You may remember the entry I posted about my West Marredpally class’ first video “Our Stories Our Important.” I’m pleased to report that the conversations around sexism, representation and girl power that project continued long after we wrapped.
In the above noted entry, I wrote about impressed I was with the ability of the girls to recognize the need for complex, honestfemale characters, rather than simply strong female characters. For our second video, a fast-paced action flick about four super-heroines taking on two evil villains planning to commit infanticide against baby girls, the students worked hard to create characters that were not only tough, but also relatable: one hero struggles with her parents having doubts in her. The students were also adamant about creating two female villains because they wanted to disrupt the portrayal of girls as sweet and nice. Their sense of empathy and ability to write and portray complex characters stems from a true self-awareness that many of the girls possess. They are immensely capable of thinking and working independently and I had no trouble sending small teams out on shoots by themselves. Despite the fact that the story was rooted in fiction, many of the actresses drew on their own experiences or those of women they knew well when approaching a scene instead of copying what they’d seen in the theater or on their televisions.
With this in mind I decided to propose a final project that would center on self-representation. Many of the students wrote poems about themselves and they worked in pairs to frame self-portraits. In stark contrast to the trepidation they displayed at the beginning of the semester, most were ecstatic to be totally in control. Their willingness to present themselves as they are astounded me; I loved seeing that some of them wrote lines like “Angry (sometimes!)” in their poems. I hope you enjoy learning more about them as much as I have!
After I finish my morning class at West Marredpally I hop into an auto, stop for a quick dosa from the delicious cart right where the main road forks, head to the right and push open the gate to Bansilalpet School. Most days, I’m instantly welcomed by the headmaster, a cluster of primary school students, and Geetha, my TA. Photos of school functions, certificates of achievement, and charts proudly displaying how well the students have performed on state exams cover the walls of the main office and staff lounge. When I asked my class, a group of 18 rambunctious 8th graders, to write about one thing they liked about their community, the vast majority chose to write about their school. I wish you could all feel the sense of pride in and love for this school that I get to every time I walk in that gate, but since you can’t, our class has produced the next best thing: a photo tour! Enjoy!
Did you know that India is the world’s largest producer of films? Or that, as a matter of fact, Hyderabad is home to the second largest film industry in the country? Not to mention we’ve got Ramoji Film City, the world’s largest film production facility and the world’s largest 3D IMAX Screen, which, not surprisingly, is also the world’s most attended screen.
What I’m trying to say is: movies are a really big deal here and film has proven to be an easy conversation starter with my students. My class at West Marredpally was perhaps the most enthusiastic, though; the students launched into vivid mile- a-minute descriptions of their favorite Blockbusters without any prodding. They were eager to get started on the behind the scenes work as well. I can’t quite remember how exactly it came up but at some point I asked them how many of their favorite movies featured heroines or had a girl playing a pivotal role. When that failed to elicit any raised hands I asked how many movies that fit that description they could think of. We ended up with just a handful of examples I asked them why they thought that was. They were quick to answer that people don’t want to make “those types of movies.” I asked them why that was.
“They wouldn’t make money because there would be no one to see them.”
“Why?”
“Most women work too much to go to the movies.”
I pressed them on why they thought only women would go to see movies about heroines.
“Men would not be interested to see them.”
Again, “Why?”
The conversation was at times thrilling, at times exhausting and definitely a challenge for all of us but we eventually got ourselves right to the center of the vortex we were struggling to define. The students realized that many filmmakers and moviegoers operate under (and the former therefore perpetuate) the same assumption that women make less capable, less complex, less convincing, and therefore, less lucrative heroines or even principle characters.
Then, these cross-legged, wide eyed soon-to-be directors and writers and actresses and camerawomen and editors decided that they could try and convince folks to produce movies about women and girls- and what better way to do it than by making one of their own?
Over the next few weeks we talked about all of the reasons that common assumptions about women and girls are false. We talked about ourselves and told stories about moments in our lives that we’re proud of. Hema Prabha is only twelve but she can speak seven languages. M. Swathi is a great cook. Devi tells gripping stories. Hemalela aced all of her exams. Swathi is a talented runner. They told me about all of the women they admire. To help bridge the language divide, I borrowed a move from Hyderabad for Feminism and had them scrawl their thoughts on whiteboards in English or Telugu and take photos of these alongside their action shots. Finally, they recorded their voiceover, picked a powerful instrumental song to accompany, honed their editing skills and here’s what we came up with:
Around the time we were starting post-production, an article entitled “I Hate Strong Female Characters,” was published. I was reluctant to read it at first, too, but the basic argument is this:
“Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong.”
