We initially set out to create awareness about the lack of policy surrounding environmental education in Grahamstown. Our aim was to start a media production campaign that would make scholars and teachers aware of the environment. We hoped to draw stark parallels between global environmental issues and local efforts to conserve the natural environment.
We discarded our traditional journalistic values which places emphasis on objectivity and non-involvement for a more alternative approach:
Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, ... Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a ?radical popular? style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization ? and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism (Atton,2003: 1)
We set out to achieve a general awareness on environmental issues as well as create excitement amongst learners with regards to taking care of the environment. We collectively decided to exclude authoritative figures such as the Ministry of Education. We would use the voices of teachers and children to affect other teachers and children in bringing about positive changes. The objective would be reached through anti-littering campaigns, paper-making projects and the participation of learners and teachers in the media production process. By focusing on only these three factors, we could sufficiently reach our goals in six weeks.
The objectives were realistic in terms of time constraints, but they were not articulated with ease mainly due to a lack of communication amongst the sub-groups. The radio and photo groups focused mainly on anti-littering whereas print focused more on paper-making and television more on the media production process and involvement of learners. The measurability of our objectives is yet to be determined as we have not received feedback from the schools that participated in the above-mentioned projects. In short, we decided that we would not focus on what was not being done by schools, but instead to focus on what schools are in fact doing to create environmental awareness amongst their learners and how these plans are unfolding.
From the radio and photojournalism point of view, the journalistic approach used has been participatory. Our CMP group, during the research done in the third term, realised that there are many environmental policies placed within schools? curriculum, particularly Grahamstown schools, but not much is being done to implement these. The learners are taught about issues that concern the environment, but they hardly ever put it into action.
We did preliminary interviews at Nathaniel Nyaluza Secondary School and asked a group of Grade 11 Geography students to express their environmental concerns. The group raised concern over the litter within their school and how most scholars have an apathetic attitude towards littering. This is often reflected within the community of Grahamstown, creating a pollution problem. Thus, we embarked on projects that could help learners implement what they learn and address the concerns they have. In short, we asked the learners to take what was in their textbooks and put them into practice. The Photojourn and Radio groups began a participatory project at Nathaniel Nyaluza Secondary School with approximately 32 learners. They consisted of nine drama and 23 geography learners. We encouraged them to launch an anti-littering campaign and the drama learners made a skit to perform in front of the school at assembly, so as to make people aware that littering is not one person?s responsibility but rather everyone?s concern. Afterwards we took them to a river clean-up, organised by G.R.A.S.S. (Green Revolutions And Social Solutions) and showed them what effect littering has on society. This in turn has helped the learners understand the importance of keeping the environment clean. The photojourn and radio students then created two slide shows which help promote anti-littering within their school and broader community, using the voices of the students.
This approach may be seen as alternative because we were concerned with building a better world and hoping that was established at Nyaluza can be a model for other schools to follow by distributing what was captured over the past two weeks to other schools here in Grahamstown. We allowed the learners to play a role in the process of documenting this information. The intent of this participatory approach was to inform as well as educate learners, hoping that the learners take this project into their community independently and therefore providing the wide-ranging and relevant information that democracy requires.
We took a group of young citizens who can facilitate a forum of discussion about their environment, analyse, critique and also act on it. In this way, they were telling us what they felt about the campaign and the river clean up and how they can change the present situation at their school, as well as within the greater community. This was what we set up as our objectives as a multimedia team: to educate and help students implement what they learn in their school. We used the learner?s voices because we felt that the nature of educating people on the environmental problem is often preached to them. We felt that the message would be better received by our target audience if the message was communicated by scholars themselves.The WEPD group embarked on a similar program at Mary Waters High School, where they used a participatory approach to help educate a handful of learners within the school. They taught the learners how to use old paper to make new ?artistic paper? and other ways to recycle and help the environment in a small personal way.
