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Media Literacy Education
Jordanian and U.S. teens produce classroom videos in cross-continent, cross-cultural exchange which includes visit to Media Giraffe conference
By Kathy Cadwell & Rob Williams
May 21, 2006, 23:15

Jordan/Vermont exchange students

Are all Arabs “terrorists”?

Are all Americans “fat and stupid”?

Are these two stereotypes true?

Vermont and Jordanian high school students explored these and other media related questions during a MEDIA exchange program in Amman, Jordan from April 9-29, 2006.  This program, funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Affairs Office,  and conducted under the auspices of Project Harmony in Waitsfield, Vt., brought Vermont teen-agers to Jordan where they lived with host families for the first time in the history of these two countries.

The Media Education and Democracy In Action (MEDIA) program is the first Project Harmony initiative to establish cross-cultural ties between the United States and the Middle East. It brings together a range of organizational partners and synthesized a variety of time-tested educational approaches. As the two MEDIA program teachers, we share an avid interest in global history, hands-on approach to pedagogy and leadership development, and the power of one-on-one interaction to improve mutual understanding.

Kathy helped found “Project Harmony” in 1985, with the goal of building cross-cultural relationships and breaking down barriers between Soviets and Americans. Rob helped found the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) in 2001, with the hope of building an independently-funded national nonprofit educational network championing media literacy – teaching students and citizens to access, analyze, and produce media – with the goal of strengthening civic engagement in a rapidly changing 21st century multi-media world. With United Palestinian Appeal as a Project Harmony partner, and Champlain College and Green Mountain Valley School generously providing us with release time, we accompanied ten Vermont students and four staff to Amman for a remarkable journey of discovery and learning.

In designing the MEDIA program, we laid out a variety of goals. Pedagogically, we wanted our students in explore contemporary global issues, first through ongoing online learning discussions via web forums, and then through F2F (face to face) communication and project-based work. Our online conversations began in early January, with Vermont and Jordanian high school students introducing themselves to one another in our web forum. The teens introduced themselves and talked on line about their media interests and their concern about global issues, such as poverty, women’s rights, racism and media ownership.

During the winter months, our students used the web forum to push each other to consider media-related contemporary issues more closely. We asked the question, “Was it right of some Danish newspapers to publish provocative cartoons poking fun at Islam?” In our Amman F2F conversations, we probed the positive and negative aspects of our 21st century media culture in depth. We looked at the ways in which the brain processes different kinds of information, how advertisers and other powerful media makers “construct” media “realities” using sophisticated production techniques and how news outlets report on the events of the day.

After watching Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim’s 2004 documentary film “Control Room,” which scrutinizes Al Jazeera television’s coverage of the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq, we discussed questions of “objectivity” in journalism. We then took our questions to Jordanian newspaper editors at the Arabic language daily “Al Ghad” and  the English language weekly “The Star,” both with offices in downtown Amman. Their revelations about the nature of “objectivity” in the newsroom reminded us that the process of news reporting involves an ongoing dialogue with a story as it unfolds from day to day.

A second goal of our MEDIA program was to provide students the necessary steps to produce their own multimedia stories. Short, personal, and provocative, digital stories are designed to personalize a global issue and propose solutions to the common problems that plague us. Our online conversations and F2F work in Amman saw our students brainstorming, scripting, and storyboarding their own digital stories that focused on issues they felt passionate about. When the Jordanians travel to Vermont in June, our young media-makers will learn how to produce and edit their digital stories in our Mad River Valley editing studio. We plan to work with them to strengthen their leadership and presentation skills and prepare them to present their stories to audiences in their home communities.

A third goal of the MEDIA involves the breaking down of cultural stereotypes, often media-created. Hannah, McMeekin, from Sharon, Vermont, and Eman Al-Araj who attends Amman’s Al Ahliyyah School for Girls in Amman, are working on a digital story about cultural stereotypes. “When I told my friends I was traveling to Amman, many of them thought I was crazy,” explained Hannah. “But after spending several late nights walking through busy city streets with my Jordanian friends, I learned that Amman is much safer than many American cities”. Eman similarly observed, “In meeting the Vermonters, I learned that American high students are like Jordanians teens in many ways,” she said. “ But I was really surprised by how interested our Vermont friends were in learning about Jordanian history and culture.”

Another objective of the MEDIA program goal was to study the history and culture of each country. Our Vermonters spent several days on the ground in Amman visiting schools, non-governmental organizations, news outlets, cultural centers, and the United Nations. We spent an emotional morning at the Bakka Palestinian Refugee “camp”, a settlement of 120,000 people outside of Amman where we visited a school for disabled students and a health clinic. We also journeyed out of Amman to other regions of Jordan. We rode camels in the ancient cliff civilization of Petra and  traveled in jeeps across patches of desert in the Wadi Rum natural preserve. We hiked amongst the spectacular Roman ruins at Jeresh and swam in the to the Dead Sea (the lowest point on earth and a site steeped in biblical history). These experiences, along with the evenings spent with our host families discussing all manner of topics, enhanced our understanding of Jordan’s history, tradition and culture.

Harnessing 21st-century media

As a final program goal, we sought to harness the promise of new 21st-century media. Much attention is being paid, and rightly so, to the problem of corporate media ownership and its attendant perils. But our 21st century media technologies – with blogs, low power FM radio, digital video, podcasting, wikis, and the like – offer all of us, as global citizens, the promise of democratizing and distributing information around the world. Using digital cameras and one mini-DV recorder, we captured the sights and sounds of our work in and travels throughout Jordan, and then posted them at our MEDIA “vlog” (a video web log). This allowed friends, family, and colleagues to keep track of our learning as it unfolded.

While this MEDIA vlog served as a pilot project, an experiment in the power of digital communication across the miles, the power of “vlogging” holds much potential for future MEDIA trips. Imagine, for example, if our students each had a video camera and could narrate their own educational and travel experiences, creating a personal vlog portfolio of their own learning in the midst of their travel adventures, F2F learning conversations, and digital story production?

Our hope is to use the lessons learned from our pilot MEDIA program to continue to build relationships with Middle Eastern partners so we can offer future cross-cultural MEDIA programs for students of all ages. This remarkable experience, (one in which we worked for 12 days without a break!), combined a bewildering mixture of culture, education, history, leadership, and multimedia skills. We remain excited about the prospects for future work between Vermont, Jordan and other communities in the greater Middle East.

“None of us is as smart as all of us,” is a Project Harmony adage. Our MEDIA trip to Jordan proved a constant reminder of this simple truth, and will no doubt continue to prove true in our weeks of work and learning that lie ahead. We have much more to learn from one another’s experiences, and we have much to gain from creating new and exciting ways to tell each other’s stories.