English Confronting Modernity: Becoming Citizens of the World: Storytelling and Representation: When Mountains Tremble

Friday, September 28, 2012

Storytelling and Representation: When Mountains Tremble

Documentaries, like novels, are a representation. We can learn a lot from documentaries, but we have to understand that a documentary is storytelling and be aware that a filmmaker (instead of an author) is representing an event using storytelling techniques. Below is a list of key terms students will use when analyzing the storytelling of the documentary When Mountains Tremble, but before showing the film elicit these techniques by discussing/reviewing Discovering Dominga:

The next step in today's class was to talk about filmmaking. Soon, we will have iPads, which means we will have tools for making our our documentaries at some point. Thus, we started class with an "imagine-if" scenario. Here is an idea from http://www.pbs.org/pov/behindthelens/lessonplan1.php:

MAKING A DOCUMENTARY ROLE PLAY

In this step students take on the role of being a filmmaker. Working in groups of 4 to 6, students should consider the following scenario:

In preparation for a community-wide open house, students and teachers at Anyburg Middle School decided that it would help people understand the school experience if each class recorded a video of a typical day. The school had a limited amount of video, sound, and lighting equipment, so staff worked out a schedule for each class to have the cameras for two days.

By chance, Ms. Perez's science class ended up with the cameras on days when students were doing test prep. The students didn't think that footage of them mostly reading, taking notes, and occasionally asking questions was representative of their normal, vibrant class with hands-on labs and real-world research problems. But that left them with a dilemma. Should they shoot what was actually happening in their class that day, or should they re-enact what would happen on a more typical day? To make things even more complicated, on the second day of their video shoot, someone accidentally knocked over a tray with test tubes and beakers. This had never happened in class before. Students disagreed about whether to leave in or edit out the footage of the accident and cleanup.

Ask students to discuss the following in their groups: In your view, in these circumstances, what production choices would a documentary filmmaker make and why? How about a Hollywood filmmaker? How about a reporter from a local television station? What would be the best representation of the class and why?

After giving students several minutes to discuss the questions, call the groups together to share responses. Help students make links between what they discussed and what they learned about documentaries and documentary filmmakers.

Note: There is no "right" answer. Even experienced documentary producers disagree about how best to convey "truth" and whether things like re-enactment are appropriate. The idea here is to get your students talking about what values are in play for each type of media-maker. The Hollywood filmmaker might be more concerned with drama, the news reporter more concerned with accuracy and what footage they can get during the ten minutes they are in the school, and the documentary maker might step back and ask what is most important for the community to understand about this class.

Next, we viewed the documentary When Mountains Tremble looking for storytelling techniques such as interviews, stock footage, voice-over, and re-enactments.

Students made a visual map of the choices the filmmaker made to tell the story noting the difference sources that the filmmaker wove together to tell a story with voices and images from many different points of view; however, those clips are selections made by the filmmaker to make an argument, so we have to think about what was not selected and be aware that a documentary is not neutral.

Below are maps of the sequencing and subjects the filmmaker used to tell the first 45 minutes of When Mountains Tremble. The movie enters the conversation about Maya resilience, cooperation, and democracy with footage from guerrillas, soldiers, Maya, the United States, priests, and lawyers in 1982 along with archival footage from 1954 and one re-enactment. What Yates argues is that the United States was supporting a new version of democracy in Guatemala. Yates represents the United States as supporting a military dictatorship while the military is telling the people that they are supporting democracy, a democracy that allocates land for big business and forces Maya to work on business owned plantations of coffee and cotton in order to pay land taxes that have been Maya land for hundreds of years. Rather than an image of Maya remaining neutral in the war between the guerrillas and the government as we see in Tree Girl, Yates represents the Maya as participants joining the guerrillas in taking up arms in the name of freedom. Students see the guerrillas and the Mayas depicted from a new point of view, which complicates the Western narrative of guerrillas as all evil. The idea of revolution is introduced to our study of the modern Maya. The sequencing map illustrates not only the complexity of documentary filmmaking but also the complexity of storytelling, of history. Thus is the messiness of democracy as well.

