Multicultural America Kids Matter Spring 2009: April 2009

Spring 2009 Collaboration with Kids Matter and Multicultural America Class

Spring 2009 was the second semester in a two part, full year collaboration between the Milwaukee foster care organization, Kids Matter, Inc. and UWM's Multicultural America class. The class teaches the basic skills of reading and writing with media to students who are predominantly non-media production majors.

Since this was the second semester of our collaboration with Kids Matter, as the instructor I wanted us to build on the information relayed in the first semester's website and not simply go over the previous introductory material. However, given the students this semester were entirely new and not familiar with foster care, they were presented with a bit of a bigger challenge by asking them to expand on a topic they first had to research.

I changed the class a bit this semester to accommodate that challenge by turning more time over to each individual student's research interests in foster care, and I believe the class produced very diverse, interesting, and reflective pieces. At the side of the blog you will see links to each student's research and reflection on foster care as well as links to prior versions of this class (working with Kids Matter as well as other community organizations).

This was my third Multicultural America class at UW-Milwaukee, and I thank all our community partners to date and UWM's Cultures & Communities (the organizational home of the class) for the opportunity to work through issues of media theory/practice within the context of community engagement and social justice.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Getting Started With Our Spring Project

Here's our class, Film 150, as we are getting started on the basics with shooting video. We have a few film majors in the class but mainly the students are not working in film/media and most come from outside the art school. Thanks to the generosity of Cultures and Communities our class has a wonderful tech assistant, Dale Kaminski, and not only helps in tech demos but is excellent at troubleshooting the *many* things that can go wrong at the production/post-production end. We have an amalgam of skils and equipment so Dale's depth of knowledge really is invaluable in our DIY universe. You will see Dale's name in many of our student blogs as they send big shout outs his way. Along with Dale you see Daniel, Jess, Ben, David, and Kari working in the lab.

We got a major upgrade in lab space about half way into the term and the photo directly above is from our first lab (with Brittany and Frank). Our second and newer lab has much flashier hardware and software, but could still use some rethinking on the design front -- at least for our class -- as it is for lab work only. Neither lab space was really ready for our seminar/lab approach to media theory/practice.

Here's Tristan and Kari at our first video camera "boot camp." While not film students, they did a great job "writing" with video as you can see in their blogs.