The WEPD group also taught the learners about their ecological footprint and brought to their attention how their lifestyles contribute the environmental problem. They did not stop there, as the WEPD group provided solutions to the students to where they could improve their lifestyle and become a more environmentally conscious. Both the WEPD and Photojournalism and Radio groups decided to approach school children as we felt that the message needs to be taught to the new generation as an attempt to eradicate apathy in our next generation.
The TV crew helped facilitate both the WEPD group as well as the Photojourn and Radio groups, and worked hard to try document all the events. However, due to time and crew constraints, the TV group concentrated more on the WEPD group and created a comprehensive how-to video of what was being done with them, which in turn can be distributed to other schools and impact more people . In addition to this, the TV group created a 5-minute children?s documentary on the initiatives that some schools in the Grahamstown area are undertaking. Through profiling the respective (and independent) environmental clubs at Mary Waters High School, Hoërskool P.J. Olivier and Nombulelo Secondary School, we hope to show learners that it is possible to start something with a lasting impact, despite most constraints. This, too, will be distributed amongst schools.
Our multimedia production enhanced the process of democracy and development by involving the learners and schools that are doing something to create awareness. From a television point of view we achieved our objectives through the communication for development and advocacy approach. We decided to use the voices of learners and teachers from schools that are doing something to create environmental awareness. By using these voices as campaign we hope to promote social change by showing other schools that positive attitude and involvement can help promote change. After finding that there is no environmental policy for schools we chose to show that you do not really need a policy by looking at our chosen schools. We did not hold any authorities to account but chose to focus on what schools are doing on their own. As far as both the Radio/Photojourn and WEPD groups are concerned, both achieved their objectives by successfully engaging with the school community and mobilising them to communicate a message of social change. Through the efforts of these groups, learners from both Nathaniel Nyaluza Secondary School and Mary Waters High School engaged with the projects fully themselves, but then went out and communicated the same message to their peers and teachers.
Group 7 decided that as we are focusing on education, our main target audience would be school learners. Through our different media productions, learners would engage with and learn more about their environment. And although this was successful a few problems were encountered with regard to the target audience.
The radio students in particular had trouble concerning what language their sound slides and PSAs would be in. Both English and isiXhosa were spoken within the media, therefore a bilingual consumer was imperative. Because most of the work they did was with children from schools were learners speak both languages it was decided that children from these schools would therefore be their main target audience. People who do not speak one of the two languages would still be able to understand what the group did, as the television and writing material is in English.
The television production is successful as it reaches the target audience through an interactive how-to video. Learners will find this material both entertaining and interactive.
The written material is aimed more at an older audience, though. News stories and features let the public know about environmental education issues in Grahamstown and although the stories could be understood by learners, it was realised that the Grocott?s Mail main audience are generally older people in the community.
The style and tone of all the media produced is specifically tailored in a way that will be easily understood for each particular audience, whether young or old. The simplistic language will be easily understood by learners of all ages, and although we specifically targeted grade 10 learners, these students will be able to share this knowledge with their peers.
The media output produced by ?Professor Greenthumb? was designed with the audience in mind. Through our use of various media in various styles, learners from all backgrounds will be able to engage with the work, strengthening their environmental knowledge. But because we also wanted the older generation to engage with our journalistic production, some of the material like the news stories and the PSA take on more ?mature? approach.
Overall the group did well in producing media that will teach local children about their environment and how they can help preserve it, while also investigating and reporting on an array of environmental education topics.Although our group is divided into three subgroups and each subgroup has focused on different schools and having their own unique angles, one thing that we were able to do was to reach a consensus in terms of our target audience. Because the various sub-groups in focused on different schools and because some of these schools face very different environmental issues, we took on the challenge of having to try and ultimately find a link between the various aims and objectives employed by each subgroup.
