Students produce. Residents tell the story.
Students go into the community, record residents telling their own stories, and edit those voices into a mosaic the whole town can recognize. There is no narrator. The students are the producers and the residents are the storytellers.
Where it started
In 1991 Comcast Cablevision hired me to produce thirteen documentaries about civic organizations in Flint, Michigan. I had one week to research, one week to interview, and one week to edit each one.
I did not write narration. For each institution I found three or four people who knew its story and let them tell it. Richard Scharchburg, the General Motors Institute historian, gave each program its structure, much as Shelby Foote did in Ken Burns’s The Civil War.
A year later I took that method to a high school in Mount Clemens and taught it to students. It has been adapted for middle schoolers, high schoolers, college interns and adult volunteers since.
How a school does it
Choose a subject the community cares about
A place, an institution, an anniversary, a tradition. Local history and local institutions are the easiest starting points.
Research
Students learn the subject well enough to know who holds its stories.
Interview three to five residents
Each one answers the same five questions, below, so different voices can be set side by side.
Edit voices into one story
No narrator. Students learn structure, pacing, sound and image by arranging what residents said.
Publish for the community
Online, at a public event, in a museum, or through a local news or library partner.
The five-question mosaic
Each student is given three to five “newsmakers” connected to an event or place, and asks every one of them the same five questions. The finished story must use at least three answers to each question.
Who are you and how are you involved in “x”?
What is “x”?
What is the most important thing about “x”?
What do you like best about “x”?
What gives you the most pride in being involved in “x”?
The rubric follows Heidegger’s idea of revealing meaning rather than imposing it. Students do not tell the town what an event means. The residents tell them, and the students arrange what they hear.
“It was intended that students discover that there was no one truth about an event or place. There were several perspectives but when these perspectives were fashioned into a narrative mosaic, a more compelling truth emerged.”John Kotarski, School-Based Community Television (2008), pp. 63–64
Not breaking news
Student stories in this model “are not breaking news stories about crime, corruption, or disasters,” and they are “not intended to replace investigative journalists.” They show a community to itself: its people, its places, its history (School-Based Community Television, p. 55).
That design is easy for a principal to approve and hard for any side to attack. A program can grow into harder reporting later, once it has earned the community’s trust.
What the research says
The evidence supports the method, with honest limits: most studies are correlational, and story-exchange effects are real but modest.
Adolescence is when we start to author our own story.
A third layer of selfhood begins to form in the adolescent and emerging adulthood years, when the self as autobiographical author aims to construct a story of the Me…Dan McAdams (2013), Perspectives on Psychological Science
Video production in school is linked to civic engagement.
Media literacy attitudes and a range of in-classroom learning experiences with video production are also associated with civic engagement.Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem & Moen (2013), Educational Media International
Exchanging stories can widen understanding of neighbors who differ from us.
…non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations can facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes.Kalla & Broockman (2020), American Political Science Review
Storytelling is a leadership skill, and it can be taught.
Public narrative is a leadership practice of translating values into action.Marshall Ganz (2011), “Public Narrative, Collective Action, and Power”
“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.”Neil Postman, The End of Education (1995)
See it in practice
The same method, in three settings.