tms@themodernstory.com

The Modern Story Fellowship

Feb, 10

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Daily Updates, The Modern Story Fellowship, TMS Fellow Updates

Google teams up with The Modern Story for a career day panel in rural India

Google and TMS team up to drop some knowledge

On Saturday February 6th, The Modern Story (TMS) and Google teamed up to present a career day panel in rural India at Nalgonda´s Andhra Pradesh Residential Boys School.  The school, which is a boarding school for primary education, is an all-Muslim government program 3.5 hours south of Hyderabad. 5 volunteers from Google spoke to children of all ages from 4-10th class about their experiences in India’s educational system and how they got to be where they are today. Sheik Mohammed, a Google Maps programmer, spoke about his life in Uttar Pradesh. He grew up in a household supported by a single mother without a father or future prospects. Sheik told the kids how a life of do or die motivated him to achieve in school. His advice came from his own experience that seemed to resonate with a lot of the boys in 8-10th class. He related to the kids how he never wanted to become an engineer just because everyone else did. Rather, he wanted to become an engineer because his fascination with computers led him to learn after school, outside of the classroom, supplementing his education.

Sheikh, Ioana and TMS students at Nalgonda for the Google Career Panel

The Google team arrived around 1:30pm and had lunch with the students. Afterward, the panel was held in front of the school’s maps of Andhra Pradesh, India and the World painted on a wall on the second floor next to TMS’s classroom. Using these maps as concrete images, the Google team talked about their work on Google Maps on-line. Many of these students are unable to type. Nor have they had any extensive experience on the internet. Few knew what Google was, but their imaginations were visibly sparked. The panel proceeded by talking about problems and common experiences in Indian education and attitudes toward learning, the exciting opportunities in India’s growing economy for jobs, personal anecdotes and fielding student questions.

The last part of the panel was a motivational period where Ms. _ spoke to the kids about their potential for growth, individuality, and encouraged them to ´fight for India,´ with a wink to our no-violence curriculum :). The event ended at 4:00pm with the kids sending us off with cheers and the Google team thanking the administrators for the opportunity, saying they would love to come again. We’ll be looking forward to working together in the future. 

Feb, 2

4

Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship, TMS Fellow Updates

A day in the life of a Modern Story Fellow

After posting many student photos, essays, and film pieces and following the impressions of leading Indian experts on The Modern Story’s work in Hyderabad, today afforded a good opportunity to describe to future fellows and the general community what a day in the life of a Modern Story Fellow is like. Morning began with a fiction workshop that I have fallen into as Hyderabad offers a rich literary culture and group of talented editors, screen writers, filmmakers and historians. Critique, responses and networking is done locally and on-line. Then the power goes out and I use the opportunity to un-plug for writing a script piece that a local filmmaker asked me to work on. Headed to class. Students gave ideas for a Public Service Announcement they want to do. Leading ideas include a public service announcement on drunk driving and making food sold on footpaths cleaner and healthier. As Bogota’s mayor once said, the difference between developing and developed countries lies not in their highways but on their footpaths. The students began story boarding today and hopefully soon we will move into animation and production.

This year presents a unique challenge to The Modern Story as new administrators and staff at local schools are asking that we complete more of the videos on campus and less time spent going ‘into the field’ for things like community media reporting or documentary work. The lack of props, vivid backgrounds, and unique atmosphere that we otherwise might have access to is unsettling. But, to get around this issue, we tested the idea of using colored chalk to do stop-frame animation drawings. This technique satisfies local administrative restraints, expands the possibility of student imaginations to take form for TMS projects, and also is much quicker to complete than working only with traditional ‘flip-book’ animation. Hopefully we will be able to demonstrate results soon.

After class the TMS team met with th Byrraju foundation to plan a story telling workshop in northern Andhra Pradesh in late March. Following this meeting, I went to hear a talk and have tea with William Darlymple at Saptaparni, Hyderabad which was an intimate but elegant setting that might prove to be a good location for TMS’ awareness event in late February. Darlymple is famous for his travel writing and published one of the best books in the genre at the young age of 22 titled, In Xanadu. He stopped by for a small reading and fielded questions about his recent work Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The talk was appropriate for those interested in the work of projects like The Modern Story as it addressed issues and problems related to storytelling, narrative art, and using prose, photography and film to facilitate cross cultural exchange in India. This week’s TEDx Hitec City event also shed a lot of new light on animation workshops for children and story telling in India. I would suggest both their professional work and the content of their talks be ‘required’ reading/viewing for future fellows coming to India.