We soon found out, however, that there was indeed a link between our media output. For instance each subgroup is focusing on some of the schools in Grahamstown. It logically followed that our target audience would be schools in Grahamstown. But we also discovered that the local Department of Education circuit office (particularly the division headed up by Mr Goosen who inspects and monitors the integration of environmental knowledge in the curriculum), could also serve as a useful target audience.
This is because the media produced by all the subgroups could be utilised by the Department of Education to create environmental awareness amongst the school children in the entire Cacadu District , which incorporates King Williams Town, Fort Beaufort, Alicedale, Bedford and Port Alfred, just to name a few. In this manner our target audience will expand beyond Grahamstown.Because most subgroups have made a conscious effort to move away from mainstream journalism by utilising the principles of public, participatory journalism and communication for development, we assume and hope that our target audience will feel the need to take action in living a lifestyle that is conducive to preserving their environment for the benefit of future generations. Because most of the participants in our media outputs are school children, we hope to impress upon our target audience a sense of responsibility towards the environment just like the subjects of our media outputs.
It is also important to note that being able to adequately identify a target audience also means that all the subgroups have had to have a generic aim that would guide them as they produced and created their media output. Having conducted research into the various policies that inform environmental education in the schools? curriculum, we found out that environmental education and environmental issues are incorporated in only in varying degrees in the curriculum. The National Environmental Education Programme only stipulates the incorporation of environmental education in the national curriculum. In practice, teachers have not been able to get learners to engage with environmental issues on a more practicable way.
Thus learners have environmental knowledge but are unable to create a link between this knowledge and their everyday micro experiences. In this manner our aim as an entire group was to make learners and the public who will read the environmental page spread that our designers and writers will publish in Grocott?s Mail, aware of the impact of their daily activities on the environment. In this manner an anti-littering campaign at Nathaniel Nyaluza Senior Secondary school will make learners aware that dumping litter in their school yard and respective communities is not conducive to a clean and healthy environment. A paper-making project at Mary Waters will make learners aware of the need to recycle paper. These are lessons which will aid learners in making a positive contribution to the environment just by slightly altering their daily activities.
Schools like Mary Waters and Nyaluza can hardly be considered to be the main culprits of environmental issues, particularly considering that these schools are under-resourced when compared to other schools in Grahamstown such as Kingswood College and the Diocesan School for Girls?. Thus teachers at these schools are unable to adequately embark on a goal to make their learners aware of environmental issues. We found that because most of our subgroups were implementing projects that would tackle an environmental issue that was either broad or immediate, the element of surprise amongst the learners was their participation and ownership of these projects.
It would have been far easier for us to go to these schools and identify an environmental issue and then try to rectify it by imposing on the schools our own suggestions. Instead we approached the schools as facilitators in a process that would benefit the environment. Thus the creative elements that were employed, in which the learners themselves participated, made them very excited as they were active agents in a pertinent process as opposed to being guinea pigs. While the learners that we worked with were surprised, whether other learners from other schools would be surprised is debateable. This is a very subjective analysis.
Our project began by researching national and regional policies that existed with regard to environmental education. We discovered that policies did exist. We realised that merely because policy existed on paper did not mean that they were being practised in local schools. Our group focussed on two schools in Grahamstown that were able to partake in our project: Nathaniel Nyaluza Secondary School and Mary Waters High School.
Interviews with teachers at these schools revealed that policies were not being implemented. Teachers were also interviewed at PJ Oliver and at Nombulelo Secondary School to explore whether lack of policy implementation existed at other schools. Surprisingly, some of the teachers interviewed were even unaware of what environmental educational policies existed. Interviews proved that a lack of environmental education at schools was an issue that needed to be addressed, despite the policies available at a national and regional level.
As well as interviewing teachers, learners were also questioned on their understanding of the current environmental crisis, while they participated in practical projects such as making paper and painting dustbins. Learners at Mary Waters were also given a carbon footprint questionnaire to raise awareness around the importance of environmental conservation and sustainability. Learners expressed their feelings about the conditions of the environment by painting messages on hand-made paper they had produced, as well as painting messages on dustbins. Learners at Nathaniel Nyaluza were so enthused that they made up a song which was sang in assembly, expressing their desire for a cleaner local environment.
