Tag Archives: education

The We and the I and THE POINT

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In the Audience
For those of us invested in the world of youth and their development, Michel Gondry‘s latest film, The We and the I—which will screen this Wednesday at 7pm at the American Theater in the Bronx—may have a special resonance. A welcome, refreshing change to the often monochromatic and monocultural New York City seen in film and on TV, The We and the I showcases South Bronx teens of color, including queer youth. Gondry was inspired by the experience of entering a Paris subway car and being surrounded by the irrespressible and complex world around him. It is precisely this moment that opens the film, as several teens board the fictional BX66 bus. And while the movie isn’t technically a documentary, Gondry and his young collaborators have still captured something that feels essentially fresh and real.

The We and the I had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, as part of the Directors Fortnight program. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, the Speed movies and Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi, Gondry’s film deploys the trope of forced coexistence: A group of people are brought together by time and circumstance and then embark on a literal and figurative voyage together. In this instance, the microcosm is youth-controlled and Metropolitan Transit Authority–fueled; the film chronicles teens and other passengers traveling through the South Bronx as afternoon becomes evening on the last day of school.

filmmaker and actors

Michel Gondry and actors at THE POINT

On the Bus
Divided into three sections, featuring bullying, confrontation, self-discovery and identity, The We and the I presents a full range of contemporary issues and interpersonal dynamics. It presents a veritable heat map of how teens bond, alienate, retaliate and reconcile in endless cycles. These micro-narratives are depicted through quips, zingers, social humiliations, flashbacks and reenactments. The dramatic punctuations and beats are part melodrama and part fanciful Gondry flourish, resulting in a narrative that is touching, at times surprising and grounded in experiences drawn directly from the actors’ lives.

Although The We and the I touches on a range of pressing youth issues, it’s no “social problem” film. It doesn’t bracket its story with alarming statistics but instead concludes with the personal: As the end credits roll, we hear a touching, funny letter read by the mother of one of the teen performers to Gondry—a communication from caregiver to director. For those of us attuned to teens’ creative development, it’s gratifying to see the straightforward portrayal of their demonstrated interests, whether digital-media production, manga, music or car-racing. One of my favorite moments in the film shows a trio of young women bounding off the bus toward a nondescript building. Although we don’t follow them inside, their purposeful stride and the sign outside their destination—“Art Farm”— provide the necessary clues about what awaits them: people to welcome them and encourage their budding interests.

Mural

One of several murals outside of THE POINT

To THE POINT

Thanked profusely in the credits but never named in the film, THE POINT, a youth-development, arts and culture, and community advocacy group serving the Hunts Point area in the South Bronx, is the real-life organization that centers The We and the I. The movie is the result of an extensive collaboration between Gondry, Partizan Entertainment and the educators, artists, activists and youth-development experts who are the lifeblood of THE POINT. (See The We and the I THE POINT’S Point of View for more details) It is this organization’s extended network that helped fuel the film’s production and perhaps explains the grounded sensibility that defines The We and the I. Based on the teens’ experiences, the film was workshopped at THE POINT, a process that was mediated by the group’s creative and therapeutic professionals. This joint project between Gondry and THE POINT typifies the organization’s drive not only to make meaningful change in Hunts Point but also to transform how outsiders understand life there. As Kellie Terry-Sepulveda, THE POINT’s executive director tells me when we discuss the film, “Nine times out of ten, when Hollywood comes to the Bronx, we don’t see our lives reflected anywhere.”

Depending on your approach, as you enter THE POINT, you may pass a mural in celebration of a multitasking Ganesh, kids maintaining an herb garden, an auto-parts-shop factory, black-and-white photographs sparkling with the glow of actual film and emulsion, or a subway car graffitied by the world-renowned Tats Cru. Inside the building, each nook and cranny houses its own small enterprise, community project or service, such as Blank Plate Culinary Arts and Design Classes, the young women’s empowerment group, Where Our Minds Empower Needs (WOMEN), Open Hydrant Theater Company, Society for Aquaponic Values and Education and many others.

Educators and teens

Educators and teens from THE POINT working on Global Action Project’s Media History Timeline.

