Lights! Camera! Learning!

Hours of research, writing, and re-writing take place before Hollywood filmmakers shoot even a single frame of footage. The same is true of the videos made in Mark Wagler’s multi-age fourth- and fifth-grade classroom at Madison’s Randall Elementary School.

A student in Mark Wagler’s class shows off the dress she wore for the Hmong new year in a still image from the “Clothes Encounters” video produced by students. The video also features students who brought in their baby clothes, their best clothes, their work clothes, and the play clothes they wear for activities like soccer and the Boy Scouts. Another class participating in the Kid-to-Kid project put together a video about how kids spend their free time, and still another classroom is working on a video that takes a journey to some of the students’ favorite places, such as parks and playgrounds. Next up for Wagler’s class? A video on what ethnic foods can tell you about different parts of the world. Interviews and potluck dinners are already underway.

“Clothes Encounters of the Room 202 Kind” is the classroom’s most recent release. The video documents the cultural diversity of Wagler’s students — and in doing so, it energized and involved the students more than ever in their social studies class. With this project, they weren’t just learning about social studies, they were learning about themselves.

“The videos have been a great way to get us one step closer to a kid-focused curriculum,” Wagler says. “The kids determine what topics the videos will focus on. They write the scripts. The challenge of what to include in each video really gets them asking their own questions.”

Wagler has been making videos in his classroom for the last eight years. Because of that experience, he’s playing a key role in a new School of Education project called the Kid-to-Kid Video Exchange Project. Supported by a UW System grant, the project aims to develop a network of K-8 classrooms that create and share videos as an essential element of their social studies curriculum. Michael Streibel, professor of curriculum and instruction and associate dean of technology for the School of Education, coordinates the Kid-to-Kid project.

Streibel and Wagler train the teachers in four main areas: storytelling, using a video camera, computer-based video editing, and critical viewing of videos. The 10 Madison-area teachers involved in the project attend full-day training sessions once a month. Between meetings, they stay in touch with Streibel and each other via computer conferencing. By uploading scripts, raw video footage, and still images, they can receive input from other Kid-to-Kid teachers while they’re working on their own video project.

“It’s a significant commitment on the part of the teachers,” says Streibel, “but they’re very interested in it. We’ve tapped into a group that was really looking for ways to enrich their curriculum.”

But why videos? Is it really necessary for these teachers to know the finer points of video and sound editing? Couldn’t their students learn about culture and social studies in some other way?

“Sure,” Wagler acknowledges. “But video making brings a lot to the table. Videos provide a way for kids to document and reflect on all of the different things we do in the classroom: essays, journal entries, performances, items and stories we bring in from home.

“The biggest advantage is the incredible excitement that the videos generate,” he continues. “The kids are fascinated that they’re making something for other kids to see. It’s so much more fun than a lot of school work. It’s real. It’s something that will leave the classroom and go out into the world. Parents love it, too, because it provides a window into their child’s school day.”

Sharing the videos is so important to the youngsters that Streibel is now broadening the reach of the Kid-to-Kid network. Contacts have already been made with school teachers in North Carolina, New York City, and even Russia and Japan. Streibel will send VHS tapes directly to some schools, and will eventually post digital versions of the videos to the web so they can be downloaded by classrooms all over the world.

“We’d like to encourage other elementary-school teachers to use the Kid-to-Kid model in their classrooms,” Streibel says. “I think they’ll be thrilled with the enthusiasm and involvement it inspires.”

To learn more about this project, contact Professor Michael Streibel at streibel@soemadison.wisc.edu or (608) 262-6136.