{"id":8246,"date":"2015-03-13T03:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T10:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/?p=8246"},"modified":"2017-04-18T16:12:38","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T23:12:38","slug":"multimedia-journal-helps-students-heal-and-be-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/multimedia-journal-helps-students-heal-and-be-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"Multimedia Journal Helps Students Heal and Be Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Chicago\u2019s Tilden Career Community Academy, high school students double as enterprising reporters. They film, photograph, and write stories for Tilden Talks<\/a>, a multimedia journal funded by an LRNG Innovation Challenge Grant<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The publication is a lively hub for both serious and playful content, but it began as a way for a group of teenagers to process a tragedy. Near the end of the last school year, the students\u2019 classmate Endia Martin was shot to death. Her friends were deeply shaken<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said, \u2018I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll make it through the summer,\u2019\u201d remembered Krista Wortendyke, digital media mentor and photographer. Even worse, they found Martin\u2019s memorialization in the media was lacking and often inaccurate. It didn\u2019t do justice to the lives and neighborhoods they knew intimately.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a pivotal moment for all of us,\u201d said Suzanne McBride, another digital media mentor and associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago. \u201cTeachers, students, and mentors realized how powerful it is to give the students the tools to tell their own stories. It doesn\u2019t have to be filtered.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the teachers had an idea. They armed five students with iPhones and told them to take video diaries during their summers to film life in South Side, Chicago, from the eyes of someone living it. When the students returned to school in the fall, they had incredible footage of hardships and humor.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, during the same summer, the Tilden staff heard about the LRNG grants, \u201cand all these lightbulbs went off for us,\u201d McBride said.<\/p>\n

In 2014, LRNG awarded grants to 14 teams of educators working on the challenge of expanding time and space for creative and connected learning in schools. The grants grew from a\u00a0partnership among\u00a0the National Writing Project, John Legend\u2019s\u00a0Show Me Campaign<\/a>, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation<\/a> to support educators in developing solutions to challenges central to implementing connected learning.<\/p>\n

With the grant, Tilden Academy has turned a summer assignment into a long-term project involving two classes and lunchtime clubs. Tilden Talks will feature traditional journalistic pieces, but it\u2019s also a platform for powerful personal essays, a venue for venting about daily stress, and\u2014in one case\u2014a place to brag about social media prowess. One student, unprompted, wrote a moving piece about all the smiles she sees in South Side, Chicago<\/a>, debunking prevalent stereotypes, Wortendyke said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not trained journalists yet they\u2019re really developing a good sense of what it takes to tell a story,\u201d McBride said.<\/p>\n

Tilden Talks is primarily an empowerment tool. Elsewhere, the students are \u201clacking their own control over their own representation,\u201d Wortendyke explained. But it\u2019s also a fantastic introduction to tech tools and skills\u2014and to professionalism. Many participants\u2019 work for Tilden Talks is akin to a first job.<\/p>\n

If any school is a natural host to a student-run multimedia journal, it\u2019s the Tilden academy. The school is one of Chicago\u2019s two Convergence Academies<\/a>, underperforming schools that were converted in 2013 to institutions with emphases on connected learning and digital media integration. The transformation is the product of a joint effort by the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago<\/a> and the Chicago Public Schools<\/a>, and it is supported by a grant from the US Department of Education Investing in Innovation Fund.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing in Tilden Talks is central to what Convergence Academies is about,\u201d McBride said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to help young people feel literate in the digital world and tell stories. It\u2019s imperative that they know how to use these technologies for civic good.\u201d<\/p>\n

By\u00a0Natalie Orenstein<\/em>
\nPhoto\/ Krista Wortendyke<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Chicago\u2019s Tilden Career Community Academy, high school students double as enterprising reporters. They film, photograph, and write stories for Tilden Talks, a multimedia journal funded by an LRNG Innovation Challenge Grant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":8247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[518],"tags":[48,619,580,78,490,329,92,330],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8246"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8281,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8246\/revisions\/8281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}