Silvia Bacher and Monica Beltran, respectively communication and education specialist and Buenos Aires-based journalist
“Keep the presses rolling!” Media workshops in Buenos Aires schools have mobilized tremendous enthusiasm.
Budding journalists choose photos for their school newspaper and learn about page layout.
When they are given a video camera and sent out on an assignment, young people can find out for themselves how journalism works.
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AN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK Argentina’s budding journalists have colleagues in
other countries including France, Chile, South Korea, Switzerland and Benin. Working
together, these young reporters put out a weekly magazine for children called
Fax!, which was launched in France in 1989 by the Centre for Liaison between
Teaching and Information Media (CLEMI). |
Armed with microphones,
tape recorders and cameras, the schoolchildren of Buenos Aires are learning to express
their opinions and look at the news with a critical eye
The teacher
asks her pupils to listen to the tape of a radio news item in which a government
official says immigrants are to blame for other people being out of work. The statement
makes a strong impact. The children, fifth grade pupils at a school in the Parque
Avellaneda district of Buenos Aires, fall silent. Then Amparo, a 10-year-old Bolivian
girl, speaks up. “When I was in hospital,” she says, “they didn’t want me to stay.
They shouted at my mother and said: ‘go back to your country.’ They didn’t give my
father a job because he’s Bolivian.”
The news story, and Amparo’s reaction to it, gave the children the idea of choosing
“Immigrants at School” as a topic for their radio broadcasting workshop.
“We chose the subject because most of the children here are Bolivian,” says the school
librarian, Fany Opino. “The first thing we do is collect information. Then we rehearse
the programme before it goes on the air. But the most important thing is that the
children not only think about a situation they come up against every day, but that
they feel they’re being listened to.”
The radio workshop is part of a Media Production in Schools scheme started up 10
years ago by the Journalism, Communications and Education Committee of the city of
Buenos Aires. The scheme is known as the child journalist project but its aim is
not so much to train young reporters as to increase the children’s capacity to express
their opinions and to use the media to help them to think for themselves.
For the “Immigrants at School” workshop, the children were asked to go out and interview
immigrants, in some cases their own relatives. They wrote up their reports, read
them out in class and discussed them. Then they collected material about racial discrimination
from books and magazines. Finally, they worked out a structure, chose some music
and put their radio programme together.
In the child journalist scheme, the process whereby children investigate, discuss,
defend their opinions and listen to others, is more important than the end product,
whether it be a newspaper, a video or a radio programme. In other words, the school
is given the key task of training citizens who can think critically about the world
they live in. “The workshop on immigrants helped me to understand why people sometimes
shout at me in the street,” says Maria Esperanza, another Bolivian pupil.
According to the teacher, making the radio programme enabled the children to know
what it feels like to be rejected because of skin colour or place of origin. It also
taught them to look at radio and television news with a critical eye and, through
their own communication media, to protest against the plight of those who feel victimized.
Producing radio programmes and magazines is a well-established activity in many countries’
education systems. The Argentine programme has some unique features, however, because
of the political and social context in which it developed in the late 1980s. The
long years of military dictatorship and censorship had instilled a culture of silence
into Argentine society. Within communities, the lines of communication were broken
or frayed. The media production project seemed to be a good option for strengthening
democratic practices via the school and for repairing the social fabric by building
bridges between the school and the community and teaching children to interpret critically
messages transmitted by the media.
Breaking
the culture of silence
This objective may
well be the key factor in the success of a programme which has managed to survive
both lack of funding and political vicissitudes. In 10 years, the number of schools
involved has grown from 34 to more than 200, most of them in poor neighbourhoods
of Buenos Aires. About 50,000 children, mostly of primary school age but also some
older children and some in special schools, have worked as reporters, editors, announcers,
picture or film editors, researching, planning and producing more than 600 school
magazines, 700 hours of radio programmes broadcast by local radio stations and about
100 videos.
The fact that the topics covered by the workshops are suggested by the children themselves
and reflect their interests and needs is in itself a small revolution. Titles such
as “From junior to senior”, “Generation 2000” and “From caning to caring” give an
idea of the subjects that most interested these budding journalists: relations with
adults, human rights, violence, ecology and discrimination.
Some topics are directly related to the school curriculum (the role of women in history,
mathematics, climate change and health care); others focus on community problems
and lead to specific action.
Children who took part in one journalism workshop, for example, were worried about
the disappearance of trees near their school, so they carried out a “tree census”
in the neighbourhood. They interviewed the oldest residents, talked with experts
and officials, and expressed their concern in a video made for the community. Then
they launched a campaign to replant the area with trees.
Other children made a video about the rights of children “so that adults know more
about us and don’t mistreat us.” This led them to take an interest in the lives of
street children, some of whom they interviewed to find out how they managed to survive.