In their video the girls place equal value on the fact that they are physically strong as they do on the fact that they can cook, or that they value relationships, or that they’re sincere. They get to be themselves, not faster, stronger, meaner, more butt-kicking but also more callous tropes of themselves. I am so grateful for the conversations these students have allowed me to have with them and I can’t wait to see what fascinating characters they come up with as we embark on our first short fiction video.
Is there anything more delicious than being pleasantly surprised by a situation or circumstance? The thrill of having your assumptions dashed away, like a dandelion when a puff of wind flutters by? My class at Audiah Memorial High School has been nothing but a series of lessons in the foolishness of placing stock in pre-conceived notions, and the spark of beauty that lies in a true surprise. Compared to the other classes that I teach here in Hyderabad, the kids at Audiah are outliers: they are mostly boys, where I otherwise only deal with girls. They are mostly Telugu-medium, while my other students are quite proficient in English. The children at Audiah are rowdy: students openly beat each other in the classroom, mini versions of Pacquiao and Mayweather. Children at my other schools appear to be oblivious to the outcome of a great right-hook. Thus, my earliest dealings with the nineteen students at Audiah were a veritable mixed-bag. They had little to no idea what the words that I was spouting meant: English was a foreign language in every sense of the statement. Homework was assigned, and then summarily dismissed by the students. Unlike the other schools I have been working in, I did not have proper teacher assistants that were able to help me on a day-to-day basis. I felt disrespected and alone. The hours I was spending on cultivating “perfect” lesson plans were for naught, and I felt as if I was failing those that needed failure the least: my students.
Frustration has a face!
Then came a breakthrough, and it arrived accidentally, as most great things are wont to do. While frustrated at my lack of ability to convey the concept of a “point of view” I slipped in a phrase or two in Telugu. The kids were shocked at my hidden linguistic abilities, yet they gobbled up the information that I was presenting. The photography scavenger hunt that we were working on was a breeze, and resulted in some great shots. When friends and family ask about my experience so far with The Modern Story, they assume that most of my work is in teaching English. Strengthening existing language skills is certainly part of my job, but the focus is on digital skills and instilling creative confidence. By simply switching the mode in which information was being presented, students that I had deemed “difficult to work with” were transformed. My notions were dashed away in a flurry of surprisingly beautiful and engaging content.
The next great surprise came whilst we were deep in the bowels of producing our first photo story. The kids settled upon three topics: ‘Maths in Daily Life’, ‘What is Friendship?’, and ‘Welcome to Audiah’ (a love letter to their school). This entailed three separate production teams, all simultaneously storyboarding, location scouting, taking pictures, and editing final products. As mentioned above, we do not have teachers assistants at Audiah – the teachers are too busy with their own curriculum to undertake TMS projects. Thus, the decision to undertake three photo stories meant that I, as a facilitator, would have to rotate my assistance between the groups, and that at any given time two groups would be dealing with production on their own. I was initially terrified at this prospect, as previous projects had needed to be micromanaged, for the sake of creative integrity and the equipments own well-being. However, as this blog post’s title indicates, I was about to be surprised yet again. All three groups were exemplary in terms of efficiency. After returning with the ‘Maths’ team from photographing a local shop, I was thrilled with surprise at the photos that the ‘Friendship’ group had captured. The rowdiness that was once so prevalent in class had vanished. Students were patient with each other whilst editing their stories in iMovie. Fighting over notebooks and pencils had been replaced by helping one another detach audio or insert subtitles. The final results can be viewed below: the students hope you enjoy watching them as much as they enjoyed making them. My first two months at Audiah have been a lesson in surprises, and I cannot wait to see what else these kids have in store. Now it’s on to the first video projects! Cheers!
We are so excited to be posting our first photostory!
