Lights, camera, action! Whether it is your first time to walk through the doors of the Lycée’s broadcast media lab, or your hundredth, the thrill of a busy newsroom never gets old. Downstairs in the York Wing basement, the Lycée’s media lab is equipped with a wall-to-wall green screen, microphones, spotlights, boatloads of professional camera gear, rows of Macbooks with state-of-the-art video editing software, and—perhaps our most valuable asset of all—Mr. Jeff Rogers himself, the Lycée’s in-house media integrator.
Mr. Rogers joined the Lycée Français de New York in 2015. A constant tinkerer and insatiable learner, he holds a BFA in photography and media from CalArts and a masters in education from Bank Street College. Despite having no formal training in journalism, Mr. Rogers’ instinct for storytelling has definitely flourished at the Lycée, thanks to the resources available in the media lab. He is basically our resident mad laboratory genius. Just ask any student who has spent time in the media lab, and they will tell you how Mr. Rogers’ enthusiasm for journalism is contagious.
According to Elementary French Teachers Bernadette Robine and Camille Jobet, the media lab is especially popular with 5th grade students. “The students get very involved. They ask a lot of questions,” says Ms. Robine. “That is the idea of PBL in general. You come up with a topic, a theme, but the work comes from the children. They develop their own angles. They explore.”
For last December’s Day of Understanding, Ms. Robine and Ms. Jobet’s 5th grade students used the media lab to produce an investigative report on “Poverty in New York City.” This was inspired by a guest lecture from BFMTV correspondent, Cédric Faiche. The end result was a 15-minute-long news segment that was so engaging and informative, it could have been on the evening news.
“The children worked extra hard because they knew their friends would see it,” says Ms. Jobet. “They wanted it to be good.”
Here is an outline of the Lycée’s broadcast journalism curriculum:
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Skills learned:
Whether students go into business, medicine (or even professional journalism!) after they graduate, they will absolutely continue to use these skills after school: organization, teamwork, research, empathy, synthesis of new information, and how to meet deadlines. There are plenty of skills to be honed by practicing the art of nonfiction storytelling.
“We all need to learn how to present information,” explains Mr. Rogers. “You go to business school and they are studying filmmaking as part of the curriculum. It might not be called reporting. It’s telling stories.”
As it turns out, sharing information in a clear and effective way requires a lot of different skills.
1. Organization/ Planning
With the Poverty Report, as students developed their questions, investigations and story ideas, they created a Google Drive system with folders and sub-folders. The process of organization and planning is important: they write a mission statement, and they put together a schedule with deadlines to meet. As students gather raw footage, they begin to upload their material into the pre-organized system of folders.
“It’s getting them on board with this idea of sharing work and sharing folders,” explains Mr. Rogers. Classmates need to be able to access the relevant new footage, and they need to know when it will be ready. “If you’re absent, your partner still needs to work on things.”
They also use a script organizer and folders for transcriptions of soundbites from interviews.
2. Teamwork/ Responsibility to the group
Collaborating can be hard. Because the students’ document is shared, they need to communicate and work together to update it as their project develops. The assign roles—an editor, a camera operator and an on-screen reporter. During brainstorm sessions, one student will act as scribe and put all the ideas up on the whiteboard.
“In the past I assigned roles,” explains Mr. Rogers. “But I’ve found that it’s better left to them. They generally switch, and they understand what’s fair. The shy one gravitates behind the camera.”
The editors’ job is to make sure that the footage coming in is good and useable. If it is not on point, the team needs to talk about it.
3. Research and synthesis of new information
One of the most exciting parts of being a reporter is going out into the world, armed with questions and a reporter’s notebook, and seeing what you can find out. Once the students know what they want to ask, and who they want to ask, they put on their “press passes,” pick up their walkie talkies, and explore the whole school. They come back with answers.
“We get all this footage,” explains Mr. Rogers. “We get all this information. But then we say, ‘Wait, what have we learned? What do we know now that we did not before?’”