The main goals of our project were to raise environmental awareness among learners and encourage them to make changes in their school and home environments. Our goals demand a large degree of participation from learners. The aim was not to dictate environmental information to learners, but to have them discuss how these issues personally affect them. We feel that the more learners engage with issues through active participation, the more meaningful the process would be and it would be more likely to initiate change. Based on the main goals of our project, it seems that public journalism is a befitting journalistic approach to adopt. Public journalism insists that journalists assert their positions as members of the community. By avoiding the pretence of neutrality, journalists can better represent the varied concerns of community members (Howely, 2003: 276). Being members of the Grahamstown community, it is important to engage with the students as fellow community members. In order to truly understand their position as a member of the Grahamstown community, one cannot remain distant and ?objective?. Instead one must try to gain a deep understanding of how their position in the community affects their interest in and understanding of environmental issues. We hoped to engage in a conversation with learners, as opposed to producing a one-way flow of communication. This was achieved by encouraging learners to start up campaigns at their schools, such as the anti-littering campaign at Nyaluza. Learners had to produce a play and address it to their assembly. They also had to write messages on dustbins and on home-made paper expressing their views of the environment.
In order to link local problems of environmental education to national and global dimensions, an interview was conducted with members of the Environmental Education Unit. It was discovered that an international project aimed at increasing environmental awareness and education at schools, has been growing at a national and international level. However, in Grahamstown membership to this program was on the decline. This information serves to signify that Grahamstown was in fact falling behind. It was discovered through interviews with teachers and with members of the Environmental Education Unit that this was largely due to teachers not being effectively trained in how to incorporate the environment into their teaching. Interviews with school staff members showed that any form of environmental education was initiated by one or two motivated teachers, who lacked support from other members of staff.The sources we used, which included teachers, learners and ?experts? on the topic from the Environmental Education Unit, provided us with a broad understanding of the problems with environmental education in Grahamstown. By getting learners to actively participate in environmentally-friendly projects, we noticed how their enthusiasm and concern for the environment was not what was barring change, but rather a lack of education among teachers, who need to be taught about environmental awareness and sustainability before one can expect this information to reach the learners.
As a multimedia group we had multiple projects and expected outputs that we aimed as well as worked hard for. Our blog stated our aim perfectly: ?This project involves working with high school learners from around Grahamstown and giving them practical tools on how to sustain their environment, especially issues surrounding littering and recycling. We endeavour to leave a legacy so that other schools and learners can learn from our project and continue further with it.? This is exactly what we did, producing very high-quality journalism along the way. However, the initial planning and constructing of how we were going to reach our objectives was probably the hardest part of our project seeing as we had such different mediums to work with. But with communication and compromise we overcame these problems.
The writers and designers put together a paper making workshop at Mary Waters high school that the photojourn as well as TV students followed. The TV students included the footage they captured during the workshops in their how to video. This was not the only integrated part of our projects however. The radio students recorded a radio drama with the Nyaluza school during the anti littering campaign where bins were painted by the photojourn students mostly. All these were then combined into soundslides. There was also a GRASS river clean up that both the writers and the photojourns students followed.
In the end all the various media outputs were collectively reported on by the writers in a Grocott?s Mail spread that the designers had designed uniquely and creatively, in doing so threading the whole project together under the heading of ?environmental education in schools?. We also have an exhibition tree as one of our outputs at the Barratt lecture theatre exhibition on Wednesday. On this tree will be pictures from all the various projects as well as the paper the students have made. The other achieved outputs like the soundslides and TV outputs will also be showcased here. The TV how-to videos are intended to be circulated amongst local schools in the future as to keep our project going even when this course ends.In the end, each of the quality multimedia outputs we produced as a group supplemented each other well, working together to make our pupils more aware of their environment and of how they can improve it actively themselves, thus perfectly achieving our objectives as a group as a whole.