One of the first assignments I gave my students at Seethaphalmandi was to bring in an object that was precious to them and share it with the class so that I could get to know them better. The class implored me to do the same and, the next day, I obliged by bringing in a handful of postcards from my friends’ travels. At first, the postcards were a simple tool to help explain the basics of creating a storyboard for a photostory. I had my students shout out what they could infer about Portugal from an image of a white church next to a lighthouse, or Washington, D.C. from a shot of the capital building or Israel from a close-up of a decked out camel. Then, I read the accompanying text aloud to demonstrate how even more can be gleaned from a detailed written description. Immediately, the students began to reflect on their own surroundings and to quiz me on how much I was able to understand about the culture of Hyderabad based on what I had seen so far. They wanted to know what my friends thought of India, what had I taught them. One student asked: “Teacher, have you sent any postcards yet?
And thus, the idea for our digital postcard was born.
Many ideas were thrown out in that first brainstorming session and I really hope that we get a chance to return to some of them- but partly because these students are naturally inclined to be in front of the camera and the idea of dressing up at school was exciting and partly because of my inability to pronounce or spell any of the things I was wearing they decided first to educate the masses about traditional Indian dress.
I wrote in an earlier post about creative confidence about our goals of serving more as facilitators than teachers, of actively listening more than we lecture, and of our desire to see students confidently share what they know and think and feel with us. And in this class my students really had no option but to muster that creative confidence (please refer back to my previously mentioned ignorance). When we needed to write a scene identifying the pieces of a half saree or decide whether a photograph should be a portrait of one student or a group shot the students quickly realized that I wasn’t the one with the “right” answer- they were. It was wonderful to watch them step up and be the experts that they are and it’s led to our classroom having a much more open and egalitarian feel.
On a typical Thursday I’ll come in and ask them about what’s happened in the city since the last time I saw them- it’s festival season so there’s almost always been something exciting. One week, a Muslim student taught me as well as the Hindu and Christian students in the class about Eid. The following week, I explained absurd and amazing spectacle that is Halloween. And this past week, a student named Nityanand explained the upcoming Ganesha festival- he’s an expert and counts it as his favorite since it happens around his birthday. I can’t wait to continue learning from and alongside these students, but I think we’ll start off this week with a mini celebratory festival of our own!
Hello! Nicole here. Last week Nelle, Shivani and I were really lucky to be at the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) Training co-hosted with one of our other local partners, The America India Foundation (AIF). As participants we learned so much about creative pedagogy and how AVY applies it and were thrilled to interact with our teaching assistants outside of the classroom and as educators we were able to lead several parts of the training. I was especially excited to facilitate a workshop on Creative Confidence.
This idea of creative confidence, of ownership, of assuredness that your voice is the best voice for for folks to hear a story from is incredibly important to me. It’s what drew me to digital storytelling when I first heard about it in college and it’s what informs every decision I make when it’s late at night and I’m lesson planning at our dining room table that’s always a little cramped with whiteboards, backup hard drives and student’s journals. In each class we’ve tried to make a conscious effort to present ourselves as facilitators more so than teachers with all of the answers and in some it’s been easier than in others to get the students to step up. For example, my students at Seethaphalmandi school are in pre-production on a series of “digital postcards” about the culture of Hyderabad and the first one is centered on typical styles of dressing. It didn’t take them long to realize that in this situation they had to teach me. They’re confident in their knowledge of the topic and they’re excited to share what they know with anyone who wants to watch their video.
Nithyanand storyboarding at Seethaphalmandi!
At the school discussed in the workshop, West Marredpally, however, the task was a little bit more daunting. My students were quick to point out to me that most people in their community give more freedom and privileges to boys and also very attune to the massive dearth of movies with strong female, particularly young female leads and so I pushed them to make the connection between the two issues. I was scribbling their ideas on the board and pushing them to tell me why (“why don’t people make these movies?” “why won’t people go see them?” “why do you think only women would go?”) and on and on. At first, they seemed to think that every time I pushed on it was because they had the wrong answer and it was a bit of a challenge to assure them that they were so completely right and that I was excited about where we were getting, but we finally came full circle with five minutes left on our Tuesday class and one girl confidently pointed out that if movies can shape thoughts and thoughts can shape actions in a negative way then the opposite must also be true and there was the creative confidence I had been searching for. The class is entering the production phase determined not only to take great photographs or speak clearly when recording the voiceover, but to use these tools that tells a story that will change the hearts and minds of those within and outside of their community. Also, on the subject of determination, all of this talk about the strength of girls has led to many a conversation about a girl gang of superheroes, which to me sounds like it has all the trappings of a great action movie for project #2. Stay tuned!
