For the fourth year in a row, the Pulitzer Center partnered with Free Spirit Media (FSM) to bring our distinct take on global news literacy to FSM’s six-week intensive summer video program at in North Lawndale. Over two days the students, hailing from several at-risk public high schools on the westside, met with Pulitzer Center journalists and FSM staff to dig into global journalism projects and glean from them lessons to carry forward in the work they’ll complete by mid-August.
In topics ranging from perspectives on coverage of youth violence in Chicago and Guatemala to the over-fished Sea of Cortez to the public health crisis of cholera in Haiti to the Sudanese partition, the students found universal themes that will inform and shape their short-form video projects. Using the Pulitzer Center journalists’ projects as starting points, and our Gateway themes as guides, the students broke into four teams, each of which created mind-maps to identify local manifestations of the global issue presented to their group.
Chicago-based photographer Carlos Javier Ortiz, fresh from a three-week reporting trip to Guatemala, brainstorms with his team and Free Spirit Media’s Melissa Bryan to tell stories around the social problems that underpin a global epidemic of gun violence.
Students prepare to assign team roles by defining needs and skills in a group activity. The four teams will have the next five weeks to make their movies, with support along the way from their Pulitzer Center journalists.
Over the five weeks the students created videos, with active mentoring by the Pulitzer Center journalists including e-mail and Skype feedback and rough-cut video critiques. The process culminated in a wrap session on August 15, reuniting the teams and the journalists to critique and celebrate the work.
The Pulitzer Center team also visited the Westside Writing Project at the Rumble Arts Center, critiquing the students’ video work and sharing Carlos Javier Ortiz and Dominic Bracco’s work on portrayals of youth violence — both in Chicago and in Guatemala and Mexico — in the US media.
Our journalists also discussed global news literacy at a morning session of the Columbia Links program at Columbia College Chicago. Pulitzer Center education director Mark Schulte outlined the organization’s mission, emphasizing the need for global awareness in a modern media diet, and photographer Dominic Bracco shared his work on Mexican youth at risk.
Breaking down the media wall
We were again amazed at the power of breaking down the media wall (students feeling excluded from the news industry because of race, class, and age) by helping students to brainstorm and execute globally relevant reporting projects.
Big topics like labor issues, ocean health, infectious disease, and youth violence can be made relatable through journalism projects that take a human-centered approach.
Given some space and encouragement, students can quickly recognize that global news does not have to be about “the other” — rather, a news diet that incorporates good global reporting helps the students understand their own place in their community as participants in a world society with common challenges.
Elizabeth Czekner of Free Spirit Media works with students on a team mentored by Pulitzer Center grantee and independent documentary filmmaker Jennifer Marlowe. Marlowe’s work in Darfur around documenting the roots of peace and justice provided a global departure point for a discussion around lasting community harmony in Chicago, and ways that social problems are portrayed in the press.
“I was impressed with the students’ ability to ask thought-provoking, challenging questions about each of the presentations and amazed at how quickly and how deeply they were able to connect global themes to current issues in Chicago,” says Jennifer Marlowe, Pulitzer Center journalist and independent filmmaker. “I felt like I was seeing the learning/connecting/growing taking place right in front of my eyes! I can’t wait to continue to work with this group and watch their projects (and insights) develop further.”
Pulitzer Center multimedia projects coordinator Meghan Dhaliwal said that a major takeaway for her was the way the students responded to the global issues presented to them.
Mexico City-based photographer and videographer Dominic Bracco discusses global commodities with students and Max Foehringer-Merchant of Free Spirit Media. Dominic’s recent project on overfishing in the Sea of Cortez helped spur an exploration of the goods (food, electronic devices, clothes) that Chicago teens consume every day, but that they are rarely encouraged to think deeply about by the media.
“We were throwing things at them that felt, for the most part, really far away from them but they had no issue thinking about their locality through the lens of the issue we presented to them,” Dhaliwal says. “My group landed on teen suicide as the topic for their doc (looking at it from a public health perspective), which surprised me a little bit. The subject is heavy and taboo, but they all seemed really keen on pursuing it. They were totally on to that just based on their personal experiences, and they know this is an issue in their community that needs to be discussed. I’m so looking forward to seeing how they navigate telling the story of this issue.”
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