Peer To Peer
On my recent trip to THE POINT, it’s noon on Saturday; I had just seen The We and the I at the IFC Center the night before. Open Hydrant is doing a script reading at a table in the atrium. A few doors are open, but many of the warrens that make up the space are sparsely inhabited. As I head up to the Teen Loft, though, it’s a different story: I see that educators and kids from Global Action Project (GAP), a youth-development organization that focuses on using media analysis and production to address social-justice issues, have joined the teens from THE POINT’s Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood (ACTION) grou[ for a Hive Digital Media and Learning Fund–sponsored workshop entitled, “Making Media, Shaping History.”

Together, they are an impressive group, comprising youth who have made real change in their communities and travelled widely sharing skills and knowledge. But now they are eating pizza and breaking the ice by kidding around; later they’ll break into a game of Ninja. It’s great to see a couple of familiar faces from The We and the I, the two actors in the film who are still in high school. This is also one of those great Hive NYC moments when you see in action some of the core beliefs that bring our learning network together.

Essentially, what I saw that afternoon was just some of the real story behind Gondry’s fictional film: THE POINT’s free workshops and its focus on leadership, social change, creativity and college and career readiness. As Terry-Sepulveda emphasizes, “We work with a youth-centered model. Every issue you see in the film is something that THE POINT addresses on a regular, sustainable basis.”

The We and the I is being screened on Wednesday, April 17, at 7pm at the American Theater in the Bronx. After the screening, actors from the film and educators from THE POINT will be present to discuss their role and their objectives in working with Gondry. Tickets are $9 per person and can be purchased online. For additional information, please call THE POINT: 718.542.4139

Can Digital Media Move Teens Off the Couch?

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This is a guest post by Maibe Ponet, Senior Director of Digital Fitness Innovation at the YMCA for Greater New York. 

We wanted to take a moment to share our impressions of how digital media and technology are (or are not) being used to reverse physical inactivity among youth—this after having had the great opportunity of participating in the 2013 Partnership for a Healthier America’s (PHA) “Building a Healthier Future” summit in Washington, DC.  PHA is a timely and important initiative supported by First Lady Michelle Obama that brings together government, private and non-profit organizations to discuss strategies to combat America’s obesity crisis. We were invited to speak about Y-MVP.

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Technical aspects of Y-MVP were tested in December 2012 at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Y. Starting on April 27, the program will be piloted at Bed-Stuy and Harlem Ys.

A quick refresher on our project: Y-MVP is an NYC YMCA initiative that aims to inspire the teens we serve to engage in Moderate to Vigorous Physical activity during after school hours, which is when they attend our youth programs. Y-MVP is essentially a customized iPad application being developed by Learning Times on their BadgeStack system, with input from the Institute of Play in the conceptualizing of planning and recording functions. The app, available via an interactive kiosk, uses game design, social media, virtual badges, and tangible rewards to incentivize teens to plan and track their workout, all while learning fitness concepts. The theory, as you may know or infer, is that by using innovative learning methods and by validating achievements and skills we can foster long-lasting behavioral changes.

What we observed at the PHA Summit, is that digital media is a fertile but uncharted terrain when it comes to its use in motivating real life physical activity among youth. You may be thinking now about the thousands of fitness apps in iTunes waiting for a download, or about inventive tools such as the Nike+ FuelBand or Wii Fitness. Those solutions are built for the intentional user—mostly Y and X generation adults like myself who every week set Monday as the starting date for a new this-time-I’ll-stick-to-it exercise routine. Unlike commercial fitness apps, Y-MVP is carefully tailored after the realities of Y branches and the needs of the young New Yorkers we strive to help –that is, 13-17 year-olds from low-income minority communities (with high rates of overweight and obesity) who take advantage of our free youth development programs, but are not exercising enough.

Our guiding question is: How can digital media help our traditional youth programs in moving (quite literally) teens who are not that particularly inclined to follow an exercise routine?

In the summit’s only session dedicated to digital innovations to promote wellness, the Y-MVP presentation was delivered by fellow Hiver Lori Rose Benson, our Vice-President for Healthy Lifestyles, and Learning Times founder and Credly CEO, Jonathan Finkelstein. We were excited to share our app prototype and thinking behind the Y-MVP model. We were one of two presentations in the session, the other presentation by My Healthy World, Inc., a health and wellness school curriculum built around an app.