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Re-imagining the English Classroom

This unit is an example of what English teachers can do to explore global issues of social justice through reading and writing. This is specifically designed using eighth grade Common Core Standards, but the units are appropriate for middle through high school students. The essential question that began this blog is this: How have the Maya responded to signs of change, and what can the Maya teach us about tradition, cooperation, and democracy? However, it expanded to other units that also seek to find the lessons of modernity -- or the belief that knowledge, the economy, technology and even our selves are capable of never-ending improvement. That said, our work is to uncover the darker side of such progress, which is also complex and shows how we are implicated in the lives of people all over the world. The format of these units is mostly inquiry-based, but we hold onto the core of our discipline, which is narrative. History is a narrative just as stories are, so we need to see any story as having gaps that prompt questions and further inquiry.

For the Maya unit, students will learn about cooperation through inquiry by beginning with a central text, developing comprehension and literary analysis skills while reading the central text, and then filling in the narrative gaps with additional inquiry researching a variety of genres. The summative assessment will enact this principle by presenting their research through multiple genres and then sharing their findings in a oral presentation and gallery walk. I try variations of this with each unit.

1. Thus, the first learning goal is to understand that knowledge is constructed by and through multiple sources. For this reason, we will do fishbowl and socratic seminars throughout the 3 weeks . The summative writing and speaking assessment is a multigenre project (see Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style or many websites) that synthesizes various sources to answer our essential question using multiple genres. Students are free to select from a variety of topics.

2. The second goal is to consider what different genres do to help us understand Maya experiences; thus, students will be able to examine the structure, authorial language, and authenticity of historical fiction and testimonio and to analyze what impact each has on the reader’s experience.In reading various texts, students will practice comprehension skills, identify and analyze literary devices, and trace the theme of cooperation. The summative reading assessment is a written assessment about figurative language, vocabulary in context, dialogue, and genre.

3.The third goal is to enact inclusivity, participation and critical engagement -- pillars of thick democracy. The texts in this unit captures the resilience of people and the value of cooperation. By focusing on Maya genocide of the early 1980s and exploring their culture, American students can learn the true meaning of cooperation and gain a greater sense of democratic living while also celebrating the resilience of a people. We will see how the Maya maintain their cultural foundation while making modern adaptation.

The novel, Tree Girl, is the central text, so the study guide here follows this book chapter by chapter indicating places for additional inquiry. Students will do inquiry during workshop time and keep notes in their research journals. The testimonio of I, Rigoberta Menchu, and numerous documentary and other media resources capture the social structures that created oppression in Guatemala and the mechanisms people used to resist and maintain traditions such as coops for farming and weaving and integrating Catholicism with indigenous religion. The two books are also a source of comparison as we think about how we learn about history.

As we see in Grandin's book, "Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society" (196). However, individuals, especially activists like Rigoberta Menchu, while extracted did not remain isolated. Out of such manifestations grew a new way of thinking that resisted oppression –granito de arena. This metaphor for cooperation is a powerful message for any democratic society and is particularly relevant for developing classroom ethos. Guatemala advanced democracy not through autonomy or isolated freedom but rather a "collective action laid bare the social foundations of self" (181). This, I think, is what is worth knowing and teaching in our schools; this notion of democracy is worth contemplating, and so this unit attempts to explore these notions by using stories as points of access for these young thinkers.

Ganito de arena – a humble phrase that says “ I alone can’t change things. But I can HELP to change things." It’s a collective concept of change! It signifies a process that change can take many forms. It comes through struggle that unites collective rights and individual rights. What I give is only a tiny contribution (as with all the people we will meet in this unit). There are no heroes, but when the hand of destiny touches you, you have to act – you don’t have a choice.

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Friday, September 28, 2012

Storytelling and Representation: When Mountains Tremble

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