After the talk with Mr. William Darlymple, I went to the Qutb Shahi tombs to see a contemporary Indian dance performance mixing martial arts and modern movements in India’s seven dance idioms. The performance, held at the last of the Shahi tombs, required the audience to rotate around the magnificent Persian architecture as the dancers evoked spirits of the dead into a display that employed martial art discipline of movement and the agility of world class dancers from Europe and across the Subcontinent. Then afterward I went exploring the burial houses around midnight that still remained open. The night ended with a local friend taking me to Basra Cafe, a great byriani restaurant near the TMS apartment in Abids where we had tasty garlic chicken kebabs and byriani rice. I hope this presents a small picture into the great opportunities the TMS fellowship provides.

Nov, 30

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Classroom News, Daily Updates, Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship, TMS Fellow Updates

Technology and Education develop a student’s sense of the self

The Modern Story based in Hyderabad, India is about to kick off its digital story projects on film. Digital narratives at The Modern Story (TMS) integrate technology into the classroom by teaching creative expression alongside computer literacy skills. One documentary currently underway at The Modern Story is highlighting the railway community´s influence in Hyderabad. The documentary focuses on a lowly employee in an area called Lallaguda who never attended school and was never formally educated. His daughters are now proud graduates from the Railway school where The Modern Story is teaching. One is on her way to becoming a lawyer and the other is enjoying success in college.

Their successes bring to mind a lesson learned from last week’s class. We were critiquing clips on the new iMac that The Modern Story purchased for Railway. In the clip, which touched upon child labor, a boy being interviewed in the street says, ‘No. I want to work. School is useless.’ All the girls immediately laughed at the boy’s statement. They attend a government school which could use some improvement but is successful considering its public status. Yet, all of the girls immediately saw the boy’s statement for what it was: a lie. During moments like these, when the girls are using a new iMac to watch the lives of other children unfold sadly in the streets, I am reminded of the importance of technology in education but for a reason I hadn’t thought of before. When the girls laughed at that boy they participated in the invention of the ‘other,’ conferring upon themselves a certain distinction- They have a chance for a different life than their parents had. Remember, most of these girls are first generation learners! (not first generation college students but actually the first person to attend any formal schooling from their family.)  There has been much talk lately about the relationship between invention and technology in entrepreneurship. See below for information about the Ashoka conference that will be coming to Hyderabad February 9-14, 2010. However, as I walk past the ‘vocational training room’ at Railway which is full of dusty sewing machines and enter the ‘Digital Equalizer Lab’ where we teach I can’t help but wonder if the most important link between technology and invention for some communities is the invention of the ‘other,’ a traditionally negative process that in our context gives the girls a sense of urgency in their education – ‘We must succeed!’ could easily have replaced the laughter at the boy on the streets. With this invention of the ‘other’ emerges a positive element in an otherwise divisive notion of students differentiating themselves from children working on the street. They may be their parents’ sons and daughters but they are not their choices. In the beginning of the year I performed a piece of spoken word for the class, called ‘Knock Knock’ by Daniel Beatty where the poet closes with just those lines:

“Knock knock with the knowledge that yes we are our fathers sons and daughters but we are not their choices for despite their absences we are still here still alive still breathing with the power to change this world one little boy and girl at a time. Knock knock! Who’s there? WE ARE!”

With the introduction of technology comes the invention of the ‘other,’ and perhaps, as Paul Auster would continue, the invention of solitude. But these girls have provided a forceful lesson and put an interesting spin on an otherwise unfortunate division between themselves and their fellow citizens: ‘I am therefore I think!’ A lesson that highlights how easily the ‘social’ in social entrepreneurship can be formed or left in the street.

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2009. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event. Danny is a 2009/2010 Fellow with The Modern Story

Oct, 22

0

Daily Updates, Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship, TMS Fellow Updates

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Challenges to creative writing curriculum in India: Individuality, Borges, and the crowds of the city

Above the boy’s beds made of steel is written “The greatest men have always stood alone.” The quote, for me, lends weight to the tension between individuality and the teeming 1billion plus Indians in the subcontinent’s often overcrowded cities.  ‘Individuality,’ in reference to our students and their education, is often at odds with the overpopulated city and the lack of funds to provide enough teachers for individual learning. This week taught me the challenges of implementing a curriculum teaching individual expression, creativity, and a sense of individual value in our students in Nalgonda. A.P.R.S. boys school is a Muslim boarding school. Although they are not necessarily minorities in all parts of Hyderabad, there is a rich record of complementary and antagonistic histories between the many religions living side by side in the country’s urban centers. Whether or not they would express it themselves, it seems to me that religion plays into a sense of pride in both their identity and interests. They are fascinated by the pyramids and mosques of Cairo, tigers, Arabic and Urdu calligraphy, riddles and religious songs from childhood. So far they have been doing great individual and creative stories while in class. For homework, however, almost all the students copied poems out of their English readers claiming that they had written the poems themselves. For example, one boy claimed he was the original author of ‘The Road Not Taken.’