While our first few weeks in Hyderabad were filled with hotter-than-hot temperatures, things have drastically cooled down with the arrival of a cloud filled sky. The nonstop barrage of rain has been perfect for settling into the classroom and doing some quality brainstorming with students. The girls at Railway High School in Lallaguda were the first ones to get classes underway at the start of the semester and are thus further along with the curriculum than the rest of their peers — which means the beginnings of a photo story!
The girls have been musing and marinating about various problems that they perceive in their community and so for homework we asked them to illustrate two images: one picturizing a problem, and another showing a solution. I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of issues that the students spoke about: Jyoti was concerned about water wastage, Vennela is particularly interested in the plight of child laborers, and Mohammedi had this to say about child brides: “It’s very sad when someone’s childhood ends at the age of eleven when they get married”. Nearly all proposed contacting the government for solutions to the problems with Pooja even inquiring about the best way to organize a march downtown! I’m certain that the class contains the next Indira Gandhi or Pratibha Patil; these kids are not to be underestimated!
Sirisha diligently photographing while Pooja interviews Ms. Nirmala
Most of the girls centered their problems around the plight of those located outside of Hyderabad: “in the villages there is no electricity, in the villages there is too much pollution” and so on. Picking up on this common undercurrent the first photo story has been tentatively titled “Village Life” and will focus on four main themes: Roads/Pollution, Water, Education, and Electricity. Students then picked which topic piqued their interest the most and split into the appropriate group to do research on the internet and to interview adults. We’re still in the beginning stages but the girls are so enthused and energetic that big things are sure to come — stay tuned!
Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Rory Sutherland
At this point, we hope you’ve moseyed on over to The Modern Story’s video page, taken a stroll in Rainbow Park while pondering a girl’s struggle for education, and eaten birthday biryani on a rainy day. Our final batch of photo stories comes from the 8th standard class at Railway Girl’s High School, an extraordinary school in Lallaguda that was been partnered with The Modern Story program for three years. In a unique departure from the traditional photo story format, this year marked the first time that a TMS project counted towards students’ quarterly exams (representing 25 marks total). Through a collaboration with the 8th class English instructors, Mdms. Shimla and Vimala, the photo story assignment asked students to create a visual interpretation of William Wordsworth’s “A Spring Morning.”
“A Spring Morning” is fourteen lines in length and describes the beautiful day that emerges after a rainstorm:
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stockdove broods;
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;
The grass is bright with raindrops; – on the moor
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.
A Spring Morning is also first poem in the English Reader textbook for all 8th class students in the state of Andhra Pradesh and between the five schools where we teach, it is one of the few common denominators. Nearly every student has some working familiarity with this poem and especially its resounding introduction: “There was a roaring in the wind all night.” A few have even copied a verse or two in their homework and claimed it as their own. But that’s another issue for another blog post.
More pressing in early July was the challenge of interpreting a remarkably straightforward poem in an imaginative way. “A Spring Morning” is fourteen lines long and featured Wordsworth at his descriptive best. Read it again and you’ll see. The poem is constituted entirely of images. It describes the beautiful day that emerges after a rainstorm, pregnant with the sounds of birds chirping, water flowing, and a hare bounding through puddles. This hare is the closest thing the poem has to a protagonist and his splashy journey the extent of the poem’s narrative, leaving those hungry for a plotline (or a story to digitize) wanting. And while the other TMS photo stories drew from the personal lives of the students, ranging from the everyday of cooking biryani to broader themes of caste division, and had clear narrative conventions (a main character, a beginning, a middle, and end), the story that landed in the lap of Railway was a snapshot of the English countryside written over 120 years ago. What possible connection did Wordsworth’s pastoral paradise have to their personal lives?
It was a question the three of us thought about for a long time, as we read and re-read those fourteen lines in search for creative wiggle room and a story to conceptualize. We had the students choose their favorite line of the poem and draw it. They wrote poetry for homework and read poetry in class. Kelly wondered if we could represent the emotional arc of the poem, showing the ascension of family calm after a storm of domestic violence. As a warm-up, she and Dana choreographed an expressive dance around the poem’s major images, which 8A enthusiastically memorized by heart.
