Communications

Shooting Chickens, and Other Things We Did on Our Summer Vacation

During one week in July, six high school students from the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem produced a video documentary of upstate New York farm life, and five of their schoolmates produced a full-color, four-page newspaper. The projects were part of summer media work-shops held at the Park School for FDA students, sponsored in part by a grant from the ABC television network.

The video production fieldwork was led by assistant professor Gossa Tsegaye ’76, who organized tours of a dairy farm, a migrant workers’ camp, and a chicken farm — "to show [the students] something different from what they are used to seeing."

What they saw and documented included the daily life of an 11-year-old Danby boy who gets up at 4:00 a.m. every day to do his farm chores. They also visited a summer school for children of migrant workers in King Ferry and videotaped a "jailbreak" of chickens at a farm in Lansing — rather a disconcerting experience for the city kids, who were more startled than the birds. Those scenes, along with retrospectives of the week, were edited into a 22-minute documentary and presented on the workshop’s last day.

FDA students with professors Mead Loop '88 (back, second from left) and Gossa Tsegaye '76 (far right)

The print journalism group of FDA students, led by assistant professor Mead Loop ’88, used digital cameras to shoot pictures, Adobe Photoshop software to edit them, and PageMaker software to design a newspaper. The paper contained articles on the video documentary’s production, a review of associate professor Ben Crane’s documentary "School Prayer: A Community at War," which aired nationwide on PBS’s Frontline in July, a column on the effects of corporate logos in high schools, and a retrospective on the 30th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.

FDA is a competitive public high school that entered into a formal partnership with Ithaca College in April 1998. One of the expectations Dorothy Haime, FDA vice principal, had for the summer workshop was that students would return to high school prepared to teach other students how to shoot, edit, and produce programs. And her expectations were met: the video production students are now teaching other students back at school, using College-donated television equipment. The College has also donated computers for a journalism lab at the high school; the students are using them to produce their school newspaper, the Clarion Voice. "Everything we did this summer," says Loop, "the students are using this fall."

And what do the students say about their summer experiences? First, they’re glad they don’t have to get up early to do chores. Second, they’re glad they got to take courses at a nationally recognized college. And third, they’re glad they don’t often have to endure attacks by fowl!