The media platforms that our multimedia group chose to engage with all had a participatory element to them. This corresponded to our objective of creating environmental awareness through participatory education. As such, our group did an anti-littering campaign, a recycled paper workshop, a children?s news broadcast and a how-to video. All of these projects sought to get learners actively involved and in so doing we hope to convey educational information pertaining to environmental awareness.
All of the sub-groups have created media outputs that will be exhibited at the final presentation event, however they have also been created with the intention of presenting them to the schools that participated in the projects. As such, the sound slides that document the recording of a drama PSA and the anti-littering campaign at Nyaluza will be presented to the school to further enhance the participatory objectives of our project. This participatory approach worked well at Nyaluza, as the children were eager to participate in resolving the school?s litter problem. The radio drama was similarly successful, as through creative engagement the learners came to address environmental issues, as well as see it in an alternative light.
This was a similar case at Mary Waters, where the learners made recycled paper. They too were keen to get involved in environmental projects and responded well to the hands-on approach we presented them with. With the second part of this project ? the painting on the pieces of paper messages pertaining to environmental concerns ? the learners where less eager. No art classes are offered at Mary Waters and the learners were initially at a loss as to what to do with the paint, brushes and paper we gave them. With encouragement they did get creative and produced pieces of decorated paper that will be used as ?leaves? on a 3D tree sculpture that we will be creating for the final exhibition. This tree will then be presented to Mary Waters so that the learners can see what their efforts went towards. We feel that with the presenting of the tree, the learners will be able to appreciate more fully the role of a creative approach to dealing with environmental issues. The learners that partook in this project where all from the physics class, which could perhaps account for their very practical attitude towards environmental concerns. Along with this a spread will be published in Grocott?s Mail, carrying stories related to environmental concerns but laid out in very creative, untraditional manner. The opens the project up to the wide Grahamstown community, however still calls for participation through the unconventional design.
A core objective of our multimedia group was that of participation. All our sub-projects sought to engage with this in some way. As such, in appose to making simply a general PSA, the television group opted for a kid?s news broadcast. The aim of which is to ?speak? to kids on environmental issues and get them thus to engage with the information being conveyed. The other project was a how-to video, which documents the process of recycled papermaking. The objective of this is that as we could only logistically get to one school, this video would allow other schools to similarly engage in the process we set up at Mary Waters and thus creatively engage with environmental issues too. How-to videos are also by nature participatory, as they call on the viewer to engage with and internalise what it conveying.
All of these media outputs have as their principle the notion of participation. This was the objective we laid down at the start of the project, and to which we based all of our decisions. As environmental education was the topic we chose, we felt it obvious that participation must form a fundamental element within our project.
The general enthusiasm of the multimedia group has been quite high from the onset and we have tried by all means to share this enthusiasm with the learners that we have worked with so far. The nature of our two campaigns: the anti-littering and recycling campaign meant that we had to feed our participants with a sense of excitement about being involved in these projects with us. The anti-littering and recycling campaigns are projects that we wanted the learners to continue with on their own, even when our Critical Media Production has come to an end. As a multimedia group, we had the clear goal of educating our learners through participation and in turn educating ourselves through this process.
The creative element of our projects is conveyed through the nature of our journalistic outputs. The radio and photojourn students created a Public Service Announcement with the learners from Nyaluza High School and the television students participated in documenting this process. The learners from Nyaluza High School also performed a play at assembly on Monday and this performance was well received by its audience and well enjoyed by its participants. The creative element came through well in these two dramatic pieces. The recycling campaign was mostly a WEPD project but the television students documented this whole process from the start. This recycling campaign was largely centred around a paper-making process where the students made paper in one session while learning fun facts about the environment, then in the next session they were each given a leaf written something about the environment that they could do anything with ie use it as a paintbrush to paint on the recycled paper or anything else they felt was appropriate for themselves and for the process that they had taken part in. These pieces of recycled paper are going to be displayed at the exhibition where they will hang off a tree as ?leaves?, along with other ?leaves? that document some aspect of this CMP project.
