The Joy of Sharing Knowledge

For three Saturdays now I’ve been going to a place called Paradise Heights. At first glance you couldn’t think of anything paradisaical about the place. Built at the foot of the infamous Smokey Mountain, Paradise Heights looks like nothing but a series of unfinished buildings rising above mountains of trash.

That's me showing a workshop participant how to use the mouse by playing a GCompris game.

Gawad Kalinga volunteers have not only built homes for the poor in Paradise Heights, they have also organized the community for a series of trainings. One of these trainings is a computer literacy program for adult women. I volunteered to be one of the facilitators of the said program.

The age range of the 17 computer workshop participants is from 23 to 55. Their organizer told me that most of them are former garbage scavengers. On the first day of the workshop, the participants made it clear to me that they’ve never held a mouse nor a keyboard before. So we spent the first Saturday playing GCompris – a collection of free and opensource games engineered to teach users how to utilize the mouse and keyboard.

As expected, they found it hard to keep the mouse pointer steady and hit the mark. But four hours of practice, patience and perseverance paid. I was happy to see them making double right-clicks at the end of our first session. So that they wouldn’t forget the assigned keys for each finger, the participants traced their hands on paper and wrote the corresponding keys on top of each illustrated finger.

A workshop participant practicing her newly-acquired skill. Take note of the drawing as her guide. Click the image for bigger size.

During my second session with them I taught them how to use OpenOffice.org Writer, a free and opensource word processor. I started by explaining to them the basics of word processing and then asked them to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” After four hours they were able to encode paragraphs and effect basic formatting such as bold, italics and underline all by themselves.

In response to popular request, I taught them how to navigate the world wide web during our third session. Something as everyday as websites for people reading this blog appears so out-of-this-world to the Paradise Heights women. I made an effort to slowly explain to them how to visit websites, how to search for virtually anything using google and yahoo, how to play educational games, and how to watch videos and listen to music online. I also taught them how to open an email account and send/reply/forward electronic messages. By now, almost each participant has an email account.

The participants helping each other to create their very first email accounts. Notice the smile and the excitement on their faces. Click the image for bigger size.

You can only imagine the joy I experience as their facilitator. Women who used to pick rubbish from dumps are now empowered individuals who navigate the internet and eventually, I hope, encode their stories and make their voices heard all over the world through online media.

The three Saturdays I spent with them taught me that it is never too late to learn anything new. It has also taught me that a garbage dump can become a “paradise” when residents envision and believe it to be so. Through their desire to be computer literate and their willingness to practice what they’ve learned from the training, I can say that in time they will take their “paradise” to new heights.

Culmination and Commencement

My thesis defense last Wednesday was both a culmination and a commencement for me. It culminated my three years of studies here in Italy and at the same time, it commenced a new stage in my communications ministry.

Participatory Video

Video is a powerful medium. It can strongly affect viewers and producers alike. Video has the potential to deeply shape how viewers see themselves and their world. Yet is also has the power to influence, transform, and empower those who produce it. Participatory video focuses on who is communicating, on who produces the images. The reason for this is that the people who construct the images and create the messages also shape their content, presentation, and perspective.

Participatory video has been utilized by many groups and communities all over the world for various reasons and purposes. Indigenous peoples, grass roots organizations, marginalized women, youth, children have turned to participatory video to shape how they are presented to others, to preserve indigenous knowledge and culture, to raise issues, to uncover abuses, to give visibility to disenfranchised people, to present alternative perspectives about our world – in short, to empower themselves. The common thread that can be found in all participatory video experiences around the globe is that more importance is placed upon the process itself than on the product.

THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PARTICIPATORY VIDEO

The historical roots of the development of participatory video can be traced to the Challenge for Change program initiated in 1967 by the National Film Board of Canada. Two people are credited for the pioneering work, namely Colin Low, who headed the Challenge for Change program, and Don Snowden, who was at that time the director of the Extension Department at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada.

Colin Low and Don Snowden began their experimental work in an island called Fogo. The island was chosen because “apart from material poverty, Fogo… suffered from what Snowden had termed the poverty of information and organization, 5000 people lived in 10 communities in relative isolation from each other, further divided by religious denomination.” The main aim of Low and Snowden was to give the people of Fogo island the opportunity to define themselves and voice out their collective social problems through film. But instead of using the inhabitants of Fogo as resources for the film, Low and Snowden utilized the camera as a tool for community participation and empowerment. And thus the Fogo Process was born.

Together Low and Snowden made more than 25 short films with the people of Fogo. A quick look at the titles will give one an idea as to the content and main message of each short film: Tom Best on co-operatives, thoughts on Fogo and Norway, the songs of Chris Cobb, some problems on Fogo, the McGraths at home and fishing, introduction to Fogo Island, fishermen’s meeting, Dan Roberts on fishing, Andrew Britt at Shoal Bay, the Mercer family, a memo from Fogo, Joe Kinsella on education, Jim Decker’s party, Jim Decker builds a longliner, founding of the Co-operatives, the Fogo Island Improvement Committee, discussion on welfare, the children of Fogo Island, Brian Earle on merchants and welfare, Billy Crane moves away, the winds of Fogo, William Wells talks about the island, when I go–that’s it!, a wedding and party, two cabinet ministers, a woman’s place, Fogo’s expatriates, citizen discussions, the story of the Up Top, and the merchant and the teacher.