Plagiarism is not always an un-creative act. Some philosophers, such as those Jorge Luis Borges would often quote, believed that anyone who writes a line of Shakespeare is Shakespeare. One of Borges’ most famous stories is that of a man who tried writing the next great Don Quixote. Realizing his pride, the man decided instead to live his every thought as though he were Miguel de Cervantes until, without glancing at the text, his life would lead him to write Don Quixote word-for-word, exactly as the original. In most contexts, such a conjecture would seem ridiculous. However, in the teeming crowds of Hyderabad, the individuality of one person or one student can often get lost in the shuffle of government education. Plagiarism can also lead a teacher to suspend their belief in a student’s creativity. But this is not so much of an alarm for our classes. Yes, it was not easy for the students to internalize an emphasis on individual work, original ideas and creativity. But they have shown excellent promise while working in class. As supported by the America India Foundation’s Digital Equalizer Program, we as Fellows recognize the importance of bridging the digital divide but also recognize a more pressing issue  at the local level of our schools; the value ascribed to individual expression, and perhaps in proportion, individual worth.

There are daily news reports that emphasize a reduced value of human life in such a highly populated country; on-going fatalities on the highways, railroads, oppressive pollution hanging as thick as moss in front of pre-schools, the suicides after the Chief Minister died and the list goes on and is normalized. Granted, this is an outsiders perspective. Yet, on our daily rides home through the congested and chaotic streets of Hyderabad, I am reminded of the social context pressing in on the classroom once the bell rings and the day is over. For teachers, we return to our apartment in Abids. But the boys return to their metal beds and their walls where it is written: “The greatest men have always stood alone.” Success, it seems, comes when one has the privilege to live in a house with your own room, to ride in your own air conditioned car, to have the personal space to breath unpolluted air: indeed, it does seem the greatest men here strive to stand alone. There is a health related aspect to self-isolation. No wonder so many students perceive their solitude profiled in the city’s skyline; privacy is at a premium in India. Those who can’t afford it continue in the rush of the alley traffic beneath the high rises. Perhaps like our students they are fascinated by tigers, pyramids, and constructions of the mind that lead one man to believe, as Borges often dreamed, that he is any other man. For now, our challenge is to channel their energy into completing the assignments faithfully and honestly, doing their own work and showcasing their incredible capacity for wonder.

–Danny Thiemann
2009/2010 Fellow

Oct, 10

0

Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship, TMS Fellow Updates

Gearing up for The Modern Story and settling in Hyderabad

Despite delays in our classes, the first week in Hyderabad was an exciting one. The kids that live in our apartment are full of questions about the U.S. and our work in India. They have taken me to play cricket, badminton and catch. Some hope to be professional sports players. Yet, they have few resources and little space to exercise. Pollution shallows both their lungs and the sentiments they may harbor within them. They are bright. Many are strong and have a quick wit. Unfortunately, their frustrations are inherent in the circumstances in which they live: air pollution, water-borne diseases, troubled schools, limited access to higher education, and a dearth of athletic or academic scholarships.

On Tuesday we visited the Railway Girls School. They were the first children I met outside of my neighborhood. A girl read her poem, ‘Onset of Night.’ Her writing was exceptional and I hope her work is published more extensively on-line so that others can see the benefits of The Modern Story. The work focused on the traffic of hands, feet, and crowds that flood the city. It was an excellent exercise in creative writing and personal reflection. I couldn’t help but admire how she related what chaotic rhythms of the city beat within her own heart. She is smart, as are her classmates. While most, it seems, have dreamed in proportion to the school’s successes, I was struck with how The Modern Story allowed her to dream in proportion to her reach toward the self.

