Uprooted peoples and broken connections
Many Pacific Island families are uprooted. They come to the main islands (or Hawaii or Guam) seeking work. Traditional family structures and village governments are stressed and sometimes broken. Children come to school without the stable fabric of home and community. Many, many children and families of the Pacific are now "immigrants." Away from home. Disoriented. Economically poor.
These challenges have no "ready" solutions. They must be part of our ongoing dialogue. As possible, our Pacific Voices Project supports educators to work with families and communities to share and produce knowledge. At Maap Elementary School in Yap we support teachers to produce videos about their garden, so that children and families can maintain sustainable life styles that are not so dependent on store bought "goods." In Utwe Village, in Kosrae, we record a canoe builder who teaches village youth to build their own canoes to fish in the mangrove forests, rather than depending on the motor boats that they cannot afford. We are also exploring ways to re-connect immigrants with the people of their home islands via video teleconferencing and the Internet.
Suggestions to trainers on how to use the Pacific Voices curriculum
We are not yet sure how the Pacific Voices Curriculum can best be used by technology trainers in the Pacific. We will provide trainings through "hybrid" courses, using a combination of video conferencing, web cams, the Internet, CD ROM’s and face-to-face instruction. We are confident that experienced classroom teachers who already have basic "computer literacy" in terms of word processing, e-mail and Internet can master this curriculum through independent study, mentoring and "supported practice." The software we include in our Pacific Voices Kit is "mainstream" and for the most part well-supported with manuals and guidebooks.
Re-purposing projects across multimedia applications
What makes this project unique, perhaps, is our commitment to "re-purposing" projects across several powerful multimedia applications, including the Macintosh suite of productivity tools (SimpleSound, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto and AppleWorks), as well as Hyperstudio. We are dedicated to thinking "across media" so that stories can be published as books or magazines, as well as recorded to audio and video tape, or disseminated in interactive CD ROM formats.
Project-based learning
Perhaps another attribute of this curriculum is our commitment to "project based learning." We do not teach skills in the abstract. We insist that teachers come to us with projects in mind – projects that will be valued by the community and are anchored in stories. We insist that projects celebrate the visual and performing arts. No matter the topic, there is room to celebrate the beauty of the Pacific through photography, painting and drawing, singing, chanting and dancing.
Honoring stories
We believe in the power of stories. We want stories to be told. And we want them to be "interpreted" in writing, illustration and theater. We want stories to be anchored in the wisdom of village and family. We encourage note pads, tape recorders and cameras to go to homes and community gathering places, to sharpen our eyes and ears to the knowledge and beauty that exists around us. We believe in publishing our work and "giving it back" to communities so that schools become voices for the old and the new.
What we are describing represents a departure from the typical "educational technology’’ workshops and courses to which we have been exposed. We are not just teaching technology skills. We are teaching a set of values about community empowerment.
Trainers as teachers: Sharing ownership of Pacific Voices
Having said these things, we have not written this curriculum in a "rote" or "prescriptive" way. The tools we support seem to work well together in thousands of combinations. The diversity of projects to date are archived in our CD ROM periodical collections. We encourage you to review them.
We also know that workshops and courses each assume personalities and lives of their own - as they should. We encourage any "trainer" to take from these materials anything that can be of use to you. We want you to "own" the content of your own trainings. We invite you to contact us with questions or comments. We will do what we can to assist you to design your own training venues.
An aboriginal man with a camera
Two years ago, when this project was in its infancy, this author had the opportunity to visit Captain Cook University in Townsville, Australia - spending the better part of a week in the Aboriginal Studies Department.
I became acquainted with one of the Aboriginal students named "Four Mile." He was named after the road sign that marked the place of his birth. The curriculum of the Aboriginal Studies Department included the expected courses in Aboriginal history, culture and language. What surprised and delighted me, however, were the courses in journalism and media that were also included and required.
Four Mile and his peers were learning video documentary, print journalism, radio and television, in order to return to their communities prepared to become the "story tellers" of the new media.
On the day I left, Four Mile was boarding a bus to return home for a month, somewhere 200 miles from Townsville, in Australia’s outback. He had a video camera and a tape recorder in a case and a plan to interview his people about "the alcohol problem." We shook hands. I took a cab from the bus station to the airport.
We wish Four Mile well. One day, perhaps, we will connect up again,
via Peace Satellite, or Internet, or something as yet unimagined.
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