Workshop activities can also be purely creative and artistic. The presence of a Ukrainian
child among sixth-graders at a school in the Caballito district gave the children
the idea of collecting information about Slavonic history and culture. Next, they
decided to create a puppet show based on Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka and to video
it. “They researched the composer’s life and work, went to see some ballet and, helped
by craft and science teachers, made the
puppets and wrote the script,” says the school’s music teacher, Lucia Salgado.
One of the biggest and most persistent obstacles to changing the old education model
is the lack of properly trained teachers, and so theoretical and practical teacher
training has been made a key element in the child journalist scheme. Once a week
over two months, groups of interested teachers get together to produce and discuss
media material with the help of a colleague who has classroom experience of the scheme.
With Unesco support, the programme has since 1994 built up a network of 350 teachers
with special skills.
New
horizons for teachers
Participants say the
media workshops help them to recover their appetite for enquiry and learning in a
school context which is by and large unexciting. For the children, they mean greater
freedom and more contact with real life. “The workshops allow us to interview people
and go out into town, while in the classroom we read and study to pass exams,” says
one young reporter. They open new horizons for teachers like Monica, who described
how she learned to have more respect for the children’s experience and realized that
she had no monopoly on wisdom. “The workshop enables us to break free from stereotypes
and find out things for ourselves,” she says.
Teachers taking part in the experiment agree that producing radio programmes and
newspapers is a good way of fostering children’s verbal and writing skills since
it doesn’t involve reciting a lesson from memory but getting across personal ideas
and opinions clearly and effectively so that readers and listeners outside the classroom
can grasp them. The school newspapers the children produce, either in the form of
a single sheet or a magazine, are distributed in the school and the neighbourhood.
The videos they make are usually shown at school festivals and other special events
that parents and neighbours can attend. Since 1994, radio programmes have been broadcast
weekly on FM community stations as part of a series called “Kaleidoscope: Children’s
Voices.”
Learning
to decode media messages
The purpose of the
Buenos Aires scheme is not to set schools against the media but to channel the natural
enthusiasm of children and teenagers. Latin American children spend an average of
four hours a day watching TV or listening to music on the radio. Argentina’s Educational
Television Foundation discovered that out of 10.5 million households, 9.5 million
have a television set and more than half of them are signed up with some kind of
pay-TV, making Argentina number three in the world in terms of cable TV subscribers.
By the time children get to the age of 16, they’re spending about 46,000 hours a
year sleeping, 22,000 watching TV and 13,000 at school. “Television became the main
cultural activity of the 20th century,” says Sara Critto, the head of the Foundation.
“But schools don’t take account of this and children aren’t properly prepared for
it.”
The most influential media in Latin American countries—radio, TV and the written
press—are often controlled by small but powerful groups which usually obey economic
interests and pay little regard to the citizen’s right to information. What’s more,
the social context leaves little time for the clash of ideas and provides meagre
access to sources of information outside television and radio. This sometimes produces
audiences addicted to certain editorial approaches which sacrifice accuracy to newsiness.
But using the latest computer or a film camera doesn’t necessarily sharpen the critical
faculties. Technology cannot replace the teacher, whose role should be to help children
analyse the news. By producing informative material, children learn how to accept
the existence of conflicting viewpoints, distinguish opinion from facts and objectivity
from sensationalism, and find out how to attract a reader’s or listener’s attention.
All these experiences help children understand the nuts and bolts of communication
from the inside. They soon realize that a news story is not the same thing as “the
facts” but a compilation that is rarely 100 per cent objective because it depends
on who is doing the reporting. The American essayist Alvin Toffler has said that
to prevent children becoming passive receivers and to teach them how to decode media
messages, “the best thing is to give them video cameras and send them out to film
something by themselves. They will soon learn to interpret the media in a critical
way. They’ll also find out how easily images and ideas can be manipulated, how to
spot hidden advertising in entertainment programmes, and see how politicians use
demagogic pictures and opportunistic poses.”
Media programme production will not become widespread in Latin American schools until
political leaders are convinced of the need for them and the reluctance of the schools
is overcome. The impact of the media is so great that schools cannot stand by and
do nothing. Whether teachers like it or not, the media are in competition with schools
as agents of socialization.
Teachers should realize that although they have little money to buy new equipment
and although there are many obstacles to tackling extracurricular subjects, the media
and new technology can be their allies and schools are the most suitable place to
teach children how to master media skills, interpret media messages and equip children
to question them.
• Producción de medios en la escuela.
Reflexiones desde la práctica. Coordinación de Periodismo, Comunicación
y Educación, Secretaría de Educación, Gobierno de la Ciudad
de Buenos Aires, 1998.
• Internet: http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/educacion/
chicosperiodistas
• sbacher@rocketmail.com