Alberdina Power is an English teacher at Hillpark Secondary School in Glasgow. She is writing here in a personal capacity.
background
Using the Scotland on Screen archive as a starting point, I'm working with pupils in English, first years initially, and various departments, to build a school archive on film and also collecting objects and written evidence/anecdotes.
The two first year classes I've started the project with are full of enthusiasm, providing plenty of stories, objects, bits of film on DVD and ideas which they are gradually building into scripts and storyboards for filming. Teaching staff and other colleagues are coming up with materials too: old copies of the school magazine from various years, going as far back as the year the school was built, 1967; photos of former pupils whose kids now come here; and an 'archive' of photos from the librarian, which is actually a cardboard box with random photos from the last ten years, stuff that's no longer needed but nobody knows what to do with it. All of it is of potential interest at some stage of our project.
The Scotland on Screen Website is a great resource for learning
The first years have become very interested in camera techniques, even before they get their hands on the cameras. Mainly triggered by the work we've done, looking at how some of the Scotland on Screen archive films are constructed. This has led to discussion of what makes a piece of film look amateurish or professional, what keeps the audience interested or makes them switch off. We've concentrated on slice-of-life type footage of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and it's interesting and unexpected to see that they are intrigued by these pieces of (mainly) black and white film. Since they're so used to fast cutting and fancy graphics I thought there was a danger they would find them boring, but instead they seem weirdly hypnotised by the slow pace and delivery.
We've been using resources from this site to go over film language: at this stage, mainly basic shots, angles and camera movement.
I've also shown them examples of student films made when we were able to run Media Studies courses here, and they have very strong opinions on how these could have been improved. They're building these ideas into their storyboarding and getting more confident about using the terminology.
The main challenges, are the practical ones. The periods are only fifty minutes long, forty if you include time for movement between classes. There is very little space for filming other than our immediate classroom; and planning ahead for when the two classes are ready to film is tricky. It's difficult to have cameras to hand when we need them, and editing and storage facilities are not readily accessible. But we'll deal with each challenge as it arises.
I need to keep thinking about balance too: making sure the pupils are also covering a range of English-related activities. But one of the good things about the archive film work is that it's very varied. They are doing a fair bit of critical analysis of archive films, they're planning storyboards and doing script writing, learning about narrative structure and point-of-view etc, as well as engaging in group discussion and thinking about aspects of history. I have each class for five periods, so I'm allocating two out of the five for this work, and covering more conventional aspects of English during the remainder of the time.
My colleague in the History department has some great ideas. She's working on the project from a more historical perspective with one of the first year classes. She recently had the idea to apply for funding from an Action Research Project that she'd heard about. We got excited about the prospect - maybe we could acquire a few ultraportable laptops to help with film editing, and perhaps even a few digital cameras solely for our use, that could be readily available whenever we need them. But last week we found out that we'd missed the deadline for bids, and anyway it was an SQA grant and so needed to be tied to 'Attainment' (i.e. S4 classes and Exam Results.) Back to the drawing board.
The pupils are enjoying working on the project, beginning to have a real sense of ownership about it. We're putting displays of the materials up in the corridors and plan to showcase the project, along with some of the Scotland on Screen films, at the Primary 7 Parents' evening on Thursday.