Over in 8B, the girls turned the poem into a play – “acting out” what they read, roaring like a lion, chattering like a magpie, and raining like a flood. Neha and I were the costume department for that day, furiously scribbling “tree,” “sun” and that famous “hare” on pieces of computer paper and taping it to the front of their uniforms.
While these exercises helped the students in isolating the major “characters” of the poem, they didn’t generate a more profound interpretation than the literal fact of a spring morning after a rain storm. At first this disappointed me. Years of schooling had coached me in the “seek-and-ye-shall-find” methods of literary analysis, in which a careful reader cannot in good faith leave any symbolic stone unturned, but must dissect any verse with a mental scapula, extracting the meaning hidden by the all-knowing poet/creator/mastermind. If our students wanted to represent the hare as simply that – a hare – would we be allowing them to settle for a superficial interpretation?
Maybe. But maybe not. For there is another kind of wealth to be found in poetry that operates on the pure level of language, of words. And meaning revealed by the simple stringing of several words together. “All things that love the sun are out of doors.” To read these words on page, to understand them, and to represent them artistically is an accomplishment for anyone, let alone students whose second language is English. Any deeper meaning lacquered upon the simplicity of Wordsworth’s words does not indicate a more meaningful understanding of the words themselves. And the more we worked through the project, the more I realized that our earlier fixation on finding a deeper meaning distracted us from the beauty of its delivery. We changed focus from questions of message (What do we think Wordsworth means by a spring morning?) to questions of medium (How shall we recreate a spring morning? How shall we evoke the feeling of a spring morning?), recognizing the ample inspiration in this spring morning to produce a photo story of substance.
And that’s when the fun began. 8A brought the outdoors inside, hanging raindrops from the ceiling and birds from the window, and embodying Wordsworth’s menagerie by turning their cheeks towards Kelly’s face paint brush, grinning hugely beneath rabbit whiskers, chattering like jays and magpies with cut-out speech bubbles, and forming birds wings with their adjoined thumbs. With a little help from Dana and the Electric Light Company, they learned to read expressively, to make their voices rise calmly and brightly like the sun, matching the cadence of Wordsworth’s iambic pentameter.
After breaking into three groups, 8B received blank story boarding sheets.”You choose. Its your choice,” Neha and I kept saying when they asked what to do next and after some initial discomfort, each team attacked the project from a different angle, with a different story board to show for it. Velankanni and Shanawaz took digital photographs on the school grounds and created rain where there was none, sprinkling “dew” on grass blades, draping leaves in puddles, and commissioning a few of the Tiny Tots students to pose with umbrellas. When a downpour did come, Srilekha and Ramya Sree bolted outside with a video camera and returned triumphantly to class with a sound recording.
Other teams delved into mixed media collages and stop motion animation, condensing a series of 30 still pictures of a run rising upward or a hare moving forward into a four second clip. While teaching them these techniques, their application and execution was entirely up to the students. It seemed that the more free they were to experiment with different media and represent the poem as they wished, the more personal responsibility they developed, as they recognized this project was in some way an extension of themselves and there was no “right” way to complete it. “A Spring Morning” may have been written by Williams Wordsworth, but “A Spring Morning” photo story was all theirs.
Their burgeoning sense of artistic ownership culminated in a showcase of the photo stories for their parents during the annual Parent-Teacher meeting and for the head administrator of the Railway schools on Teacher’s Day (see video below). Our students spoke proudly about their work and what’s more, seemed astonished that they themselves (rather than another adult or teacher) were speaking on their own behalf and representing their original work. Watching them from the side, I realized it mattered little in the end whether we were in England or in India. These students were resourceful enough to illustrate “A Spring Morning” poem on the moon provided they were given the moon rocks to do so. And therein lies the true success of Railway’s photo story project: that the students experienced the thrill of creation and just how personal it can be.
The time has come to officially post the TMS photo stories of 2012! All the videos are available for your viewing enjoyment on our Youtube and Vimeo channels, but I wanted to write specifically about the Audiah Memorial and Bansilalpet photo projects. While the students of Railway School were assigned a poem by William Wordsworth to interpret photographically, our AIF schools had the added challenge of writing and storyboarding their own original ideas. With the hopes of prompting some “change the world” thoughts, Emily and I held a cause-and-effect lesson. We talked with the students about how one action can often have multiple, unforeseen effects. We crafted several mini-stories out of photographs pulled from the web. The classic example of someone throwing a stone into still waters and thereby causing continuous ripples proved particularly helpful in getting our point across.