In the case of the 5th graders’ poverty report, they learned that poverty is a lot more complicated than they initially knew. Fear of poverty, or being perceived as poor, is a sensitive subject for a lot of people. Also: the students learned that not all the information you encounter in the world is true.
“They have to check for proof to make sure that it’s a good source, and it’s real,” says Ms. Robine. “It’s important to know where the information comes.”
4. Empathy
Students began their research into poverty the same way a lot of people do: Google. They found that if you simply type the word “poverty” into Google image search, you will see a lot of images that are cliché, reductive and sensational. Dirty children, crying, bare feet, women in ragged clothes.
“What if that was the only research we looked at to be more informed about poverty?” Mr. Rogers asks.
Thankfully, students spoke to a wide variety of expert sources and developed a more nuanced understanding of the issue. For example, they spoke to a soup kitchen director who explained that there are three factors that lead to poverty: food, shelter and medicine. A lot of times, people can pay their rent, but they need to choose between buying groceries or going to the doctor.
“At the end, they all wanted to do more field trips in soup kitchens and to help people,” says Ms. Robine. “A few kids in my class have asked their parents if they can do that with them. I hope that it’s the beginning of something.”
“They are in 5th grade, so they are thinking of community service in middle school and high school, and I think they are really looking forward to it,” adds Ms. Jobet. “They want to be involved in their community and in life.”
Most importantly, the students took the time to synthesize all the new information that was coming at them through their research. Thanks to this, they have a more nuanced of poverty.
5. How to be clear
While interviewing people on the street, 5th graders discovered the importance of phrasing questions in a way that can’t possibly be misunderstood.
They accidentally offended someone by asking, “What is your view on poverty?” The question was unclear, and the man responded, “Do I look poor?” This fumble could have been avoided if the students had approached the conversation more carefully.
“We had a big conversation in the class about what that must have felt like for everybody involved,” Mr. Rogers confesses. In the future, he hopes to keep the interview topics positive. Focusing on questions about gratitude, integrity and happiness.
6. How to meet deadlines
The 5th graders discovered that their biggest problem was coming home from reporting trips empty-handed. When they didn’t have any video or material to show their editors, the project stalled.
“Not all the groups delivered what they were supposed to deliver,” says Mr. Rogers. “That’s where I try to support. And rely on this organizational system. I have class folders, and I can go into each one and make sure that the students are not just collecting raw footage, but putting together a final product.”
The students learned that it sometimes takes a lot of creative problem-solving to pull a finished product together.
7. Agency
As students advance from radio journalism to broadcast journalism to podcasting, they learn more and more that they are in control of the story. Not only do they choose the topics they want to discuss—they also choose their angle, and the expert opinions they want to spotlight. There is power in shaping the message.
“The newspaper is a human-made thing. It’s not a machine,” explains Mr. Rogers. “It comes down to people who have a bias towards action. People who want to know something. Whether it’s through their feet, or their phone. Agency is huge.”
In other words, students are learning how to make their own choices about how they move through the world. And even though the younger ones sometimes want to produce silly reports, like about their favorite video games, they are also learning how to make “big picture” decisions about intention in their projects.
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Building a community:
Sometimes in the national headlines you will see that high school journalists are the first ones to break a big news stories. This is thanks to educators and and educational programs like ours. In this vein, Mr. Rogers has high ambitions.
“I am always tweeting at journalists, asking them to speak to my students,” says Mr. Rogers. “More often than you realize, people respond and say, ‘sure!’ That’s exactly what a journalist does.” In other words: journalists and journalism teachers care.
Even if most Lycée students do not end up pursuing professional journalism after school, the skills they develop by studying media and storytelling will stay with them for a long time.
About the Author :
Rachel Veroff joined the Lycée’s Communications team in 2018. She brings to the school her interest in storytelling and bilingual culture.