Civil Rights: Representing Ideas – IT, History and Music, Year 9

Overview

A Year 9 project with an IT class producing a video that presented the stories of five women involved in the Civil Rights movement using a combination of music, stories and drama to create an integrated narrative structure.

Learning Objectives

· To use improvisation, music and performance to consider the role of key individuals in campaigning for and affecting social and political change
· To consider ways of making information into video narrative in order to engage an audience
· To use editing tools to develop their critical and analytical skills
· To work collaboratively in groups and as a class

Project description

This project was part of a Scheme of Work that had been developed for year 9 IT that focused on pupils making videos and publishing them on web sites. Although IT was the focus of the lesson, importantly for the quality of the outcome, in each of the projects, the content for the videos were drawn from other subjects outside of IT. The focus became women – both contemporary and historical – who have had some kind of social impact. The first ‘Wanted Women’ project involved pupils, in groups, producing ‘western-style’ wanted posters for each of the women detailing who they were, what they were wanted for and why. Instead of a still-image, the poster featured a video of a reconstruction of events that the women were involved in and some discussion of the accompanying issues.

The Civil Rights project developed from this Wanted Women module. The aim was to develop some of the ideas further and to spend more time working on background and content. The project involved a collaboration between staff at Highwire (a drama and a history specialist) and a visiting musician/singer. The idea was to use the music of gospel songs and songs of the Civil Rights movement as a stimulus for improvisation and video work concentrating on five key women from the ongoing struggle for Civil Rights in the USA.

In the school sessions, pupils were re-introduced to the history around Slavery and Civil Rights in the USA and were taught some of the songs and their relevance to the history. They were also introduced to video making techniques.

The pupils then spent two and a half days at Highwire working intensively with the visiting musician and producing collectively a 12- minute video linking the stories of the five women through music and drama.

Creative thinking and behaviour: representing ideas

The project gave pupils’ a range of creative modes of expression – music, images, drama and video with which to represent ideas about history and the lives of particular individuals. In particular, the use of songs and music that they learnt and performed connected them in a very immediate way to some of the issues about slavery and civil rights. For example, through learning spirituals such as ‘Swing Low’, pupils gained an understanding of how biblical imagery and metaphors were used to express resistance to slavery and to build solidarity when other forms of communication were denied to them. Understanding of this history helped them interpret the music and when performing for the camera this enhanced the quality and depth of their representation of these ideas. Similarly, the song ‘If you miss me at the back of the bus’ about Rosa Parks, very clearly connected them to the story of Rosa Parks and the important role that she played in the Civil Rights movement.

There is something very powerful about pupils using video cameras to record their role- play and performance. Cameras provide an immediate audience – what they are doing is being documented and this instantly adds credibility and seriousness of their work. On one level this means that pupils know that they are being watched and this makes them concentrate and focus. But as a tool for representing ideas it adds a great deal to their thought process – they are thinking about what they are going to look like, how they are going to sound, how what they are doing will come across and how it will be understood. This means that they have to really engage with and be confident with the ideas that they are representing. With some pupils a way to get to grips with difficult ideas is to ‘perform’ them for the camera – wanting to be taken seriously gives them an investment in the material.

Additionally, through the editing process ICT provided tools that allowed them to select and represent these ideas. Through recording the songs for an audience, adding music to moving images and selecting which pieces of music to use to tell the story they were having to re-present what they had learnt and to select and edit what they felt would be the most powerful way of getting across these ideas and stories from history.

Key features of ICT that enabled and supported pupils’ creativity

Multimodality: The video itself used a number of different modes of communication – black and white footage to represent different places and times in history, captions and scanned images inserted into the video narrative, music, time out thoughts, edited into sepia, talking head to camera. In this way, the video they produced contained different layers of meaning.

The finished video contained a storyline which had pieces of information that were only mentioned by characters, but had no detail, such as ‘sharecropping’. This additional information written as text was then added to the website. The video was split up into eight discreet segments. Each of these segments was used as part of linked web pages with text, image and animation to provide this additional information and to flesh out the narrative. This combination of the different modes of presenting information – songs, drama, text, images etc allowed the production of a complex, interwoven narrative.

Quality: Producing a collaborative 12-minute video gave the pupils the opportunity to produce a high-quality product that they felt ownership of. The video was shown in class, to other classes and at a Year 9 assembly. The involvement of different adults with particular expertise also added both to the quality of the project but also to the quality of the pupils’ engagement and motivation. The experience was highly motivating and moving for all those involved. The IT teacher on the project said: ‘The final result moved many of the pupils to tears and has impressed staff’. Although there was initial scepticism about learning songs in an IT lesson after each session with the musician the pupils left the centre singing. The use of IT and in particular video added a sense of purpose and audience to the musical and dramatic elements of the project. The pupils had justifiable pride in the finished product

Accuracy: Because they were publishing for an audience and producing a video that other people would see about important events and characters from history, pupils needed to consider carefully the accuracy of the information that they used.