One of the most exciting break-out projects I’m working on right now is the Odyssey Film School. Its a 10-day workshop that we will be running on international school campuses as part of their summer school offerings. First up is International School Bangkok in June 2014.
To get kids excited about this and to clarify our agenda, I designed a short critical thinking / brainstorming exercise that can be facilitated free of charge in any school with students interested in digital media. Then I went on the road and tried it out. So far its been really exciting to facilitate and really well received. Here’s how it goes:
Critical thinking exercise part 1: organize the space and set the tone
First of all you need to set the tone. Students are often not particularly comfortable sharing personal information (even just opinions) in front of large groups, so I always start by breaking them into smaller groups. This activity plan is based on the assumption that we have a group of about 20-30 students (the average class size). The exercise takes about 30 minutes – but you can take a little longer of you have the time (just play with the debriefs for a little longer after each question).
Split students into 4 groups. Either let them decide or you do it. Groups need to be of roughly equal size. Each group will then be asked the same question but need to answer it from a slightly different perspective. Perspectives range from local to global. Most recently when I facilitated this in Jakarta, I used the following four “perspective categories”:
1. Your school
2. Jakarta
3. Indonesia
4. The world
The questions
QUESTION # 1: Create a list of the top 3 issues you face today (social or environmental or both). Remember to answer this question from your group’s allocated perspective. You can write down as many as you want initially, but then have to create a short list of three.
NEXT: ask a representative from each group to share their conclusions.
QUESTION # 2: How do you know about these issues? How did you receive the information? Please write down a list of the sources of this information – i.e. family and friends, TV, newspaper, etc. Now please estimate the percentage of this information that comes from a digital media source.
NEXT: ask a representative from each group to share their conclusions.
QUESTION # 3: How much of the information about your top 3 issues focuses on the solutions to the issues? Create a rough percentage – for example if you watched 100 minutes of TV how many of those minutes would be looking at the solution and how many would be looking at the problem? If its 80 minutes focused on the solution and 20 on the problem then that’s your percentage.
NEXT: ask a representative from each group to share their conclusions.
The debrief… patterns / observations /
Predictably, students invariably create statistics that suggest that most of their knowledge about issues outside of their immediate family and/or local community come form digital media sources.
The inverse is also true: the closer to home the issue and the more “local” the perspective they were asked to represent, the higher the likelihood of the information sources being non-digital media.
Students usually estimate the percentile of digital media coverage to be 70-90%.
Students also usually estimate the ratio of issue : solution news coverage to be about 80:20.
QUESTION: How do you feel about receiving so much information about issues and problems with so little focus on the solutions?
A common response to this question is silence, at which point I usually say, “exactly!”. Generally in life when we are confronted with a challenging / stressful situation to which we do not have a solution we do one of three things; fight, flight, freeze (silence is a freeze). This then becomes a segue into a conversation with the students about Activist Media: about how they can harness the power of digital media to make change happen.
We’re striving to do that through our collaborative partnership with the Paradigm Shift Project and the newly-formed Odyssey Film School.