Without a clear goal of what we wanted to do as a group ? our multimedia group objective, it would not have been possible to figure out what direction our efforts should take. However, we were fortunate in that we wanted to educate through participation, as environmental education was not part of a lot of schools? curriculum, as is set out by the education policy. So our efforts were directed at those who do suffer the most as a result of this gap in the education system ? the learners. In order for our efforts to be most effective for such a short period of time, we had to work with learners that were not too young but were old enough to understand the seriousness of a sustainable environment.
As a group, we chose not to align ourselves with any particular social movement, institution or commercial group. Our topic did not lend itself to aligning with any particular educational group, and rather we felt that the most valuable approach to given topic of environmental education, was to be proactive and educate local learners. After all the teaching we gained on the environment and issues such as global warming, carbon emissions and climate change due to human impact on the earth, we felt that it was important to educate others. This meant not aligning ourselves with an already established group, but rather creating education that was needed through identify our won problems and then finding practical solutions to these local problems. An example of this is the anti-littering campaign that was run at Nyaluza High School, after a preliminary interview we found that kids were concerned about the amount of rubbish in and around the school grounds and we provided a platform for them to come up with solutions and then teach other learners about keeping a clean environment.
By not aligning with a particular established environmental education group, our project might lose impetus after the end of the campaign and cease to be a sustainable; as an environmental education NGO might have been able to make Nathaniel Nyaluza Secondary School (for example) a sustainable and long term project. But at the same time, by not aligning ourselves with a group (an NGO, or a governmental department) we avoided the politics and regulations that might have restricted us. For example, if we had tried to start a government initiative with the education department we might have been restricted in what, how and where we could teach. By creating our own programs, we had the power to set our own agenda?s and find genuine local solutions. We were aware that we were not professionals (something that might have benefitted us if we had aligned with a larger group) and we made a concerted effort to make the project sustainable and also to make sure that the solutions we found were specific and valuable to the school.
Our multi-media groups and sub-groups were organised around educational programs (at Mary Waters and Nathaniel Nyaluza) and at educational policy (in writing pieces). Production all complemented each other, focussing on teaching learners (something we identified as very pressing, important and valuable) and at the same time looking at the institutions that these learners belong to, and the type of environmental education they are exposed to and how the schools themselves model this education by being more environmentally friendly.
Groups worked very much in their subgroups, while we all worked with similar intentions and specific outcomes; editorial processes (such as editing and proof reading) were worked out within each sub-group. From an administrative point of view, this made the most sense. It also allowed each group to develop its own piece and create a wide-ranging exhibition under a one specific outcome.
The choice to have a larger group that operated editorially in subgroups was not really a choice, but rather the nature of the course. Because photojournalism students and radio students are asked to create a sound slide, these members naturally worked together . While WEPD groups and television students worked administratively within their designed group. On one level, this worked very well, issues could be dealt with quickly and effectively and organisation in a smaller group allowed the process to be easier and more efficient. It also allowed smaller groups to interact with each easily, for example, letting the television people know when they could film and so on.
However, it did mean that it was harder for subgroups to create an exhibition that was cohesive, but regular meetings and frantic emails allowed the whole group to make sure that their work stayed along the desired output. There were no particular students who did not attend meetings, and we dealt with those who didn?t to find their own feet. Because we were under so much time pressure, we did not have time to recap and rehash ideas and instead pressed on. Ultimately group work is stressful, especially because of the time pressure that we encountered in this course, but we managed to create cohesive and interesting pieces of journalism.
