Blueprint Professional Development Workshop: Community Engagement

The Tribeca Film Institute delivered a skills building workshop on Community Engagement for New York City teachers and community educators at the Maysles Institute in Harlem on March 31. Our goal for the afternoon was to help inspire teachers and educators to identify and create relationships within their own school and neighborhood communities to support the creation and distribution of their projects. The workshop began with participants uncovering their own artistic identities and community connections by creating a visual map of resources to draw personal inspiration from. To further jumpstart their imagination, guest artists presented teachers with three successful projects that engage community in the creation and distribution of film, new media and photography: Bayete Ross Smith introduced Question Bridge: Black Males, student Brittney Lopez from the Maysles Institute screened two trailers of Triggering Wounds, a youth-produced documentary on gun violence, and Virginia Cromie and Gina Pollack from The Inside Out Project presented their large-scale photographs in various local and global contexts.

Virginia Cromie presents work from The Inside Out project. To help teachers understand where and how to make community connections in their own projects, we asked them to do “backwards curriculum mapping,” identifying and ordering the steps taken to create the projects presented. Participants were then tasked with using the same steps to map a curriculum from scratch, guided by scenarios based upon teacher-identified needs. Some fantastic ideas came out of these explorations. For example, a group tasked with defining a media project for a student exploration of the Stop and Frisk laws identified “who they know” as their fifth step in project mapping. They listed out security, the student’s connections, the police department, staff, parents and social networking sites as possible places to meet subjects for a documentary. We’re excited to see how these ideas manifest in their classrooms.

Teachers order the steps needed to create the project Question Bridge: Black Males.

Curriculum mapping. Hope these projects come to life.

[Top photo: One of the teachers, Kameelah, creates an identity and community map.]