This week of delay has also given me the opportunity to befriend men who have children in the government education system of Hyderabad. One man, a translator of Hindi, Urdu and Arabic, expressed that while the schools are not terrible there is movement without momentum in their education – the children move up a grade but few can build on that knowledge to graduate from university. I asked him what, when he was a child, he wanted to be when ‘he grew up.’ He didn’t answer. A man with broken glasses, he was accustomed to a world view that could not focus him in it.  His friends joked with me. They said that, as I prepare for a 5 month program in Hyderabad. I should also prepare for a city that swirls with, in the spirit of Fitzgerald, the ‘secret griefs of wild, unknown men.’

On Wednesday I got lost in one of Hyderabad’s poorest districts within the city limits, 3 km west of Osmani Hospital. My autorickshaw driver picked up two schoolboys and let them ride for free. We passed a man handcuffed and pressed up against the walls like worn graffiti. The two boys got out asking the man, who was apparently a relative or father, what was happening. The mix of police sirens and the call to prayer rose a familiar music above the city, in what felt like more of a call to discontent than to communion before dissipating among the crowds. The autorickshaw driver reminded me not to be too quick in punishing students for not doing their homework if they come from troubled neighborhoods such as this. We haven’t started teaching yet, and while I don’t think that the circumstances can make for a direct comparison, there is a lesson to be learned that the students’ home situation must be kept in mind, especially in a city like Hyderabad.

Yes, I do hope the students learn valuable practical skills. However, I am more keen on developing the students’ awareness of their capacity for expression. The final product is important. Yet, so are the impulses, energy and drive that the program develops. A city as chaotic as Hyderabad can narrate a false biography into a young man, leading him to mistake the limitations of the city for his own.  Sometimes, it can be tiring to live in such a crowded city center. Because of these circumstances, the most important lesson we might reinforce is a sense of individual worth, perhaps best summarized by T.E. Lawrence who once wrote “there are no great lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock its peoples, partly so that no man mistake for history the bones from which someday a man might make history.”

Jul, 23

1

Project Tracks, The Modern Story Fellowship

Summer Update

The Modern Story is pleased to announce a few updates!

–We are pleased to introduce Danny Thiemann and Vidya Putcha as our newest Modern Story fellows! Danny and Vidya will be introducing themselves on the blog in the next month and will leave for Hyderabad in late September. Both are busy preparing for their upcoming adventures!

-Ioana Literat, a former TMS fellow will be returning to Hyderabad as our local coordinator. Ioana will be overseeing the fellowship, organizing local trainings for teachers and young educators and launching The Modern Story at the Railway Girl’s School in Hyderabad! Ioana will arrive in Hyderabad in early August and will be heading to Goa for Video Volunteers Media Camp.

-Prithvi Kunapareddi who worked with Mona and Dave and the Vijayanagar School last Spring will be running a digital storytelling camp for a small group of students starting next week. Prithvi will hopefully begin to update the blog and share some of the students work!

Please continue to check back as the program will resume full force in September – Stay tune for some more excellent and authentic stories from Youth in Hyderabad!

Apr, 26

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The Modern Story Fellowship

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2009/2010 Fellowship Application is now OPEN!

We are pleased to announce that the 2009/2010 Fellowship Application is now open and accepting applications.  Please read through the Fellowship page for more details and submit your application online today!  We look forward to hearing from you, and if you have any questions, please forward them to:  themodernstory@gmail.com

offerings, boy's school intro 003, India Gate, IMG_0222

Apr, 8

2

Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship

Khudah hafeez, malikaluddum, good bye!

 

My term with The Modern Story has come to an all-too soon close.  My writing can’t  really sufficiently sum up the experience in one blog entry. Yes, the reverse culture shock came through, Chicago now seems quiet and calm!  One conclusion I can immediately draw is that I am not finished with India.  Saying goodbye to the students at APRS and at Vijaynagar Colony was bittersweet because I really don’t know when I will get the chance to work with them or see them again.  Most of the students don’t get to the internet very often, so we exchanged snail mail addresses and phone numbers, through which we will hopefully be able to stay in touch, but I hope to find a way to get myself back to India to revisit the students and continue learning about and exploring the country.

The Modern Story is a program that I hope can continue to grow and continue to collaborate with schools and students in Hyderabad.  Many thanks to Piya and Remy for their guidance and support through the program, I’m sure I’ll be sticking around to help with the program’s further development in the future.

Dec, 30

3

Reflections, The Modern Story Fellowship, Videos

Some random entertainment…

Melanfloquine, the malaria medication I have been taking here in India, has made my sleep schedule extremely erratic, so I made a short little animation during a couple insomnia fits.  Stick figure animation is the perfect cure at 3AM, when your brain isn’t really up to the capacity to be fully productive, but it still wants to keep occupied.  So please take a look if you’d like, it’s only 90 seconds!

