When choosing which concept we wanted to focus on, our main priority was focusing on something that everyone feels strongly about, and would be able to comprehend their best ideas into it. After a couple of brainstorming sessions, we decided to focus on Paulo Freire’s banking education system, noting that everyone has undergone similar experiences on it. We posed the question about the nature of this system and if it operates in a way that is beneficial to the learner even to a miniscule extent.
We believe that we would be able to produce our best work if we chose a format that allows movement for unlimited creativity, hence why we chose a creative final project. The project was split into two subgroups where we worked in pairs. The first half integrated audio and visual elements in a cinematic poetry film titled, Of Things That Shouldn’t Be, while the second half went in-depth on the various perspectives from both teacher and student in a podcast that further explores the concept.
Of Things That Shouldn’t Be was something we like to think of as the exemplification of going beyond what we see on text. Even as the poem speaks for itself, it is accompanied by visuals that could be interpreted in many ways. This encourages everyone to interact with the film in any way they could without having to settle with just one explanation.
Planning out the film during pre-production was one of the biggest challenges we faced. We found great difficulty in trying to visualise the concept in a way that sticks to its own values. Eventually, we came up with a poem that tells a story as abstract as the visuals. The film was a whole journey that took a whole month to produce that we eventually fell in love with.
We decided to present our piece of the project in a podcast because we believe that through discussions and sharing ideas, humans can evolve and learn better. Similar to what Freire suggests about the importance of dialogue and allowing humans to think for themselves. We thought that a podcast would give greater space for our interviewees to speak as it is not confining them for example to a written piece that limits the number of words they can write. Since we were all students ourselves we wanted the podcast to have different opinions from both ends of the spectrum, including a professors point of view as well as a students point of view.
Our podcast is presented in a YouTube video as we wanted to experiment with more than just sound in our podcast. We wanted a visual that would make our podcast stand out more than others. SoundCloud would have been the more conventional route to publish our podcast on, however, we wanted to experiment with editing and to have a more interactive medium.
I love what you have done with this project, both the beautiful video and the podcast. I think together they provide a thought-provoking way to understand the relationship between this thing called education and society. They were all done quite professionally. I especially enjoyed how Prof. Mitchell pushed you to think about how our university (and even many schools) might incorporate some of Friere’s ideas. And so the question for me is how have some of his ideas been adopted in positive or negative ways, and how far have we come from when he wrote? If I had to ask you to do something again, I would push you to have had a conversation with the student and professor rather than do two separate interviews. That exchange could have been fruitful as well. Excellent work all around from me!
I am really glad to know that you could all come up with such strong narratives in its own forms to express yourselves in the topic of your choice.
I agree to what shx230 said above. A conversation between the student and a professor instead of two different interviews would have definitely made it more interesting.
Both of your works are exceptional. I could never bring myself to listen to a 40 minute long podcast about education but you guys had me engaged for quite a bit.
Great Job!