From this lesson we moved into a brainstorming session, which was easily one of the most fun and exciting days for us at these two schools. The students thought of stories about the carelessness that can lead to life-changing traffic accidents. They talked about the dangers of bad habits such as smoking, and the impact of one person using a trash bin instead of the street. Once everyone’s creative juices were flowing, we moved into making a full story based (loosely) on the cause-and-effect theme. Emily and I really tried to sit back and let the students take the reins. We were rewarded by two very different stories: one about the good and bad effects of Hyderabadi rain, the other about the rewards of perseverance.
We liked both stories for their connection to life in Hyderabad and for the fact that they were pieced together by all of the students in each class. That is, every student contributed in at least one way to the final product. Since some of our students are significantly less outspoken or less brave with the cameras than others, we felt that this inclusiveness was an important achievement.
At Audiah Memorial, we discovered that a balance is needed between action and planning. While our brainstorming and storyboarding sessions were very useful, some of the best ideas came spontaneously when we were shooting images for the story. Bansilalpet stuck more closely to the script, but also came up with some excellent on-the-spot solutions when their original ideas weren’t living up to their expectations.
At both schools, making the photo stories was an incredibly fun and rewarding process. We have high hopes for the next piece in the TMS puzzle: video shorts!
Festival season is in full swing here in Hyderabad – exacerbating the familiar sense overload of India and creating a series of obstacles to navigate in class scheduling and seeing projects to completion. August 15 marked the 66th anniversary of India’s independence, and coincided with a transition period occurring in our curriculum – photo stories finished and venturing into the new territory of video pre-production.
Each of our schools extended anxious invitations to join them for their special school programs to celebrate the brave actions of Gandhi and the Freedom Fighters that allowed India break free from British rule. However much I wanted to attend both schools, I should have anticipated that it would not be so easy to peel away from the students wrapped up in excitement at the first, MGM, to share their pride in being Indians. I also did not anticipate that I, myself, would be expected to contribute to the ceremony by giving a speech on India. I have to admit that when they announced I would be speaking it came as a complete shock, not entirely sure that I felt appropriate to speak on behalf of a country I feel only humbly welcomed to live and teach in. That said, it did not take me long to realize upon this spontaneous reflection on the Indian Independence Movement, that this was not an isolated historical event of localized importance – but rather, the introduction of the power of nonviolent civil disobedience onto the world scale. The whole world has, through its influence on global social justice movements, and can continue to benefit from a remembrance of the words and actions of Gandhi and the Freedom Fighters. I enjoyed incorporating this into this week’s lesson plans by having the girls make ‘protest’ signs inspired by various quotes from Gandhi – on topics ranging from Character and Truth, to Women, Religious Unity, and Democracy.
I also thought that Independence Day came at an appropriate time of switching gears in our curriculum, because it is our aim to engage the students in socially conscious critical thinking. As much as Independence Day could function as a celebration of where India has come – it is also a platform to focus on the issues still alive in present day India and to imagine what India can be in the future. I love this country and its spirit, but there is also a reality that it is a place with some startling statistics if you begin to look into them- where 40% of schools do not have functional toilets, 42% of children are malnourished and underweight, and basic reading and arithmetic levels struggle to keep out of decline. It was nice to reflect on the relevance of the stories written by students for the Photo Story in this context, and I am excited to share these below.
Completed Photo Stories:
The girls of MGM wanted to draw attention to the struggle women face to receive an education in India. The story, written by students, is set in a village, where a young girl dreams about going to school. She pursues this dream for education despite the lack of support from family and community, creating a role model for local girls.
The girls from Sultaan Bazar bring us a lesson in overcoming our superficial differences. A new rule from the Commissioner has created rifts between the various people of Rainbow Park – fighting and prejudice transform the formerly peaceful park into land divided in inequality. It is only with the help of an observant young girl and a ‘Friend Book’ written in multiple languages that recognition of unity in diversity is restored. I like this story because subtly it addresses themes ranging from caste and religious unity to the celebration of Friendship Day and Independence.
