

A Real-World Practium

The main practicum for the program I created was a magazine type cable television show, Bath City Beat, which was produced by high school students. Bath City Beat was a 30-minute show with 3-5 stories bridged by comedy skits. Rather than imposing a single narrator, the students interviewed residents and assembled these community voices to tell the story. Students reported on stories like the annual Bath City Festival, the ground breaking for a new community center, and the purchase of a new fire truck. The stories, told through resident voices, were compelling and the students were entertaining. The show was eventually requested by 30 surrounding communities and reached over 150,000 homes. I will explain how you can create a similar program in your community.

Storytelling is the core of the program. By telling stories about your community, and by publishing those stories on television and the internet, your students will help their community shape a narrative about itself. In the process, the students can become community change agents. Over the course of the next few months, I will write about why developing a master plan is the first step, and how you can do it. Next I will explain how to create assignments that focus the story; how to build a storytelling rubric; how to do research and conduct interviews that work; how to get your stories published on cable television and the Internet; how to promote your media studies program with other media outlets like newspapers; and how to inspire, respect and manage student humor.

A Voice for your Community
Let me begin by explaining my rationale for student community news. Communication is a necessity in today’s constantly changing world. School and municipal administrators are desperate to find ways to communicate with residents. Funding for both schools and cities is changing daily. Informed taxpayers may become partners, but uninformed taxpayers will definitely become passionate critics.

Your media studies program can create a community voice that will inform residents while teaching students powerful storytelling skills. Your school and city administrators will be unable to match the strategic partnerships you will build. Besides, you and your students will have great fun doing it. This is how the director of Mount Clemens’ Downtown Development Authority described the program I developed at the high school.

“Over his years at Mount Clemens High School, John was able to develop an award-winning program that was not only vital to the city’s students but also supported our broader redevelopment efforts by portraying the City of Mount Clemens, our redevelopment projects, and our events in a fun and engaging format. The program’s energetic and playful editing and production ensured that the programs would be watched by viewers well beyond our municipal boundaries.”

Arthur F. Mullen, AICP
Executive Director
Mount Clemens Downtown Development Authority

The value of a community voice cannot be overstated. Communities come in all shapes and sizes. They can be cities, townships, or school districts, but they can also be after-school clubs or historic commissions. Communities of like-minded people come together for a reason and they usually share stated or unstated objectives or a geographic location. Communication is the core building block to any successful community.

Communication fosters awareness of the community’s plans and the diversity of the talent within the group to reach its goals. Communication motivates members to act as a team, and it gives team members a sense of accomplishment as they see progress towards their goals. Your students can tell stories that enhance communication among the various communities in your region. The renewed sense of community that your program can provide is one of the top things public administrators want to achieve.

Student Reporters
You will also be teaching your students 21st century communication skills. This will not go unnoticed by media professionals at newspapers and broadcast television stations. The marginal cost of your program compared to production companies will also catch the eye of budget-conscious administrators. Your stories will get more news coverage and more viewers. It is a win-win for everyone.

Students will give a more genuine and authentic feel to a story than the polished media professionals that most administrators hire to promote their community. Here’s an example of what students can contribute. Mount Clemens received a grant to test its water intake from Lake St. Clair and in doing so would establish an early warning system for lake pollution. Mount Clemens city officials wanted to tell this story but it wasn’t newsy enough for broadcast television or local print media. Bath City Beat came to the rescue. Students valued being treated as serious television reporters and in doing the story they learned something important about water pollution. More importantly, residents listened to and believed these students. Residents invested trust in the students they watched grow up over the course of several semesters.

Multiple Voices Means Diversity

Your stories will also have multiple voices: multiple community voices crafted by high school students into entertaining videos. As these brief videos are assembled, a diverse patchwork of voices will emerge, showing your community as a unique and vibrant place to live and work. For instance, Bath City Beat devoted a whole show to reporting on events happening in Mount Clemens during the 2006 Super Bowl. Students reported on a chili cook-off, an ice sculpture exhibit and a Sports Illustrated VIP party at a local nightclub. The students were thrilled to get press credentials and interview Kid Rock.

People will respect the diversity that you will bring to your community’s narrative. Your students’ stories will be told from diverse perspectives: neither right nor wrong viewpoints but multiple viewpoints. Your students’ storytelling will enlighten residents not confront them. Mount Clemens disbanded its 113-year-old police department to save money. It outsourced policing to the Macomb County Sheriff and saved one million dollars annually. Residents argued passionately on both sides of the issue. Bath City Beat reporters carefully balanced multiple perspectives in their story. Their helpful report on the issues was a source of pride for everyone.

Residents will take pride in your students’ work and follow their development as your students play the role of professional television reporters. In the process, your students will become local celebrities. What’s not to like about that?

Documenting the Past and Present

I was recruited by Mount Clemens Schools in 1992 after producing a series of television documentaries about Flint, Michigan. They wanted me to develop the high school television station into a learning laboratory and teach students how to produce documentaries about Mount Clemens’ past.

Mount Clemens is a close-knit, historic town of 17,000 situated on the banks of the Clinton River. Its rich history began centuries ago with the indigenous peoples that occupied the area. Tribes of the Chippewa and Ottawa nations used the area as a summer campground. In 1862 oil prospectors drilled into the mineral rich salts deposited by ancient seas, and Mount Clemens started on the road to becoming a world famous spa town. By 1924 Mount Clemens boasted 35 bath houses that attracted the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Mae West, and Babe Ruth who came to town to “take the cure.” Mount Clemens was the place to be and be seen.

Mount Clemens also used its proximity to Michigan’s Great Lakes to attract John Hacker, a master boat builder who fitted automobile engines into his finely crafted mahogany boats and sold them to rich auto executives like Edsel Ford and J.W. Packard. One of Hacker’s employees, Chris Smith, went on to establish his own boat works called Chris-Craft. I couldn’t wait to tell these stories.

I came to Mount Clemens to tell stories about its past but quickly realized that, more importantly, Mount Clemens had no voice to talk about its present. To develop a similar program, you will need to find the stories about your community’s past and connect them to stories about its present. You will be part historian and part troubadour. You will be an English teacher, a technical wizard, and all around fix-it person. But mostly you will have fun. And you will teach students how to build a narrative about their school, their community, and in the process, about themselves.

Building E-Communities

I am writing these articles to stimulate a discussion. We are a community of media educators who are breaking new ground. Much has been written about the torrent of media assailing us each day. It is true that media can be addictive and that media organizations can use their power for corporate greed. Some would want to us to teach students to turn off media and ignore it. Media will not go away, however, and we need to teach students how to use it effectively as a language skill. Television and the Internet are powerful, but to me, that makes it all the more important for us to teach young students how to wield that power to build communities.

I hope this web log will create a lively exchange about how best to teach media. Please share your comments and join in our community.