Even if Colin Low was credited as director for all the films produced, the Fogo islanders themselves were involved in the different stages of the film production. They were taught how to use the camera, watched the raw footages, and gave feedbacks before the films were finalized. In short, the people of Fogo had control over the production and the final presentation of the films. The stories in the film were presented from the perspective of the islanders themselves. The positive effect of this process was that the people of Fogo were able to voice out their concerns to the decision makers in their government and eventually improved communications “both among island communities, and between the island and government”.

The innovations introduced by Don Snowden, Colin Low and the people of Fogo themselves that became the hallmark of the Fogo process are the following:

a. The process of filmmaking itself is more important than the films produced

b. Since the aims are participation and empowerment, the film should not only “be about the poor but by them as well”

c. The degree of community participation and empowerment have a direct effect on the kind and quality of films produced

d. Each context is unique and each member of the community is important

 

MAIN SOURCES

Stephen CROCKER, The Fogo process. Participatory communication in a globalizing world, in Shirley WHITE (Ed.), Participatory video. Images that transform and empower, London, Sage Publications, 2003.

McLaughlin Library, Audiovisual materials about Don Snowden and Fogo Island, in <<Don Snowden Program for Development Communication>> http://www2.uoguelph.ca/snowden/resources.htm.

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My Thesis on Participatory Communication

My thesis for my course in Mass Communications focuses on participatory communication. It particularly examines participatory radio and video as processes and tools for dialogue and empowerment. It is grounded on two assumptions: (1) that the process (the act of people coming together to decide who they are, what they want and how they will obtain what they want through participatory radio and video) is as important as the finished products (in this case, video and radio productions), and (2) that participatory radio and video can be used as tools to facilitate dialogue and empowerment.

My research begins by exploring two opposites theories, namely the Top-Down and the Horizontal approaches to participatory communication and by defining key concepts in participatory communication (i.e., catalyst, collective action, community dialogue, empowerment, participation, process). The Top-Down Approach considers participation as a vertical one-way input from the knowledgeable (top) to the less-knowledgeable (down) while the Horizontal Model recognizes participation as a two-way mutual process by which people are agents of their own change.

I believe that my study is important because it is a relevant and useful contribution to the endeavor of facilitating dialogue and empowerment through participatory communication processes at the grassroots level and thereby transforming rhetoric into a reality. It is an unfortunate fact that even though the Top-Down approach is almost always rejected on conceptual ground it is still very much in practice. That is why the theme of my research paper centers on how participatory radio and video can be utilized to facilitate dialogue and empowerment.

My personal experiences in making a participatory documentary video with Filipino migrants in Italy and in doing participatory radio with them at the Vatican Radio will be widely used in this research. It is argued in this study that genuine dialogue can be facilitated through the process of coming together, decision-making, writing, producing, shooting, recording, editing, and broadcasting radio and video. And in turn, this dialogue will bring about the empowerment of the people involved in the participatory process.

Thesis Defense

I had a fast lunch today. That’s because I needed to be in school by 2pm. My classmate Stefano Bortolato (standing, wearing a roman collar) asked me to lend him a hand for his thesis defense. The main argument of his thesis centered on virtual networking community in the context of pastoral ministry.

My job was to say three words: convergenza, applicazioni, and ok, sono connesso. He explained to me what exactly he expected me to do. On his cue, I would stand and say those words one at a time, while pretending to be busy with my pocket pc.

His thesis defense was quite creative, not the lecture-type most students normally do. Aside from live “actors” like me and Sour Emanuela (the one in front of the computer) and Lucasz (with the cellphone), he had a multimedia presentation – complete with music, video clips, etc.

The professors and the other students present were well pleased.

Music Video Editing

I spent the whole morning editing the music video I did for my course in Television. My two professors were there to check out my work. Professor Carlo Tagliabue is a kind of living encyclopedia when it comes to films. I have the impression that he has watched all the films that went on screen since Lumiere. Professor Franco Lever, on the other hand, is a visual genius. For him nothing is ugly. Everything is just a matter of perspective for him. He seems to instinctively know which angle of view best frames a picture.

The theme of my music video is “The Face of God”. The video is about God’s love but it does not show any conventional image of God, say a cross. It shows ordinary people doing everyday things – a mother taking care of her child, a young man goes out to buy pizza while on the street a beggar extends his empty hands, and two lovers having a spat and reconciling a bit later. Yet through the images of these generic folks, my music video shows that in a person who unconditionally loves another, in a person who forgives another, and in a person who does an act of charity, we discover the face of God.

My professors gave me compliments after watching the four-minute-and-a-half music video. Prof Tagliabue particularly noted the flashback part. He said he liked my use of the character’s eyes as the transitory image to his past. Since he had privileged access to all files in the university’s video studio, Prof Lever said that he had already watched my video a number of times. I felt that I had accomplished a job well done.

Video Shooting

During the shooting for the music video entitled “Power of Your Love”. As director, I rehearsed Barbara for her lines and showed her the storyboard. Barbara was the main actress of the video.

Explaining to Barbara the path and movement of the camera to give her an idea how I wanted the shot to be choreographed.

Making sure the camera had the correct settings – exposure and aperture value, white balance, etc.

My most favorite moment – saying, “Action!”

A frame for the shot wherein Barbara lipsynchs “Lord, unveil my eyes”