[vimeo vimeo.com/3161482]

Jul, 23

2

The Modern Story Fellowship

Monsoon season? Not quite…

These past couple of weeks we’ve been making steady progress at both schools, as we’re delving deeper into the curriculum and preparing for the pre-production phase of the final projects. After successfully completing the photo scavenger hunt and uploading the still images onto the computer, both the girls and the boys are now working with the video cameras and slowly learning how to improve their filming skills. They mastered the technical aspects of the video camera very quickly and with impressive skill. I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by how fast and well they learned all the functions: after a few diagrams on the blackboard and some exercises in class, they went out and did all the shooting themselves with almost no help from us. In fact, it was not the buttons and the levers and the cables etc that they had difficulty with – what proved most challenging and what required the most practice was keeping the camera steady in their hands and getting smooth, clean shots. One reason for this, as we’ve noticed especially at the boys school, is that all the boys in each group crowd around the camera and cling onto the cameraman and shake his shoulders and pull at his hands – thus, by all of them trying to participate in the filming process at once, they end up making things a lot more difficult than they should be. So we are really trying to get the boys to learn to share, and to take turns with the camera. This is not as easy at it seems, since the leaders of the group tend to monopolize the filming and assume ownership of the camera, completely disregarding the other members of their group and even running off on shooting assignments without them. The girls seem to be a lot better with sharing and taking turns behind the camera, and we feel that this attitude is a perfect reflection of their intragroup relationships: while the boys are mean to each other and bully each other around, the girls are nice and even tender to each other, holding hands in the classroom and showing a deep affection for each other. We have identified some obvious leaders in the boys class, so we are trying to get them to help the students who always get left behind – a mission that is not easy, since those disadvantaged boys are the target of all mockery and bullying in their residential community. What is interesting, as both Sarah and I have observed, is how the fundamentally hierarchic structure of the teaching staff (starting from the headmaster) is replicated in the hierarchy that determines the personal relationships between the boys in the school, where the oldest, 10th class boys exert an extremely hierarchic dominance over their underclassmen.

We have just introduced the microphone, the headphones and the tripod to the girls last class, and we will do the same with the boys tomorrow. They really enjoyed learning how to use them and they are practicing recording each other in the context of a new project proposed by UNICEF. The project, that we have already started at both schools, involves filming personal statements to their political leaders, about topics that affect them socially and personally and that they feel their leaders should know about. You can find more information about the program at the following websites: http://www.mdialog.com/video/channel/9925-what-would-you-say- and http://www.j8summit.com/en/usa/the-summit/2008/video-gallery.

The idea behind the project, and the reason we found it relevant and appealing, is that, since children cannot vote and do not formally participate in the decision-making process of their governments, they oftentimes live under the impression that their voice does not matter and that they are the passive generation, overlooked and undervalued by their political leaders. Thus, this project encourages them to speak out and become an active part of the citizenry of their country, while furthermore expressing their political voice in a culturally relevant fashion: by using video and digital media to bring not only the sound of their voices to the UN’s world leaders, but also the image of their faces, and the individual attitudes behind their concerns and their young personalities, personalities that were shaped by the very social issues they are now addressing.

Although we’ve been making amazing progress and I am personally very impressed with how bright and ambitious and quick to learn both the boys and the girls are, our activities in the past couple of weeks have been obstructed by a different kind of problem, that has nothing to do with the kids themselves but is consequently even more frustrating. Since it hasn’t been raining enough recently, there are daily power cuts in Andhra Pradesh of at least 4 hours a day – and this includes both schools and our apartment. At the girls school we have changed our class times to fit the schedule of power cuts, but even so, the blackouts sometimes take us by surprise. Moreover, the inconsistent flow of energy had damaged the computer we are using for the class, and we have just managed to get it working again after a whole week during which it was not even turning on. At the boys school, the problem of the power cuts is even more frustrating because the trip there takes 4 hours one way, so when we get there and there is no power at all and no hope of it coming back anytime soon, we must keep calm and reorganize our lesson plans… Until now, since we were teaching the equipment – the digital camera, the video camera, the microphone etc – we could do that instead of working on the computer, but now that we are finished with the hardware part, we will be absolutely dependent on using the software, and thus needing the computers to work, so our planning has been focusing a lot on issues such as back-up batteries, power cut schedules and the like. Our next approach? Rain chants.