Building onto the interviews we recorded previously, students wrote introductions to their interviews in order to make them more accessible to an audience. I asked them to write down what they would say to their parents if they were asked what they learned and what they did in STEAM in my class. All films need a beginning, a middle, and an end. Before, all we had were interviews that only we as students could fully understand. The written assignments served as introductions, which are needed in order to bring the audience into the story by providing them with necessary background information. Thus, we established our beginning, our setting – Rosedale during the 1970’s. Also, each of the interviews had a different theme (i.e. community development, civil rights, property value/crime), so each interview needed a description that related the discussion to the overall topic. The interviews and the students’ opinions act as the middle – the meat and the potatoes of the video. And finally, like the Rosedale documentary, the discussion on the goals of the neighborhood was used to end our video. The topic of Rosedale’s goals sheds light on the intentions of the people amid the conflict that we’ve been studying. It also reminds us that to resolve conflicts and to fulfill our ambitions of improving the community around us, we must acknowledge our similarities as well as our differences.
DIVAS (Digital Interactive Visual Arts Sciences) for Social Justice aims to bridge the digital divide by combining media literacy and cultural awareness along with a vast understanding of technology to encourage young women in under served communities to pursue careers in computer science and new media.