We were quite happy and encouraged by the interest and questions about Y-MVP (and by so many great initiatives sprouting around the nation to achieve healthier lifestyles), but admittedly surprised by the otherwise limited discussion at PHA on the use of digital media to fight passive lifestyles and, more specifically, the teen physical inactivity problem. That may be in part because most of us in the obesity fight have, for many good reasons, focused on younger children and adults, with teens –who are already experienced users of gamified solutions, social media and other potential tools— often overlooked. There is growing evidence, though, that physical activity declines significantly by the age of 12, just when they need the serotonin to manage the stress of adolescence. We also know that physical inactivity patterns developed during those years persist into adulthood.

In general terms, the limited attention to digital media and games as vehicles for stimulating young people’s physical activity likely also helps explain the paucity of data on its effectiveness in this field –data which is important for persuading funders.  That is certainly changing with initiatives like Zamzee, and Get Up, both emerging from academic shops.

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Badge Up, Power Up. That’s our motto. Y-MVP recognizes participants’ fitness achievements with different badges that can be shared on social media sites.

While data is important, and we hope to have some to share from Y-MVP by the end of the summer, there is a lot about educating our millennial teens that we already know intuitively or have learned from the digital learning field, including an evident ability to acquire motivation and skills from non-traditional sources beyond school and family. Does that sound familiar to you, Hivers? Yes, we believe that we can apply some of the principles behind Mozilla, Peer 2 Peer University and MacArthur Foundation’s Open Badges for Lifelong Learning research to the field of teen fitness education, without neglecting the fact that teaching real-life fitness habits requires real-life orientation, support and quality programming.

Although games and media were rather absent from summit discussions, interestingly, two of the three finalists of the competitive PHA’s End Childhood Obesity Innovation Challenge were a video game that teaches kids about healthy habits, and an online community that incentivizes young people to live healthier lives. Now college students, the creators of JiveHealth and Aurri Health Network were in their teens when they developed their ideas. The video game won the first prize.

The PHA summit reminded us that, in physical activity too, we ought to pay attention to where our young people are, and find a way to meet them there.

Introducing Open Badges 1.0

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This is re-posted from the Mozilla blog.

Get recognition for learning that happens anywhere.
Share it on the places that matter.

Mozilla Open Badges web site

Today we’re extremely proud to release Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an exciting new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Open Badges makes it easy to…

  • earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
  • give recognition for things you teach
  • show your badges in the places that matter.

This is a project we’ve been developing for the past two years, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation. Why is it important? These days, we all learn things in a wide variety of ways, but there are few opportunities to gain formal recognition for these skills. Traditional certifications, like degrees and diplomas, still lack the granularity to show the skills people have — like writing skills for an engineer, or project management for someone with an arts degree.

Not only that, but there’s no way to take all those skills and show them off in one place, regardless of where you’ve earned them. Open Badges changes that. It takes digital badges to a new level and makes them more powerful, networked and credible.

More than 600 leading organizations are now using Open Badges to issue badges that count toward education, careers and lifelong learning. Together we believe this can shape the future of learning, and help unlock the full educational potential of the web.

Girl Scouts can now earn digital badges for building apps as part of the “My Sash is an App” project

“We often talk about finding ways to make learning more accessible to more people,” says Erin Knight, Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning and Badges. “Open Badges has the power to make that happen. We can legitimize learning of all kinds, and empower people to create their own custom pathways toward jobs, education and opportunity.”

Badges backpack with collections

What’s so great about Open Badges?

  • Knits skills together. Through the Open Badges shared standard, badges for the same skill-set can connect and build on one another — whether they’re issued by the same organization or many different ones. Individuals can earn badges that recognize learning and skills from multiple sources both online and offline — from learning HTML with Mozilla, to volunteering and leadership skills with Girl Scouts, to learning introductory robotics and engineering with NASA.
  • Full of information. With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements.
  • Can go anywhere on the web. The Open Badges backpack gives users an easy way to collect their badges, sort them by category, and display them across social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.
  • Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here.
  • Free, open to anyone, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors. The open source model means improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

current issuer badges

Get involved